berlin zwei (warning: this is a very long post)

the next day we went to wannsee, where the wannsee conference was held. this is the building. in case you don't know what the wannsee conference was, i'll tell you. the wannsee conference was where the heads of all the different nazi departments came together to discuss "the final solution". for a long time, no one knew what to do with this house or the papers held inside because some of the people in politics had been former nazis and they didn't want to bring it to light. then it was a summer camp for underprivileged children. finally, someone decided that it would be a good place to have a memorial site. what i found particularly interesting is that it had histories of all the men that were involved in the meeting and what happened to them after the war. i should also point out that the tour was in english because the woman said she wanted us to really understand what happened there and we would be more apt to do so in our native language. interesting.

and now for something completely different. this is the fan fest, where they had five giant screens showing the games. we went there to try to watch the first game, which was a germany game.

unfortunately, this was my view. we could have squeezed through the crowd but some of us were hungry so we just went to a bar/restaurant and watched the game there. it was still fun.

hey, remember when i said i had a picture of that pretty building at night? this is it. they were showing some kind of soccer-themed thing on it. you can't really tell by my picture that it was moving, but it was.

then we stumbled into a park-type thing where we watched this guy do juggling tricks. he pulled pu my friends neal and bill to help him earlier and even though i was trying to hide behind my friends, he picked me, too. which meant that i got to throw these flaming torches you see here. it was stressful.

the next day we had our pick of three museums: the checkpoint charlie museum, the jewish museum, or the pergamon museum. i picked the jewish museum because it seemed the most interesting to me and mom and dad said it was neat. the architecture was really cool. this is one of the inner walls of the museum. i wished i stayed longer but we didn't have that much time. poo.

these are a dried shark and a dried fish. this man, mendelsson, was one of the first people (i think) to record findings about fish from dried specimens. i found it interesting.

after the museum, we walked around the city a bit. this is a church in one of the centers of town. it was bombed during the war and they rebuilt parts of it after but not to look how they did before, but as a kind of remembrance. we didn't actually get to go in it, though. i think i'll have to come back to berlin sometime and spend more time there.

then we went to KaDeWe which is an absolutely humongous store. KaDeWe stands for "kaufhaus des westens" and is rivalled only by herrod's of london. it was pretty cool and i got my picture taken next to big penguin stuffed animals.

this is a picture of KaDeWe.

the next and final day we went to potsdam, which is a small city outside of berlin. we visited sanssouci, which is one palace in a park with a bunch or palaces in it. this is one of the palaces. not sanssouci, though. "sanssouci" means "without pity".

this is a windmill in the park.

and this is me in front of the palace sanssouci.

FISH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

this is the fountain and sanssouci. this is also where the fish live.

there, now i'm done with my berlin pictures. whew. that was a lot. there are a lot more but people can see those when i get back. next i'll post pictures of brussels.