Day 1: Bike Tour

For the first day of class we choose a more... experiential... approach that would give us a broad overview of what was to come as we get to know more about the city. Our guide and cycling hero for the day was Keiran from Fat Tire Bike Tours. Our three hour trip took us from medieval Berlin (the name comes from an ancient Slavic term for "swamp"...) to Nazi bunkers to East German walls to postmodern memorials. Berlin is truly one of the most complex cities in the world – historically and otherwise. 

Everyone chooses and tries out their steed for the day. The seats on these things were amazingly comfortable and one doesn't need more than three speeds in flat Berlin (Iowa seems mountainous in comparison).

Every bike has a name. I just happened to get Mr. Marx.

Thumbs up.

Keiran was both entertaining and well-informed. The Staatsoper and Bebelplatz were our second stop. 

We just happened to be at Bebelplatz on the anniversary of the day (May 10, 1933) when Nazi officials and Nazi students burned 25,000 books, which they deemed to be antithetical to the Nazi ideology. The memorial that is literally embedded in the ground here is an eerie, ghostly sunken room of empty bookshelves meant to represent the books that were lost. We got to talk to a gentleman who is attempting to add to/balance that memorial with his own project, Ein Ort zum Lesen (a place for reading). This private project is an attempt to not, like the official memorial, mark the absence of the books, but to in fact bring the books back and have us read them. Each of these chairs has a book that was burned in 1933 and the passerby is able to have a seat and read the thoughts and texts again. Lovely.

We also got a short break at Checkpoint Charlie. 

A short stop at the Brandenburg gate. We'll be back.

Our final stop was the Lustgarten in front of the Altes Museum and Berliner Dom. We had survived an exhilarating, sunburning, and informative ride through the busiest streets of the Hauptstadt. I guess we were ready for anything at this point.

I didn't get much video, but used the short clip I had to start learning how to use iMovie. If interested, go here. 

Check back for more updates!