European Tryst: Berlin Alone!

My friends left for Switzerland leaving me to fend for myself for the day. I decided to take a tour of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp nearby. While waiting for it to start I chatted with a couple of girls from California. One of them happened to be an avid French Horn player as well! So we reminisced about playing.... As far as the tour went, it was as expected for a concentration camp. After the tour, we were walking back to the train station and I heard the words 'studio' and 'chipboard' behind me so I turned around and asked if they happened to be architecture majors. Turns out a whole group of them were there since they were studying abroad in Berlin for the semester. I chatted with them the whole way home and then went with one of the girls to the Reichstag. The Reichstag was very cool! Hitler had it burned down during WWII so it had alot of history and a very cool modern dome designed by Sir Norman Foster. It was very impressive with a sunshade that moves with the sun to keep the glass structure from turning into an oven.

the entrance gate

markers for all the barracks

some of them burned

the anniversary was recently so people had left flowers in the camp prison

foundations

memorial - it's actually false because the camp was set aside as a memorial by the soviet union who wanted to portray it as communism's victory over the nazi regime so the only color diamonds on the memorial are the orange for the communists that died in the camp. each type of prisoner was given a color - none of the others were represented in the monument