Sarah and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

I'm in Sweden. That's a plus.

I'm in Malmö and nothing's open. Minuses.

I had to fight, cry, scream, and bitch to get a refund on my thermal tights and am basically the ugliest American in Central Europe. A big, embarrassing minus. I also forgot to pack more than one pair of jeans, barely made my flight thanks to Prague's heinous gridlock, and got to experience the joy of paying Wizz Air's checked baggage fee. Minuses all around.

There's a petting zoo in Old Town Square in Prague and I paid 20 crowns for feed and played with two sheep and a donkey. The donkey and I are now friends. Plusses all around.

I didn't realize that traveling over Easter will leave me with very little to do or see in Oslo because nothing will be open. Guess I'm doing a lot of aimless wandering. Fuck. Big minus.

The petting zoo ruled, though.


BEST FRIENDS.

Guess who's back, back again...

I realized I never actually updated about Berlin, part zwei, so here I go:

Friday: Five-hour bus ride. Own room at hostel. Walk to Reichstag; lose everyone accidentally by Brandenburg Gate so head to dinner and Potsdamer Platz. Drink heavily. H&M! Buy new iPod headphones, weep at price. DIRTY DANCING: DAS ORIGINAL. Best time of my life. Dance in seat. Keep drinking heavily. Walk to Bendlerblock for reflection/possible stroke of genius re: my research paper. Fail at having any divine inspiration. Walk to Brandenburg Gate for nighttime picture. Fail at finding TXL bus back to West Berlin to the hostel, have intense German lesson with adorable cab driver.

Saturday: Bus tour due to rain. Visit KaDeWe (German Harrod's), am shocked by prices. Go to Potsdamer Platz; take Samantha to Führerbunker and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, buy book at Potsdamer Platz mall, eat too much sushi. Go to Checkpoint Charlie. Buy linen bag. Take long route back with Ambassador Holub & co.; group starts to drop like flies. Make it to Bebelplatz FINALLY. See infamous plaque. Visit St. Hedwig's Cathedral. Go to Galeries Lafayette, do not purchase Longchamp despite advantage price with Euro. Visit 4,238 bookstores. Refrain from purchasing books. Go to Film Museum back at Potsdamer Platz; purchase new book. Dinner. Wine. Wine. Wine. Wine. Wine. Old Jewish Cemetery and Neue Synagogue; Alexanderplatz! Hostel.

Sunday: Tour of Cecilienhof Palace; do not pose for picture a la Truman/Churchill/Stalin. See Wannsee on way to Potsdam. Dresden! Am depressed by Dresden. Home.

Long story short: I adore Berlin and will move there someday. Really. It will happen. Am going back for Lady Gaga on May 11, may purchase apartment then. Meanwhile, I go to Scandinavia for my Easter spectacular tomorrow night. Wish me luck, dear readers.

"Mein Baby gehört zu mir, ist das klar?"

So clearly I'm a glutton for punishment as I went to go see Dirty Dancing: Das Original Live On Stage tonight in Berlin at the Theater am Potsdamer Platz. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson with foreign-language plays (I'm still traumatized by A Doll's House in Paris) but no, I booked a ticket for Dirty Dancing and here I am, now a veteran of the German musical.

It was absolutely fabulous.

The difference is that, well, the first play I saw was by Henrik freaking Ibsen, and I had never read it or seen it so I was miserable and tired and lost. This, while no Sondheim show, was Dirty Dancing: Das Movie verbatim, and for that I am eternally grateful. Literally word for word (translated), scene for scene, it was exactly the same. Maybe two songs of fifteen were in German. The dialogue was in German but the songs were all in English (clearly learned phonetically by some cast members). I was outrageously drunk, and thus, it was the most incredible time. Part of the reason is because I bought overpriced Riesling but I had factored that requirement into the show-going experience.

It was actually better seeing a show in German because I was pleasantly surprised by how much I understood, whereas in France I was just bitter and disappointed that my A in French 101 didn't let me understand Audrey Tatou doing Ibsen. Also, too bad that the actor playing Johnny was a Teutonic, gayer Cheyenne Jackson with tighter pants and was wholly unbelievable in the role, but whatever. It was DIRTY DANCING: DAS ORIGINAL. I loved every ridiculous second of it. I still love Berlin. ICH BIN EINE BERLINER. I love this city.

You give me fever/heat stroke...

It's 66 degrees Fahrenheit in Prague today. I can't stress how freaking weird this is because I'm walking around in leggings and flip flops. People are tanning. I've seen more hairy arm pits in tank tops today than ever before, and deodorant is still a foreign concept.

It's also the first day I've felt really content in Prague.

Weird.

Ich bin ein day tripper.

So Tory's been here for almost five days and I've been doing all the touristy things with him that I've been putting off for the past six weeks. We've been to the top of Petrin Hill on Klaus' disco funicular, explored Prague Castle, basically moved into the Globe for brunch and happy hour purposes, went to the malls repeatedly, finally saw Nine together, found another English-language bookstore, crossed the Charles Bridge, saw the Lennon Wall, enjoyed Malostranská, and visited the Kafka Museum.

We ran out of stuff to do by Wednesday.

Hence why I dragged him, slightly kicking and screaming, across the border to Berlin for what is coming to be known as Klaus' disco day trip. Took a bus that left at 11:55 Wednesday night and arrived just before 5 a.m. on Thursday. We went pretty much non-stop at that point and honestly, I think I'm out of stuff to do in Berlin. Considering we were physically in Berlin for all of 14.5 hours, I think we did a pretty admirable job. I've turned seeing a week's worth of stuff in a day or two into an art form.

We took the U-bahn in from the bus station, made it to Alexanderplatz, realized that nothing would be open at 5 a.m. and thusly headed to the Hauptbahnhof. Had a lovely breakfast at McDonald's, the only place open, and booked our tickets home in broken German. From there we took the LONG way (unknowingly) to the Brandenburg Gate. The Brandenburg Gate is way smaller than I had pictured it to be, but it's right next to the U.S. Embassy and we briefly considered going in and asking for a map. Consular services have been extended to help quasi-backpackers.

We kind of stumbled upon the Reichstag accidentally and just beat the line to go up into the weird, modern dome on top. The audio guide, dubbed Sir Lee, gave us a fairly thorough explanation of the landmarks visible from the dome but literally as we were leaving the line had tripled ten-fold. This still doesn't top the line that we passed on our way back to the train station in the evening where it looked like it was about to go off the Reichstag's property, but it was pretty epic.

We found our way to the Holocaust memorial, which is more or less a bunch of stone cubes of various sizes and, of course, very much open to interpretation. Berlin, like Munich, certainly isn't trying to hide its role in the Holocaust; in fact, by the philharmonic, there is a sign and very large plaque regarding the fact that the T4 Aktion murders took place on that spot. The spot of Hitler's bunker was near there so we found our way and it's just a large parking lot with yet another plaque. Must be weird to park your BMW or live in what I'm sure is prime real estate over Hitler's bunker, but that's the charm (?) of Germany, I guess.

We wandered down Unter den Linden to Bebelplatz, where the first major book burning occurred in 1933 (and upon doing further research, we didn't actually go into the actual platz, so no points to me or Tory). We went from there over the river and through the rest of Berlin where we made it to Alexanderplatz and then decided to go to Wombat's, pretend we were staying there and jack a free map or two. Our diabolical scheme worked and I got the most amazing falafel since Israel. Point one, Germany.

We went to Checkpoint Charlie (so touristy), the Topography of Terror (an open-air museum that shows the locations and functions of every Nazi-era building), and then Tory hung at Starbucks to rest while I wandered over to the Jewish Museum. Unlike Munich's this one is epic and HUGE, and, true to form, packed with obnoxious Italian tourists whom I just can't seem to escape. The museum didn't really teach me anything new but it was interesting and, of course, I left with two new books. I wanted to make it to the Stasi Museum too but it was way too far east to make it there on our epic day trip, so that's for another time. No going that far into the former USSR.

At this point it was only 2 p.m. and I was almost done with my list. We went over to what was once the Jewish quarter and saw the Neue Synagogue (beautiful) and the destroyed Jewish cemetary (not beautiful). The only graves the Nazis left were those of Moses Mendelssohn and the few tombstones that were really stuck to the wall, so it was kind of haunting. It looks like a small, very green park now.

From there I dragged Tory to the other side of the Tiergarten because I wasn't leaving Berlin without seeing the Bendlerblock, from where the July 20th plot on Hitler's life was attempted. I'm a big fan of the movie Valkyrie (no judgment) and I'm actually writing a research paper on the German resistance so naturally I had to visit the German resistance memorial. This was the one museum without English explanations so we wandered aimlessly for a few minutes before realizing we could get a free English audio guide. Win. It was very interesting and I'm glad I went, especially as I probably wouldn't have been able to make it there next weekend when I'm back with the group. Tory deserves a gold star for putting up with all of my history-major dorkiness for the day.

We went to dinner (strudel was involved) and then nearly missed our train because the fast food workers decided to take their sweet time when we had a train to be on in five minutes but all was well. We jumped onto the first train, thought two couchettes were ours, rejoiced, and then were kicked out when it was determined that it wasn't our car. I hadn't actually thought that we'd be getting breakfast with our 39 euro tickets but it was nice for a few minutes.

We wandered the length of five cars and then finally found our compartment. It was empty except for this THING covered by a sheet, and words really can't do it justice but we seriously thought it was a person for the longest time and were so freaked out and tried to switch our compartment and it was terrifying and ridiculous. The only way it can be explained is by saying it's like someone rigged an elaborate bed sheet-tent and went catatonic afterward. The Deutsche Bahn employee was freaked out too but she eventually determined that it was just a bike underneath. Crisis averted. Of course, the humorless Czech conductor who took over at the border did not appreciate it the same way she did and I don't think he believed us when we said it wasn't ours.


This is the blob. We were terrified.

It took about an hour to get home from the sketchy train station. This trip included coach bus, smelly Prague bus, tram, transcontinental train, taxi, underground, overground, and basically everything but rocket-powered jet pack. But we survived. Ich bin ein Berliner and all that jazz.

Next week in Berlin (as I am going back with school): DIRTY DANCING: DAS ORIGINAL MUSICAL. I have no idea if it's in German or English but it doesn't matter anyway as there's no way I'll be sober for it. There are no words for my excitement.

Roman Holiday

Two conversations that occurred when my mother called on Thursday--

Mom: I'm going to meet Grandma at the Olive Garden on Powerline in a few minutes.
Me: Oh, that sucks. I'm in Rome.

Mom: It's raining here.
Me: Oh, really? I'm in Rome.

I went to Rome for literally 48 hours and could not have had more fun. I was initially supposed to stay in Rome for just one night and continue on to Venice but it was just way too expensive and complicated so I switched my return flight to be from Ciampino and decided to shove a week's worth of sightseeing into just under two days and it actually worked fairly well. It was my first time in Italy and going to some places doesn't faze me but it was just mind-blowing to realize that I was actually in Italy and oh hey, there's a 2000-year-old Colosseum on the bus route and there's the pope and no big deal or anything.

This was also the first trip in which I essentially traveled by myself. Jesse and I went together, same flight and same hostel, but due to complications beyond my control we were apart for around a day and a half. The hostel was outrageously social so I hung out with two guys from Dallas on Thursday who were in town for spring break and then an amazing girl from Canada who was backpacking through Europe. Traveling by oneself is a strange sensation. On one hand, the freedom is incredible - no waiting for others to make up their minds, no compromising, just doing whatever you want. On the other hand, it can be lonely and if you're not good with maps like I am, it can be incredibly frustrating. If anything, though, it proved that I can do this for the two days in Scandinavia, so that's a plus.

On Thursday, I bonded with my roommates from Texas (as the only girl in the room, I kind of ran shit... just saying). We went to the Spanish Steps (where I had flashbacks from my mom's Europe journal-- AmEx is still just around the corner), the Trevi Fountain, the Colosseum, and the Forum. I can't really go into individual detail about each thing but I'm just blown away by how ancient everything is. I love London and Paris for their histories but they really just can't compare to a city that is actually thousands of years old. I also don't know if Romans are totally nonchalant about living in Rome because I'm sure after a while the thrill of walking by the Colosseum dissipates but I was completely in awe.

I headed to the Vatican afterward and went in the wrong direction a few times, but once I got there it was beautiful and old and kind of smaller than I expected but it was still very cool. Honestly, I prefer Notre Dame but that's just me. That night I took a night tour operated by the hostel, so I saw some of the same sights again and that was okay, I guess, but at least there was context involved.

There was a five-hour mass transit strike scheduled for Friday so I was out of the hostel REALLY early to beat the shutdown and of course the only thing I saw closed was the metro, so whatever. I navigated my way to the former Jewish Ghetto and stayed on the tram over the Tiber River. Walked through Trastevere back to the Jewish Quarter and toured the Jewish Museum and the synagogue. The Jewish Museum was interesting because Rome has the oldest Jewish community in Europe (they arrived in 161 B.C.) and while there aren't many artifacts from that era, they were fairly solid up until 1943 for obvious reasons. The synagogue was gorgeous, though- very Mediterranean and colorful but security was freakishly intense when I was going in- the questioning was akin to boarding an El Al flight.

While walking back to Via Nazionale, the main shopping street, I kind of wound up in the middle a massive anti-Berlusconi protest run jointly by a trade union, a student group, and, of course, the Communist group. Not going to lie but I kind of felt like a war photographer with my point-and-shoot camera. Don't try to convince me otherwise. The protest started near the Vittoriano (a huge white building known as the "wedding cake) so I checked out the exhibit inside. Because clearly visiting Auschwitz a week ago didn't depress me enough, I checked out their massive Auschwitz exhibit and, true to form, was depressed again. I rectified that by going shopping, and because I'm trying to buy a book from every place I go, I wound up with a biography of Cleopatra. Being a history major gives me leeway to be a huge nerd.

At this point it was around 2 p.m. and the only major thing left on my list to see was the Pantheon. I actually successfully navigated my way over with the hostel's map and my joyrides on Roman public transportation, was surrounded by southern Americans, and hung out inside and read Let's Go Europe to kill some time. Unfortunately it feels like all of Europe is under construction because it's not quite tourist season but I hope the officials know they're killing all my pictures. Okay. Cool. Also, I loved being mistaken for an actual Italian even though I can barely speak the language; the odd thing is that now that I'm back in Prague, the first thing to come to mind is "me scuzi" instead of its Czech equivalent. That shit doesn't really fly here because I think the Czech people have the same disdain for Italian tourists that they had for the Soviets in 1968.

After that I went back to the hostel with the intent to read a little and wound up drinking three happy-hour glasses of wine and scarfing pizza with Neigele from Canada and I loved every second of it. Stumbled onto the bus to Ciampino, bought Italian fast food to bring back to Prague (Mr. Panino is EXCELLENT), and somehow managed to retrieve Tory from the airport minus his belongings. Tory traveled from the airport to my dorm in a t-shirt, sweatpants and dress shoes. It was 20 degrees outside. Go Tory.

If Bruce Willis thinks it's a good idea...

I've now been to Poland twice in just under three years, which is far more than most people go in a lifetime, and God knows I never expected to be back again this soon. Back in 2007, I loved Krakow; it was beautiful and kind of warm and sunny and up until the point when we went to Plaszow, it was one big party. Of course, things got bad afterward and didn't really pick up until I got to Israel, but Poland had its beautiful moments.

Not so much this time around.

Krakow was still quaint and cute and really pretty in places, but of course, I was there for a different purpose this time around. The first time I was there was for the March of the Living, which, in retrospect, is not the most logical of programs because there's no way 17 and 18 year olds are mature enough to handle everything they throw at us in the span of a week - Plaszow, the ghettos, Auschwitz, Birkenau, mass graves, Tikocyn, Majdanek. I'm not even sure there's an age that ensures that one is mature enough to handle the camps because the camps are completely incomprehensible. But, I guess, for my first trip to Poland, I was there for a Jewish teen pilgrimage, a more emotionally intense version of the teen tour I was never able to do. I'm grateful to the March for many things, especially the fact that I was able to go into Poland this time with a vague knowledge of what to expect.

Going with a completely secular group was a new sensation, and I can safely say that I'm not a fan of touring the camps in a group in the slightest. It's not something that can or should be done in a pack; there will never be enough time to try to comprehend and reflect on the experience. The Miami group was not there for a seminar in the Jewish experience in Poland; we got Polish history as a whole and then a bit of Jewish history, but the makeup of the group had me slightly on edge. Unlike with the March, not everyone was Jewish and not everyone's family was affected by the Holocaust; even more so, not everyone had family members in Auschwitz. My mom had me reading literature about the Holocaust from a very young age and I'm grateful for the exposure; it's probably part of the reason why I'm a history major today. But that means I'm going to have a vastly different take on the events of the Holocaust, and that means I'm going to react in a vastly different way.

Truth be told, I didn't really need a return visit to Auschwitz, certainly not this soon after my first, but it was a facet of the Classroom Europe trip and I didn't really have a choice. I can now safely say that the next time I go back will either be with my mother or with any children I may have. It requires reflection and contemplation but I don't learn anything while I'm there. If anything, it makes me feel numb and doesn't elicit much of a visceral reaction, and the fact that I'm not reacting makes me upset, and then it's a big cycle of feeling terrible. I thought it would be better this time around now that I knew what to expect, but I knew that I'd see the room with the entire wall of human hair and the 40,000 pairs of shoes and the suitcases meticulously labeled by people who would never see their belongings or homes again, and just that knowledge was terrible in and of itself.

On the way to the camps, I had many of the same thoughts that I did on the way in last time, that every house we pass along the highway could have belonged to a Jewish family at one point in time, that by the grace of God and my family's emigration I exist today, because if they had stayed in Europe there's a pretty decent chance that everyone from those generations would have been murdered.

I hate visiting the camps because I'm a visual person in that I need to be able to picture a place as it was when it was operational; it's not limited to the Holocaust or World War II but even frustrated me in London and Paris, where, for instance, I couldn't imagine the French Revolution taking place in what I know was a very different Place de la Concorde. The images of the Holocaust that I had before the March was that of a black and white, two-dimensional Holocaust, no more than figures in a film. I still can't picture the camps as operational - that isn't to say I would ever dare deny the Holocaust, but it's just hard for me to picture actual humans living and dying there. Auschwitz has always felt more like a film set or museum display than an actual camp that saw one million Jews and thousands of others killed, which is why going there frustrates me immensely.

I also don't really know how to approach the Holocaust. On one hand, I'm a history major (and in some ways a very amateur historian) and I try to treat it objectively and clinically and just as something to be studied; God knows I've read enough about it. On the other hand, I'm a Jew with European ancestry and also a human being, and the Holocaust isn't something that should be looked at objectively; it's the greatest crime against humanity to date. And at what point do you stop blaming a country for its role in such a heinous crime? I know tons of young Germans who want no association with the Holocaust because it wasn't their generation that did something so terrible, but at what point do you absolve a country of its past transgressions? And does that set a dangerous precedent ("Kill a few million but we'll forgive you in 60 years")?

Anyway. Poland wasn't all Auschwitz and doom and sadness, though it was pretty fucking cold and that sucked because I didn't anticipate it at all and hence I might have frostbite and/or pneumonia. We left just before 8:30 on Friday morning and got to Krakow nine hours later after 2000 stops, three back-to-back passport checks (and one in which Samantha's passport was stolen by a Polish police officer/drag queen), and two instances of almost plowing down a Krakow tram. But we got there, dropped our stuff off, went to dinner, and while I have no idea what anyone else did, I got almost 10 hours of sleep that night and it was FANTASTIC.

On Saturday we toured Wawel Castle (which I remembered last time only for its presence on The Amazing Race) and it was interesting but all chapels and tombs start to blur together after a while. Afterward we went to Kazimierz, the Jewish Quarter in which we spent most of our time back on the March, and we went to the Old Synagogue's Jewish museum, which I remember pretty vividly from 2007. Of course, it wouldn't be Poland if I wasn't surrounded by LOUD Israeli tour groups, so that was comforting in a way. Samantha and I went on a quest for a mezuzah and books, and I witnessed a very uncomfortable interrogation in Czech by a Polish shopkeeper, and it might have been the funniest part of this weekend.

After lunch we went to the area of the Jewish ghetto. I remembered the chairs memorial and the small part of the wall that my group had seen on the March, and then Samantha led us to the ghetto memorial and then Oskar Schindler's factory, which was in the most depressing part of any town I'd seen up to that point. The factory was just another building, though I guess I wouldn't have been impressed unless Liam Neeson was giving me a personal tour. I suppose everything seems bigger because of movies so I can't be surprised by how small it felt.

Samantha and I headed off to a bookstore afterward and then I found hair gel (!!!! I'm such a guido, wow), and then our travels took us to a shopping mall. I guess I should take the time to note that I love seeing three things in foreign countries: highways, rest stops, and shopping malls. I know it's weird but whatever, I love seeing how residents of other countries live and travel and so on. All I can say is that this mall put many American ones, including the terrible Florida malls, to shame because it was three stories tall and FABULOUS and it's odd to see how much more developed Poland is than the Czech Republic. Carrefour also needs to get itself to Prague RIGHT NOW because it was like Super Target and I'm mildly obsessed. I nearly went food shopping in Krakow just because I could. Also, Bruce Willis is apparently a spokesman for Sobieski vodka and hence his face is plastered all over the boxes of the gift sets of vodka, and it is HILARIOUS.

I've been thinking a lot about the scene from The History Boys that I quoted in the previous entry. Before those lines, it says this of the Holocaust:

AKTHAR: It has origins. It has consequences. It’s a subject like any other.
SCRIPPS: Not like any other, surely. Not like any other at all.
AKTHAR: No, but it’s a topic.

I wish I was mature enough to comprehend it because I thought there would be a ton of progress on the front since I was 17, but I don't think there is an age at which the Holocaust becomes easier to comprehend or emotionally manage. The camps shouldn't be a tourist attraction, but then again, there really isn't another way to present them.

Nothing is appropriate.