Month: January 2014

The Final Stop: Belgrade

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So clearly I am doing a smashing job of updating this thing, seeing as my trip ended on the 19th. Here I am almost two weeks later with four days left to update of my actual study abroad. Let’s see if I can wrap this up in one fell swoop.
We were only in Belgrade for three full days and two of these were incredibly busy. As with Sarajevo, here are all the lectures we attended with NGOs, government people, and the US Embassy:

January 16th
National Democratic Institute (NDI)
Serbian Parliament and the Democratic (Minority) Party leader
Belgrade Open School on the process of Serbia getting into the European Union

Serbian parliament building

 

Group picture in the large Serbian assembly hall

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Srebrenica

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This day was easily the most emotionally tolling, as we stopped in Srebrenica on our way to Belgrade. It was going to be a sad day to begin with, as genocide memorials always are, but it did not help that the night before was the night we went to Cheers with the Bosnian students and many of us were hungover for the first half of the day. Being stuck on a bus with a hangover and 27 other people is not a good way to spend the morning. When I was on birthright, they told us the only night we were not allowed to drink was the night before we went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum outside of Jerusalem. While everyone understood back then the reasoning behind it, it hits home even further why they tell you not to drink before a genocide memorial after having done it… Besides this, the day was as fitting for a memorial as it could possibly be. Dark gray skies dropping a cold wet rain that left all of us cold and shivering, regardless of having a rain jacket or how many layers you put on.
Srebrenica is one thing that no one on our trip knew about prior to this visit. A very very simplified story of what happened is as follows;
In 1991 during the war, Srebrenica was besieged by the Chetniks and was finally declared a safe zone by the UN 1993. 400 Dutch peacekeepers were brought in to protect the town and met with significant resistance when they took away the weapons of the Bosniaks. By taking captives, the Chetniks were able to make the airstrikes stop and slowly advance on the city. On 6 July 1995, the Chetniks advanced towards Srebrenica, and the Dutch peacekeepers did not fire a single shot to try to stop them, so the city was taken by Milosevic and his generals. The residents and the refugees that flocked to Srebrenica as one of the last safe zones in the area were gathered in the square and through the next few days, the boys and men were separated from the women and children and killed. Several thousand tried fleeing on foot towards the nearest free city, but this was a several days walk and were ambushed so not many survived. Our guide was one of the survivors from this march. The massacre which took place from 11-13 July killed more than 8,000 men and boys and threw their bodies in mass graves.
This massacre seemed much more real than anything else you hear about in class or in the movies. Srebrenica is not something that is readily discussed in history classes and is still a sore point for many people in the Balkans. Unlike in Berlin where there are memorials to the Holocaust, WWII and war crimes nearly every other block, many people in this region still deny the role that the Bosnian Serbs played, so there is no chance for closure. One of the other biggest differences between hearing our guide Hassan speak of his experiences and hearing Holocaust survivors tell their tale is the age different. Holocaust survivors are often sage like due to their old age and are the survivors from a seemingly different time. Hassan was a teenager during the massacre, making him younger than my parents. This is the hardest reality for me that something that happened so recently, in my short lifetime, is virtually unknown to many. In this massacre, the women and children were left alive, leaving them longing for their loved ones whose fate was unknown but assumed dead. The torture of uncertainty, leaving the slightest once of hope that just maybe your husband or child survived, is one of the worst forms of torture. We watched a short video further detailing the events that happened and that interviewed mothers and wives, hoping their loved ones survived but knowing in the back of their mind what their ultimate fate was. Watching live footage of the bombings and some of the events that occurred seemed almost unreal since this type of footage is not often released or for public viewing in the US.

After the memorial, we made our way into the town of Srebrenica for a homemade lunch. It was an all you can eat buffet which was certainly welcomed since we were all cold, wet and hungry. We managed to stuff all of our faces since it was the first meal other than breakfast where we could choose our portions and our eyes were definitely bigger than our stomachs.
The rest of the day was spent driving to Belgrade, which should not have taken that long but took the remainder of the afternoon because the roads were not overly great. The drive to Srebrenica that was beautiful and mountainous gave way to flat countryside with a stop at the boarder so we could show our passports, interrupting everyone’s bus ride naps. We finally made it to Belgrade in time for a late dinner. Several of us made our way to the Pedestrian Street after exchanging our currency for the fourth time and ate at Vapianos, a brilliantly designed European chain of Italian restaurants. They give you a card and order individually at the counter based on what type of dish you want- pasta, pizza, salad, etc. This worked great since there was a group of 9 of us and did not exactly want to wait a long time for our food.

A Sampling of Sarajevo

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So the next two days in Sarajevo were busy and mind numbing. We heard so much on the Bosnian governments, what trouble it is in, if it is doing anything correctly or is just 100% screwed, what the international community is doing (incredibly little), what a real ‘dark sense of humor’ means, and some marketing/economics. Maybe I should have requested ECON credit for this course instead of the HIST credit that I am getting… That way I can finally say I have taken an economics class because the segment on the stock market we did at the end of AP Euro in high school definitely did not count. I played games and snoozed while Danny and Mark did all the work. We only won the stock game because Danny’s relative (aunt? grandma? I have no idea) is good at the stock market if such thing is possible and called that we should invest in gold. I’ve learned a lot about much more than history thankfully.

Our lectures for the next days were as follows:

Day 1

  • A member of Parliament
  • The Second in Command at the Office of the High Representative (OHR)
  • A legal advisor in the courts of BiH
  • Why foreign investment is so hard from a George Mason Ph.D. candidate

Day 2

  • The Tunnel of Hope (not a lecture)
  • The US Embassy
  • Advisor to the Bosniak President
  • International Commission of Missing Persons

Through all of these lectures, it is really impressive that I only snoozed for one of them which should have been one of the more interesting ones. The courts of BiH should have snapped my attention away but I was sitting in the back in a warm room, listening to a quiet lady. Not exactly the greatest way to keep someone awake. Maybe too much time was spent at the bars during the night and not enough time sleeping, but even so, I regret nothing. These days were held several first experiences for me and probably most other people on the trip. One of the things that are always joked about is the reputation of Americans abroad and a generally less than favorable viewpoint but this was as far from the truth as possible. This combined with the inner workings of Bosnia and Herzegovina baffle me. Outside of the OHR, there was a group of Bosniak men who built tents and were camping out for three months trying to get the High Representative, who happens to be an American, to finally get the ball rolling so the people can get some benefit. Despite this, the international community has taken steps back during the past decade trying to get the country to stand up on its own without face planting before it takes its first step. Clearly, this agenda is working pretty well for Europe as a whole. One of the things that confused me the most though was their reasons for being angry. The Bosniak men cited that their kids were learning Serbian instead of Bosnian in the schools, which angered them because Serbian is not their language despite the two being remarkably similar save some grammar differences from what we were told. Don’t quote me on this because I’m not 100% on this information. But to solve this problem, instead of letting their kids go to school and then teaching them Bosnian when they get home, they just pulled them right out of school. In what world does this action make any sense, especially if you have any desire for your child to fend for themselves. Maybe this is just my biased opinion as someone who has grown up in the United States but this stance makes little sense to me.

One of the other interesting experiences came at the Tunnel of Hope, which may have been on one of the most depressing days I have ever seen. The smog made it seem like we were in the movie ‘The Mist’ and were all waiting for tentacles to come and rip us from the bus and drag us to the abyss. We got a brief history of the tunnel and the war from a man who we were pretty sure was Muslim based on his point of view that ‘no one objects when you go to war against Muslims.’ Unfortunately for something that had such a strong impact on the recent history of Sarajevo, this was pretty much all we heard about the war other than the massacre at Srebrenica, which we visited the next day. We did not get too much personal information from the speaker so I have no idea if he lived through the siege or is just knowledgeable. Either way, he put things into perspective that you do not think about or realize that happened especially during my lifetime. One of the things he said that had the largest impact for me was that one pack of cigarettes was worth a pig or goat and the Mona Lisa was only worth the amount of heat you could get out of burning it. Every resource was used towards survival and extra objects that did not help with this were practically useless. Pretty much everything in our homes would be worthless in this situation except for the food, blankets, and things that could burn. All of these had to be smuggled through an 800m long tunnel that was 1m wide by 1.6m tall. In a horrible sense, the cause for this tunnel is almost worth a chuckle because the reason the tunnel was needed was to run under the UN airport that was controlled by the French. If the Bosnians tried running across the airstrip, they risked being shot at by both the Chetniks and the UN Forces so their only solution was to go under the airstrip. They kept a 25m section of the tunnel preserved so people can walk through it and see what the people had to go through in order to survive. With the smog lying low over the city, you could not see the hills or across the airstrip where the other end of the tunnel was, making the experience much more ominous.

Siege of Sarajevo and the location of the UN Airport/Tunnel of Hope
Entrance to the Tunnel of Hope
The Tunnel of Hope

Perhaps the most frustrating event we had was the meeting with the advisor to the Bosniak president. This guy was a politician through and through. He was a great speaker and you could tell that he used to be a lobbyist before getting into politics by the way that he talked. By the time we got to him, many of us were tired and did not have the attention span to listen to him dance around the questions, which is exactly what he did. Without directly answered any of the questions that were asked of him, he talked for an average of 20 minutes after each one and danced his way around giving us the answers we were looking for. This is what I mean when I say that he was a politician if I have ever seen one. There is a reason this guy has been the advisor to two different presidents, each with opposing views and yet he still managed to survive the political office. The thing that aggravated us the most was his constant referral to the Dayton Accords as ‘the Dayton Constitution.’ Maybe it was because we had previously come from the US Embassy so our biases were a little stronger, but we were all convinced that the Dayton Accords were in no way meant to serve as a long standing Constitution as it is currently doing. The other thing that surprised all of us was when he told us that he believes Republika Srpska should not exist because it was founded on war crimes during the war. By allowing RP to continue to exist, it is sending a message to criminals saying they can create their own ‘entity’ through illegal means and heinous crimes. For something that was such a strong opinion, it came as a surprise that this was so bluntly stated in the middle of his rhetoric that was leaving many of us confused.

As with every night, we continued to hit up the bars because it was a lot more fun than sitting in the hotel room, no offense to that. Pat took a bunch of us to see Bilbo’s which ended up being a big disappointment, but hey, I got a picture of it so I guess it is worth it. The big drink in Eastern Europe that we found ended up being rakia (no idea how it is spelled but that is how it is pronounced) and it is brandy. It entirely depended on the flavors because in Hungary, the raspberry was gross but the plum was pretty good. In Sarajevo, we ended up doing a shot of cherry instead of jaeger because we may as well have expanded our horizons. I don’t normally like cherries but this stuff was fantastic. For being so strong, it went down like sweet wine and I have no idea how. Unfortunately, I do not remember the names of the bars but the second one we went to was very punkish. They had a brick wall with the writing from The Wall album by Pink Floyd written on it along with signatures and quotes. This should give you a pretty good idea of the music that they played there. It was all classic and 90’s rock music. Maybe in the 6 months I’ve been 21 I haven’t explored enough but I need to find bars in the states that are good to hang out at and play this type of music.

The disappointing Bilbo’s
One of the good Bosnian beers

To end the final night in Sarajevo, all the Bosnian students reserved part of a pub for us, and there ended up being 19 of us that went. 19 out of 26 ain’t bad. It was a lot of fun and a great night, the only problem was that there were almost 30 of us when including the Bosnian students in a space that was meant for probably half that many people. The group of us from the previous night all decided to do another shot of rakia and this stuff was even more delicious than the stuff the previous night, assuming you like sweet. I’m talking juice sweet which worked wonders because the main objective of the night was to get drunk and have fun. So the night was a complete success. One of the biggest advantages of doing this in Europe is that buying drinks at a bar was still more expensive than doing it on your own, it was maybe a third of the price of bars in the states and that may still be overestimating it. It turned out to be a good night of just drinking and hanging out talking and relaxing. It was pretty close to our hotel so we knew how to get back and people came and went from our group as they pleased, which made the whole night so much easier.

Church in the old city at night

An Introduction to Sarajevo

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The bus ride to Sarajevo took more than half a day. When we got there, everyone was reminded exactly what coach buses aren’t meant for- that being small narrow roads. The biggest street in Sarajevo was maybe four lanes and many of them were narrow one lane streets, especially those on the hillside where our bus was driving. One of the turns our driver wanted to make was too narrow so he has to back the bus up the entire street (which was a hill by the way) until we got back to the previous intersection. So our first Sarajevo experience scared the crap out of most of us.

The next morning we had tours of the city that were given to us by local students at the American University of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This worked out better than a group of 26 tourists following a soft-spoken tour guide that told is about more architecture than anyone cared to know about. We split into three groups and wandered around the old city of Sarajevo, which had lots of churches and mosques along with Ottoman ruins which made for a pretty neat comparison. When wondering around, all I could think about was that the city looked like a European Jerusalem, built in a valley surrounded by lots and lots of old religious buildings. The Milijacka River runs through the city which makes for beautiful views looking up the river into the hills. It’s a shame though that because it’s the winter, there is often large amounts of smog that enveloped the city. I’m talking about you couldn’t even see 100 feet in front of you. It makes for a somewhat depressing morning when you cannot see the surrounding mountains that make the city so beautiful. The students then led us to lunch at a brewery restaurant so we got to try Bosnian beer, and while it may not have been traditional Bosnian food, it was still pretty good. All of us learned one lesson very quickly: vegetarians would have trouble surviving in the Balkans. I think the most vegetables I saw while in Sarajevo, other than a tomato on a sandwich that I gave to someone else was the side of onions with the cevapcici, once again which I did not eat. Chevapici was described to us as meat fingers and said its hard to explain in English and I agree, but either way, I would say google it and find out about its deliciousness.

Looking up the Milijacka River
Jordan and I on one of the bridges over the Milijacka River

 

Mosque at day

 

Mosque by night
Walking into the Old City of Sarajevo

 

The square where Franz Ferdinand was shot in 1914

 

Looking across the Milijacka River at a pretty building
The rest of the day was spent at the University, which we walked to after lunch and saw much of the actual city. We were advised in Hungary to read the CIA fact sheet for BiH and thank god my roommate and I did. One thing that was picked up very quickly from our time there is that the government is highly illogical. This goes back to the Dayton Accords (or Constitution as some people called it). Putting it simply:

There are three ethnic groups, Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats, each of which elects one president who is in power in alternating eight-month terms during the four-year election cycle. Minority groups have yet to be represented and each of  has a have a veto power. This insane and dysfunctional division continues in parliament, the state (similar to the federal gov’t in the US), and the entities, which act below the state. From my basic understanding and without looking at the plethora of notes I have on the topic, there seems to be no decisions being made, more corruption than a mafia, and absolutely no uniformity throughout the different forms of government. So all of this makes for some pretty sweet chaos and it is impressive the country still exists when looking at it from this point of view.
By hearing all of this through lectures and trying to have it explained in some detail in an hour and a half is nearly impossible. Understanding this is like trying to learn a foreign language when being taught by a fish. Incomprehensible. Despite this ultimate confusion, the lectures were interesting and managed to keep many of us awake because this point of the trip began more lectures and less touring, so we were all much closer to nap time than the first half of the trip.

The Green is the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (The Federation)
The Yellow is Republika Srbska
A chart of the government system of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Each side represents each of the two sections of the country.

Thankfully when we got out of the lectures and were able to wander around the city. Some of the Bosnian students made a reservation at this funky bar/cafe that was by far the most hipster place I have ever seen, called The Goldfish. This gave us an opportunity to really talk to them and get to know more about them. Especially many of the students had interesting stories about where their families went during the war and coming back to Bosnia. This place had antiques and money, both paper and coin, spread all over the place and the owner had a very sweet mustache that was curled up on both sides, so he only added to the flavor of the bar. Not to mention they don’t use radio music- instead there was a playlist on the computer which played lots of oldies and indie music, which was very refreshing to hear since they were all songs that we don’t hear to often. One of the strangest things for me was one of the professors at the University is American and came to The Goldfish and spent the rest of the night with us. He was not that old but I guess I am not accustomed to professors going out and drinking with their students. Especially because many of the students had final presentations in his class tomorrow, so when a few of us switched to a different bar to get another drink, they were continually telling us to keep him drinking so he would be hungover the next day and be a more lenient grader. Naturally, we failed at this but we were also advised that this plan would have backfired had it worked because it would have made him a harsher grader due to being cranky instead of an easier grader.

The inside of The Goldfish
Walking out of the Old City at night

The Sun! It’s Real!

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I can’t tell if the days are blending together or if I am having permanent brain farts. I feel like the day what we got to Budapest was not that long ago but then I remember the amount of stuff that we did and wonder how on earth we had time for everything. I’m sitting on a bus riding through the center of Croatia and half of the trip is just blending together as being super tourists, a few lectures that are way more interesting than those at school for the most part, and enough drinking that everyone is claiming that they are not like this in the states; myself included. There is no way in hell I could afford this in the states.

I left you guys off with the Irish Cat Pub that was around the corner from our hotel. The next day was lecture day so we headed on over to ELTE University on the Buda side of the river (pretty sure I got the sides of the river mixed up in my last post- we stayed in the Pest). As hard as it may be to believe, a university in Budapest looks pretty similar to one in the states. Lots of buildings, classrooms, a field or two and so on. All pretty typical stuff that I’ve come to expect, or maybe I just have strange expectations. Either way, I’m right and your wrong.

The lectures were certainly interesting but every professor has their own style and some just aren’t very interesting for me. It doesn’t help that the first lexture was on economics in Hungary. Let’s just say the only Econ credit I have ever taken was recieved through my AP Euro class senir year of high school because we learned about the stock market for two weeks. Not exactly something that is going to help me with Hungarian economics. That being said, I understood most of what he said so I have myself a pretty big pat on the back. The second lecture was my favorite of the three, discussing the Roma population in Hungary, where a sizable population is located. We discussed identity and how one recieves it; either by the self, the community, or the governed, or any combination of the three. The problem the Roma are facing is that they typically have a very negative reputation even though much of this is unjustified. Hello Hunchback of Notre Dame. Whoever said Disney isn’t relevant to daily life was completely wrong. It was interesting because they are facing muh of the same problems as the Jews, even today as antisemitism is on the rise and the Roma are often put in school for ‘special people’. Despite having access to the same rights as the snobby white people across the town, they don’t have the mean to access the services that are available to them by the crappy Hungarian constitution (the first lecturer’s words not mine. But it does seem to be a pretty crappy constitute though.)

For the evening we went out to dinner at the Hummus Bar, which was only a block away from our hotel. It was a great place where the entire menu came with hummus that was rather tasty and the falafel was really good. To make it even better, I am pretty sure I saw a sign that the place was glatt kosher. Don’t site me on that though. After this meal of deliciousness, I was probably the fullest I’ve been on this entire trip and I loved it. The meal came out to like $7 too. That is a college students budget right there.
When I get home or to Alex’s in a week, I will probably make another blog post going over just the lectures because there would just be too much.
The rest of the night was spent in the hotel after going to a convenience store a few doors down and restocking on beer. That is pretty much the recurring theme of the nights for the past 10 days. Did a little blogging, some drinking, I tried some Hungarian plum brandy that actually wasn’t too bad; all while hanging out in a hotel room that probably wasn’t quite suited for this. There was five of us there, two girls and three guys and the girls wanted to cuddle and ended up talking about bras for probably around 20 minutes with absolutely no shame. I guess this is what happens when you spend 10 days with someone all day everyday except for when you are sleeping.
I had a brief sentence in here about a funny cuddling moment that took place but who would have guessed that at 21 years old, I am still being censored by my mother.
The next day was the first time that the sun had made an appearance in Budapest and the second time all trip. I was starting to wonder if it still existed but the sun was nice enough to make a guest appearance. We went to statue park, were all the removed statues from the communist period were relocated to. The part opened in 1993 and had lost of interesting statues and sculptures.

Unfortunately these are the only pictures I have on my phone so no more for you at the moment. The park was organized in three consecutive figure 8’s in a row next to each other becuase it is the symbol for infinity. The statues were all removed and instead of being destroyed, the statues were relocated to this park, which is continuously occurring. All the statues portrayed the soviets as heroes so there was a stark comparison to the soviet memorial that we went to in Berlin.

The tour of the park only took around an hour and we got dropped off at the széchenyi baths near victory circle in the center of the city. The sun finally came out so it made the whole city much more beautiful. There were three outdoor baths but we originally went in the cooler of them three and were really disappointed. Thankfully we moved to the other pool that was 27-28°C which felt much better in contrast to the cool air. Even though it was not the warmest day out, it was much warmer than the typical winter and certainly has been warmer than the east coast and the polar vortex. There were also 9 indoor pools and a few saunas, massage places, a restaurant and a bar and more. This place was massive, but it also wasn’t exactly cheap.

To finish of the day, the opportunity was too good to not go out and experience the nightlife. Our guide Andrea told us what street to go to and one my friends had a map that was given to her of a ruin bar and how to get to it. The ruin bars were made out of old graffitied space that was deserted. It was kind of like a strip mall of bars with lots of tables, lights and music in the middle. We met lots of interesting people including an Aussie and a guy from Oxford that were staying at a hostile not tok far away.

On the adventure to get there, we kind of bar hopped just becuase we left early and people wanted to eat and try different beers. The best one we went to was in an alley way with heat lamps on the ceiling and jellyfish like lanterns out n the alleyway. It was a lot of fun to hang out at for about an hour before me moved on to the ruin bar. The tip jar may have been the best part along with the bartender, who decided to screw school and moved to Budapest to become a bartender a few months ago.

 

Budapest, I Love You

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So I just noticed after being on this trip for more than a week, my computer is still on East Coast time saying it’s 4:40 pm while it’s actually 10:40 pm. If it was 4:40 I would be a little ashamed of myself because I am slightly intoxicated because our hotel is literally 30 meters from an awesome Irish pub and I’m a little drunk as I write this. Thank you, shot of Jaeger.

I thought Berlin was one cool city. It had a nice mix of modern, Renaissance, and classical architecture along with lots of interesting stuff. And then we get to Budapest and every person I have talked to is blown away. I mean it’s one thing to say that both cities are pretty cool and to leave it at that but instead, it was always ‘I thought Berlin was awesome and then we got here and holy crap.’ The reputation of Budapest being the most beautiful city in Europe is definitely understandable. Unfortunately, when we got here after that 14-hour train ride, the city was covered in fog so we could barely see 100 meters, let alone across the Danube from the Pest side of the river to the Buda side of the river.

Thankfully, we came to the hotel first after the train ride because I am sure we all smelled pretty horrid and my pants also smelled like beer because it exploded all over my pants and it was bothering me so I was able to change my clothes. I am sure that is more than all the information you guys need but I felt like you should know it anyway because it serves no importance at all. We walked a few minutes from our hotel, which unlike the one in Berlin is located more or less in the city center, to a restaurant where we got breakfast and didn’t have to pay because it is part of the trip aka the best part of the trip. There was so much food it did not fit on the table or the plates were just really big, either one or a combination of both is a definite possibility. After that, we got back on the bus to cross the Danube and go to the Buda part of the river, which is the hilly side and the less business-y section where the castle is. Unfortunately, we couldn’t see across the river and see the main portion of the city with the parliament building (which we went to today and I have lots of pictures of) but the Fisherman’s Basilica was still amazing and made it beautiful in a different sort of way. This is one hell of a glorious church and after the end of every mass, they sing the national anthem of Hungary, being the only church in the country to do so. We also got to see the rest of the presidential residence among some cool shops and structures. Unfortunately, the city maintained a pretty good amount of damage in WWII from the Russians and a good portion of the city had to be maintained. Either way, the church paired with the fog was a beautiful combination and while I wish we could have seen across the river because it would have been beautiful, it gave us a different image to be able to see the Basilica in the fog when we couldn’t even see 100 meters away. This was completed by a bus tour of the Pest side of the city, which is the main side of the city with the business and touristy side of the city. We were able to see the two main museums along with the statue depicting Hungarian history. The statue has a sculpture of Gabriel on top, with the seven heads of the tribes at its base. In the back, the most important kings are depicted so most of Hungarian history in terms of leadership can be explained just from this one sculpture. How many places say they can do that? Not too many that I can think of. One of the things that were pointed out to us was that the architecture is unique so that no two buildings are the same so that the city is nearly impossible to place and can pose as many other European cities, especially for movies. There is a little fun fact for you.

Traditional Hungarian Breakfast
Fisherman’s Basilica on the Buda side of the Danube River
Széchenyi Thermal Baths  

Today was an interesting experience because we had to dress up to go to the American Embassy and meet with Kris Fresonke of Public Affairs and Dimitri Tarakhovsky of Culture Affairs. This was interesting but a little bit of a letdown as well because I was looking forward to going into the American Embassy. Instead, the meeting room was changed to a building next door where the office of Public Affairs has rented space which was in cool glass buildings that had several bank offices. We decided that the discussion would be off the records, meaning we couldn’t take notes or record the conversation. Despite this, it wasn’t quite as interesting as I thought it would be.

The House of Terror Museum.

The next part of the day made up for it though because we went to the House of Terror which documented the effects of communist rule and what happened then. While the majority of the museum was history about WWII and about how Hungary refused to give up their Jews etc., the bottom floor of the museum was the most interesting for me. It compared very nicely to the Stasi prison that was mentioned in my last post. There was much of the same but also much more prison related activities that you would think of along the lines of the Communists and torture and all that fun stuff. Some nasty stuff occurred, including 157 death sentences with the minimum reduced to the age of 16, lots of types of prison cells such as fox holes, a room that was so narrow you could only stand that had light bulbs at eye level so there was no escape from light, and a padded cell. This place was freaky. I’ve been to so many Holocaust memorials and museums and even prisons but had never seen anything like this. Perhaps the most frightening part of this, which was once again reinforced by the Stasi prison was that they got away with doing all of these frightful things. The part that hit me the most was the room at the end which had pictures of all the victimizers. The majority of these people were still alive and faced no prosecution for their actions under the communist government. Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to take pictures inside of the museum despite many of the cool exhibits.

The last part of today before the free time was a tour of the Hungarian Parliament building. This place was freaking sweet. While Hungary only has a population of 12 million, it has the third largest Parliament building in the world behind London and Buenos Aires. While I don’t understand why, especially considering Hungary’s financial situation and the cost of maintaining this fantastic monstrosity, I am certainly not complaining. We got a fairly quick tour of the building getting to see the entrance hall, the giant dome, crown sword and scepter of Hungary, and the assembly hall. The building was constructed starting in the last decade of the 19th century and many aspects of the time remain, including the cigar holders outside of the assembly hall. Because you were not allowed to smoke inside the room, there were numbered holders in front of the windows near each door so that bureaucrats could remember exactly where they placed their cigars when they came out of meetings. This building took 19 years to build and I can certainly understand why. There are paintings all over the ceiling and imported parts from all over Europe, such as the columns which were a gift from the king of Sweden.

Museum across the way from the Parliament building. The statue bears a large resemblance to the one of Apollo on top of the Brandenburg Gate.
The Hungarian parliament building with construction occurring in front of it.
The assembly hall of the parliament building.
A view of the Parliament building from across the river at night. The night was very foggy so this is the result.

For the rest of the day, we just wandered around and hung out until dinner time, when we went to an Iranian restaurant and then out to a bar just to waste some time. We finished dinner around 8 pm and it was too early to go to sleep? I think not. The Irish pub around the corner was beginning its live music and the guy was actually really good. He played a few Hungarian songs but after that played American music, some of which I never expected to hear. He played/sang The Joker by The Steve Miller Band, some Red Hot Chili Peppers along with some other songs that were both refreshing and entertaining to hear. It is really funny how global American music is, and not even the stuff that has come out during the past year or two that makes your ears bleed. Some good classic music instead of that few would protest hearing.

Unfortunately, I am writing this on my computer so I don’t have the pictures yet. I’ll upload them eventually from my phone so I can add them but it may take a while as I don’t have too much free time. As of now, use your imagination.

So Much Berlin

/ migreen92 / 1 Comment

So I have been super busy and the internet was quite poor in Berlin. I have no clue how I am going to say everything that I want to and not get sidetracked.

So let’s see, we had a free day, a post communism day, and a day with some awesome lectures and a 14-hour long train ride. As I sit here typing this on my phone because I am too lazy to get my computer, it makes perfect sense that for the class blog we have to do it every day.

I went to the German Technology Museum with some other people on a free day and I didn’t know what to expect. It turned out to be really cool cause we got to see things from the German point of view. Not all Germans are scary, contrary to many peoples beliefs. The main part of the museum was five stories with boats and planes and lots of cool stuff in between. The only problem… Our tour guide was wrong and the museum was not in English. So we got to look at all the pretty pictures and had no idea what was happening half of the time. There also were sections on film and photography which was really cool to see from a German perspective. Funny to go to a museum and have no mention of Kodak or any other American companies for the most part. But they had the brewery closed. All we managed to get out of the sign on the door was ‘sorry for the inconvenience’ but either way, apology not accepted. Hot chocolate from Fassbender and Rausch made things better though after we walked through Berlin for a long time. It was some fantastic stuff. They give you a shot of water with it because it is so chocolate. And you get an option of milk or dark chocolate.

We walked past Checkpoint Charlie on our way there but also went back with the group the next day. It was a break in the Berlin Wall where people could pass back and forth. War almost broke out between the USA and East Germany when the East Germans demanded an American diplomat show his work papers and it escalated to tanks on either side being deployed until the tension eventually faded away and thankfully no more fighting happened. I don’t think Berlin could have taken any more of it. The checkpoint is still there with Germans dressed in American soldier uniforms that a bunch of us got pictures with. It cost two euro but it was worth it. I can disprove all the non-believers. Shun the non-believers. We got to see the East Side Gallery which must be an artist’s heaven. It’s a mile long stretch of the remaining Berlin Wall, divided up into different sections and painted by different artists from around the world.

We had a tour of a Soviet prison where people were out when they were viewed as enemies of the state aka they tried to escape East Berlin. Our tour guide was born in East Berlin and swam across the river to the American sector. He then knew that he had to help others escape and helped 33 people escape before the Stasi found him and imprisoned him. He was in jail for five years until he was ransomed by the German government.

One of the coolest parts was the lectures that we went to on Monday morning before peacing out of Berlin. We went to the Free University of Berlin and had two lectures, one by Jan C. Berhends (a professor at Humboldt Uni) and Hans Ulricht-Kolse (member of the Reichstag for 31 years and former head of the foreign affairs committee). Both of the lectures were incredibly interesting but here are some notes from the second one just because his opinions were very well established and with 30+ years of experience, they had so much going into them: Germany gave Israel the second strike capabilities by giving them six nuclear subs. Of all the countries in Europe, he thinks Bosnia is going to face the most trouble in the future. He hopes for a united Europe, which he doesn’t think will occur for 50 years when being very optimistic, considers the EU to be a success and believes Iran is the key to solving the Middle East problem. These are what I can remember now but there is so much more and I have about four pages of notes if people want to know more.

Since I wasn’t able to go to the Pergamon Museum which had classical antiquities. There was an exhibit on Islamic art, Mesopotamia, and Roman stuff. They had the gate of Ishtar. Amazing. The only problem was that Jess and I went to the Roman section first which is the most impressive by far, so while the rest of it was really cool, it kind of paled in comparison to the Roman Market that was constructed in the museum.

I’m getting lazy so this is gonna wrap up shortly but we got to Budapest by way of an overnight train that took 14 hours. There ended up being five of us in a train at that was probably 6×6 with three beds on either side. Thankfully we stocked up on beer because we had 14 hours to kill and it made the night go so much faster. We ended up with 12 people in this little tiny room and went to sleep when we made it to Prague around 11:45 pm. Those of us who were drinking slept great and everyone else slept pretty poorly so we were able to run that in their faces. And so now I sit here in the Budapest hotel after a quick day of touring. We are going out tonight with the professor and walking around the city.

 

Tacky Berlin

/ migreen92 / 2 Comments

Berlin is a funky city. After I got to the airport on Wednesday, we had to get to the hotel by ourselves from the airport which was an experience in and of itself. Thankfully, I picked up some people who were on my flights and arranged to meet a girl at the airport to get to the hotel with. We all had our maps out, trying to figure out the subway and busses as to get the least amount lost. One of the weirdest things is these are based on an honor code. You buy your ticket and validate it, so it gets stamped with the date and time, and certain tickets are good for a set period of time. There are no turnstiles or people checking your ticket. Instead, there may be someone in plain clothes asking to see your ticket but that hasn’t happened to us yet. If you get caught with no ticket or an invalid one, they said it is a 40 Euro fine but it is still based on an honor code. Why do I get the feeling that this would never fly in the U.S,? There were explosions going on in the distance and we thought it was gunfire. T.hen we realized, this isn’t America and there aren’t any guns. Turns out Berlin was a giant wreck after NYE and there were fireworks littered on the ground all over the place. Since it was new years day, the city was shut down and there were no stores open. The hotel is interesting; I kicked the wooden bed frame at least three times in the first ten minutes I was there, and there is a small glass wall on the side of the bathtub that is about a two feet long instead of a shower curtain so every you shower, the bathroom floor turns into a slip in slide. And there is a lot more slipping than sliding.

Somehow I am still operating on less than ten hours of sleep for the past three nights because sleep is for the weak obviously. I chose movies over sleep on the airplane and jet lag didn’t make it any easier. They didn’t even announce new years. Someone who was on British Airways said they all got free alcohol if they were over 18, meanwhile United just wished us a happy new year when we landed in Frankfurt. Not cool. The stern looking Russian man I was sitting next to didn’t even fulfill any stereotypes and order vodka. Instead, he ordered tea three times. Whats the fun in that?

The largest synagogue in Berlin in the old Jewish Quarter

Between two days, we have seen the old city, the old Jewish Quarter, a paintbrush factory that hid Jews during WWII (Otto Weidt’s factory aka small time Schindler), the Holocaust Memorial, the Brandenburg gate, the house that the Wannsee Conference took place in, the Reichstag, the ‘Hippie’ section of Berlin, the largest of the memorials to the fallen Russian soldiers that was erected after WWII, the German History Museum, and a whole lot more street art than anything else. It’s all interesting and there are still three more full days in Berlin to do more stuff. Granted tomorrow is a free day so who knows where that will go. Sleep is probably unlikely at the rate that things have been going and drinking is shaping up to be definite. We managed to explore enough of the city to find our way to some good restaurants and beer really is cheaper than water. I ate lunch today for half the price of a normal beer back in the states. We also chose the cheapest place in the market but I am going to consider that being smart instead of frugal.

Some of the street art outside of the Paintbrush factory
The Reichstag
The Assembly Chamber of the Reichstag and the dome that controls the heating for the room through air control (it was really cool)
The Holocaust Memorial — more than 2,700 abstract boxes of different heights

The city itself is pretty decked out in lights and has all these tiny winter/Christmas towns spread out that sell traditional German food and of course, beer and glug wine (sweet wine essentially). There was a giant snow slide that people were sledding down in the middle one of the main squares of the city that our hotel is only about ten minutes walk away from. It had a little beer hall, lots of souvenir carts, Christmas lights all over, and of course, none of the vendors spoke English so we had to order lunch by a mixture of pointing and other gestures. The main street that is the equivalent of 5th Avenue in NY has lights on all the trees and lots of light up sculpture thingys all down the street from giant toy soldiers, the spelling of Berlin, and lots of other things that I can’t remember because there are just too many of them. We were told to go to KaDeWe, which is a six story supermart with a massive international food bazaar on the sixth floor, and another store that is apparently the largest chocolate shop in the world. Only problem; we were walking around after dinner last night around 9 pm and literally everything was closed. Nothing opened until around 12 pm and was all closed around 8 pm.

One of the booths from the Christmas village
Lights along the big shopping street

Tonight we are all going out to dinner and the professor is paying for the food and all the drinks are going to be on us. The tour guide (who has been working with GMU for the past few years) wrote down a list of night life places for us to go because it’s a Friday night and we don’t have to get up before the sun tomorrow. I literally went down to breakfast and thought I had the wrong time because the sun wasn’t up yet. Berlin is our busiest city because it is the largest city that we are going to by far, so we have been moving super quick. Touring from 8 am to 5 or 6 pm is a little brutal on the feet regardless of what shoes you are wearing. On a random note though, I got to try German bagels. They don’t know what they are missing. They also put cream cheese on all of their sandwiches. There was a chicken or turkey bagel sandwich that had cream cheese on it. I got a falafel on a bagel instead with the coolest mint tea ever, but the point being the bagels were weird.

The beers from dinner last night, all were 0.5L

 

The tea was literally mint leaves in hot water