In case you forgot, yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall fall.
There was some uber-great coverage on NYT with which I was enraptured...
So happy for them and all the rest of the former USSR...not to be trite, but really, they've come so far.
Danke for letting me indulge myself by posting some Deutschland pictures.
(It's on my (very long) list of places I want to live.)
Relics of a dark era, Sachsenhaussen Concentration camp, just outside Berlin.
Arbeit Macht Frei - "Work Will Set You Free." The gate all prisoners passed through.
We probably walked around for 4 hours with our audio guides...
Call me a masochist or a born history junkie, but I had been looking forward to going to a concentration camp since oh, about kindergarten (maybe not that young, but I couldn't stop myself from using another Germanic word hehe). 
I'm glad Andrzej (below) agreed with me about the necessity of such an experience...
this was the plaque at the front of where the gas chambers are.
Still wanting to hit Auschwitz in Poland...who's coming with?!Bike riding through the East German country...
Potsdam.
An uber-cute town, and of course, where this happened.
The compound with the old and new castles reminded me a lot of Mount Vernon/Williamsburg, Virginia, actually...
And just for giggles...
Germans are neurotically hygienic, which I love...and I would: back in the day (when I was about 4), I told my mom I could not continue my ballet career because I couldn't stop thinking about how unsanitary the "public" barre was.
I think I was the only one who noticed-slash-was a little amused that we stayed on 'Karl Marx Allee' a couple nights. Don't worry, mom, East Berlin is totally safe now!
(The only time when I wish I were a man: so I could travel wherever I wanted - solo even - without people worrying about me.)
9 footnotes:
I will come to Auschwitz! After reading Anne Frank as a little girl, living in Israel and going to the Holocaust museum there, I am so interested in concentration camps.
Plus, it would be so fun to travel with you!
Cool post Alex! Cool pics too!
i felt the same way when visiting the dachau concentration camp...
i wouldn't say we're masochists, it's the history, definitely!
Okay, let's go to Poland! I'm down whenever you are :)
ha! i love that your 4-year-old self was concerned with the germs on the ballet barre. that makes my day.
and i would LOVE to go to auchwitz! i'm not a history junkie, but get completely sucked into anything WWII related. i had a teacher in high school who showed us pictures of a trip he took to auchwitz and i've wanted to go ever since.
....maybe one of these days.
Haha the public barre. That's great! You're so lucky at least you have been to Germany...I have yet to get there :(. Great post, I'm lovin' you blog!
so when are we going to poland?
Awesome pictures! Not sure I could ever live in Germany (way too cold!) but visiting's always fun.
You can totally travel alone! DO IT. I mean, if you have people to travel with, that's awesome, but if you don't, don't let that stop you from taking your trip! I've traveled alone in Scotland, Ukraine (some of the time), and Sweden, and both trips were awesome! My sister and I traveled alone in Paris, and neither of us spoke French. It was interesting, to say the least.... But I highly recommend it! And I just told my mother, leave me alooone!
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