Beyond the Emerald Isle: Berlin, Prague & Krakow

departing cottage 6 with one of my travel buddies!!

Oops.  I meant to do this right when I got back, I had even already written my blog but then homework took over. Better late than never! To try and avoid a novel I am going to just try and do my favorite part of each city and then add some (translation: lots) pics.

brat #2

Berlin: We had two and a half days to spend in Berlin, the perfect amount of time in my opinion. Mostly we just wandered the city, no formal tours or anything, and made it a pretty laidback trip. My favorite part was the Topography of Terror museum which was all about the Third Reich and the Nazi party and the scare tactics they employed through the end of the war.  Okay two favorite things. We also went to the Olympic stadium used during the 1936 Olympics. It was perfect!!!

The Olympic Stadium with the olympic torch above Sarah's head (middle) 

The Berlin Wall, the West side, with the remains of the Third Reich and SS headquarters 

Brandenberg Gate

We dont get fall in Ireland, just green, so Berlin was very refreshing! We just went and sat in the park one day
because it was so nice!!

The East side of the Berlin wall, it was made into a memorial with artists from 21 different countries, making a point because when the wall was intact you weren't allowed to make a mark on the East side

Prague: We took a bus to Prague from Berlin, it was a pretty nice bus ride. Prague was not my favorite city, it was about 98% tourists which was a little obnoxious but the city itself was nice.  My favorite thing in Prague was this small Jewish cemetery, the oldish Jewish cemetery in Europe. In the little graveyard there are over 12000 headstones and over 100,000 people buried there because the Jews were only allowed to bury their dead in that one area.

Church at Prague Castle

Old Town square - like  I said, lots of tourists. 

Krakow: Krakow was my favorite city! My pictures below are all of death and destruction, but it was very interesting and I am glad I did it. We did a walking tour of the Jewish Quarter, saw Oskar Schindler's factory and the ghetto created in 1941. The next day we went to Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau.  Auschwitz I is now a museum, the different exhibits are in the barracks. Birkenau was much more concentration camp-esque: over a hundred barracks, five crematoriums, the railroad right into the middle of the camp, etc. It was weird to see the difference. Birkenau was made to be a death camp, you could tell that it was built with that purpose in mind. On a more cheery note we also went to the Wieliczka Salt Mine, a mine of over 2000 chambers, some of which they rent out for weddings, conventions, etc. 

Ghetto memorial in Krakow. One chair for each thousand victims of Holocaust from Krakow (68 chairs total) . Most chairs faced the same  direction, four faced others. The one above faces Death Alley, a mass murder site in Krakow. 

Oskar Schindler's factory

Auschwitz I with the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign, "work makes free". I was surprised by how pretty this site was. 

Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Much different than Auschwitz I. The chimneys are each from a wood barrack that was burnt by the Nazis when they fled the camps.

Holocaust Memorial, located at the end of the train tracks surrounded by the remains
of the 5 crematoriums

 each small stone in the memorial is for one life taken at Auschwitz II-Birkenau = 1.1 million stones

Another memorial, just beyond the little pool is a mass grave site

Gas chamber - You can kinda see the shower heads. The hole in the ceiling is where they poured
in the Cyclone B gas pellets

Crematorium  - Auschwitz I

Luggage removed from prisoners

More things taken from prisoners. This one was tough because you know the owners of these items did not survive longer than a day, most likely just a couple hours, after arriving. The other (extra) tough part was the human hair display. Women were shaved upon arrival and the hair sold for wigs but they hadnt sold all of it before liberation.

One of the chapels (there are 40+) in the salt mine. This one is available for weddings. On the left there is a salt engraving of Da Vinci's The Last Supper. The chandeliers are also made of salt.

Overall, it was a great trip! The perfect amount of time in each city. We also decided to rent apartments instead of hostels which means we got to take a hot shower in a non-cold bathroom that lasted more than 5 minutes. Hooray! We got a little spoiled by our last apartment though, seven shower heads.  We had a delightful roomie reunion in the airport, our planes got in at the same time on neighboring gates so we saw them in the airport, dropped our bags and ran to say hi! Going home is going to be tough if I missed them so much after only a week and a half apart!!

Countdown has started though! My family will be here in 14 and I will be home in 27! I know it's a little early but just in case I don't blog again, happy thanksgiving everyone!!

michelle

Dub-town

Okay I am back! Mom, no more sending me emails chastising me on my lack of blogging. 

Dublin - the River Liffey 

It’s been a busy past week and a half – we were in Dublin last weekend from Thursday til Sunday and the professors all started giving us essays at the same time. But we don’t have class on Fridays (nor did we yesterday, we went to a castle/abbey instead) so I now have time!

The cross marks where the chair was placed, the door
where the ambulance dropped the ailing prisoner off

We left for Dublin last Thursday morning and stopped at Kilmainham Gaol (jail) on our way into Dublin. Kilmainham was the main location for political prisoners during the many uprisings, most notably the Easter Rising which eventually led to the Irish Free State.  A little about The Rising – many people did not support it because they already had home rule (their own parliament) that would start once WWI ended but when the British government responded by executing 14 of the leaders—one of whom had to be propped up and tied to a chair—by firing squad it caused outrage and garnered more support for the revolution. We went to dinner that night at The Brazen Head, Ireland’s oldest pub established in 1198. I had the beef and Guinness stew topped, of course, with potatoes. 

the roof box is the cutout in the white stone above the door

Newgrange, see the people on the right for size reference

On Friday we went to Newgrange, a passage tomb made over 5000 years ago. It is the oldest still standing manmade structure that you can enter, if that makes sense. What makes it so cool is that on the Winter Solstice the sun enters the roof box (see picture) and lights up the passage leading to the inner burial chamber. Newgrange is 85m in diameter and 11 m tall… huge! I hadn’t heard of it until I did my summer readings for Ireland, but it is so worth going to.  

We also went to the Hill of Tara where the high kings of Ireland were crowned, this was not that interesting, it’s just a hill with overgrown mounds on it. At night we went on a pub crawl, ending in the one where they shot scenes from the movie “PS I Love You” The pub crawl isn’t something I would recommend, they give you some free alcohol but then you are stuck at a pub for an hour and all the bar drinks cost minimum 5 Euro. 

St. Patrick's Cathedral

 Saturday we did a bus tour all over Dublin. The presidential election is going on right now so we saw many candidates’ busses all over the city. In Ireland, campaign season is only five weeks so they have to go hard core for those five weeks. The president is also mostly a figurehead, their only real job is to say whether a law should be sent to the Supreme Court for review, the prime minister is a more legit position. They also vote by ranking all the candidates (7 this year) from 1 to 7, eliminate the bottom candidate, and see how the rankings fall etc. until they have a winner! Strange. After the tour we met our theo prof, Brother Colmàn, at the National museum and he took us to some of the artifacts that relate to our studies. One of the really cool exhibits is on bog bodies… bodies that fell into (or were put in sacrificially) the peat bogs and were preserved there for over 2000 years. They can tell all sorts of things because they are so well preserved like what their last meals were, the vitamins in their diets, etc.

 

 Sunday we spent at Clonmacnoise, a monastery established in the 6^th century. The site is known for the High Crosses, ornately carved crosses that stand 14 feet tall.  The cool thing about it was that it is located on the River Shannon, the North/South travel way, and a drumlin (hills created by glacial deposits) which is necessary for travelling West/East because of all the bogs!

Sorry that got a little long. Just a few more little tid bits…

On Thursday we went to Kylemore Abbey, a castle of 77 rooms that was turned into a monastery and school. It is gorgeous!

prom date and me!

The boys are planning Poitin Prom, poitin being the illegal moonshine made here in Ireland. They put all the girls’ names into a hat and drew names for dates and then they have to ask their date creatively! It is kinda funny because they are all so into it, more so than the girls are. Anyway, my date asked me by pouring Guinness so that the foam spelled “prom?” Anyway, one of the boys on the trip is also a photo major, so he will be taking all the awkward prom pictures and the music (yes, the playlist has already been created) is a mix of stuff from today and our awkward middle school days.

We are here until next Wednesday, then it is off to visit the rest of Europe! I am getting super excited for that trip and, as much as I love the group, it will be nice to all go our separate ways for a little bit!

michelle

Well, one month down two to go! Sasturday marked exactly one month since our group met at the Galway bus station. It seems like I just left home but then it also feels like I have been here for a long time. Anyway, I thought I would add a little bit more about life here at the Park Lodge.

My day yesterday:

downtown Spiddal

9:00AM  - roll out of bed and make breakfast (cereal, oatmeal, toast or yogurt) and go on the computer while I eat.

9:30AM – decide I probably should get dressed. This takes about 2 minutes to figure out which clothes I am the least sick of, are the most clean (laundry is 6 euro per load) and I haven’t worn in the last two days

9:55AM – grab my notebook, pencil, water bottle and cottage key and leave for class

9:55:36 – arrive at the classroom

10:05AM  - the teacher arrives. We sing “the Wild Rover,” a classic irish pub song, go over some Gaelic conversation which goes something like this:

A: hello!

B: Hello to you too!

Classic Ireland weather... half and half

A: How are you?

B: I am thirsty. Pint of Guinness please.

A: Here you go!

B: Thank you.

A: You are welcome

B: Where are the bathrooms?

A: There.

We sing “The Wild Rover” once more and our teacher tells us all about her weekend and intros the topic for the day but then decides she doesn’t feel like teaching that and we are too tired to pay attention so we decide to hunt and gather like Megalithic men and women. 

Spiddal beach

10:30AM - We all change shoes and grab jackets and wander around the Park Lodge property. We found blackberries, hazelnuts, rosehip and sloe berries (disgusting, they make your mouth dry) on the hotel property then wandered down to the beach. The tide was too high to get any shell fish so we meander our way back up the rocky beach and through some wood covered paths into a garden then go back to the hotel.

downtown Galway

11:15AM – Start talking about an actual subject, the Origins of Christianity in Ireland (for the 3^rd time) I don’t take notes because our one assignment for the entire semester is to put her notes in paragraph form, add an intro and conclusion and turn it in and I took notes on the first subject we discussed.

12:05PM – we get a break, run to the cottage ad grab a snack, talk to my roommates, check email, go on facebook and go back to class

12:15PM – go back to class, keep doodling in my notebook, make tentative plans to watch a movie in our cottage, keep doodling

12:55PM – class is over! Go back to my cottage and make myself a sandwich for lunch

1:15pm – read the 30 pages for class later in “Re-imagining Ireland”

1:45pm – take a mini nap on the couch

2:20pm – leave for class. This class you have to get to early because all 29 of us plus the two professors are in the class and there are only 28 desks.

2:30PM – start class, discuss the parallels between the Vietnam war riots and the events of Northern Ireland

trad on the prom

3:20pm – change to comparing about the music class we had in Spiddal last Friday and “Trad on the Prom” we attended last week. Aside: Trad on the prom is a traditional music, dance and singing show that features musicians, dancers and singers from Riverdance, Lord of the Dance, the Chieftains, etc.  At one point with all 9 dancers on stage there were 15 world championships among them

3:55pm – the professors hand out a sheet detailing all our assignments for the rest of the semester which got rid of a couple papers and shortened some others. Class over.

the hotel pub, JP randomly opens it for us 

4:15pm  - meeting in our director’s cottage about our final project which has to relate to our major/previous coursework.  I am working with two others and going to research how computer use differs in Ireland vs. the US in different age groups.

4:30pm – return to cottage, go on computer/read a book

4:45pm – find out our theo prof Brother Colmàn is sick so we don’t have his class this week on Tuesday or Wednesday (that means no class at all for me on Tuesday).

6:05pm – make dinner, ravioli and tortellini with fresh pesto we bought at the open air market in Galway on Saturday

8:30pm – go over to cottage 1 for some fun!

So that was a great day. The other classes we have are much more note/lecture/work intensive.

We also booked our plane tickets and apartments for our 11 day fall break at the end of the month.  We are going to Berlin, Prague and Krakow so if you have any suggestions on where to go in any of those places suggestions would be much appreciated!

michelle

The North.

 Hello again!

We are back from Northern Ireland (Derry and Belfast) and now stay in Spiddal for the next two and a half weeks with only day trips. It is nice to know we are here for a while, nice to finally grocery shop for meals instead of limiting what we buy so we don't waste food when we leave for 5 days. And this will be a lot of pictures again... too many things are hard to explain without actually seeing them.

We left on Wednesday for Derry, after sitting five and a half hours in class in the morning we got to sit on a bus for five hours in the afternoon. On our way we stopped at Yeats' tomb at Duncliffe. Yeats was buried elsewhere but was moved to Ireland 10 years later. The grave itself was boring, but the church and graveyard was on a hill overlooking a mountain and the view was beautiful.

We got to Derry at night and had dinner provided for us at a pub. Derry is the only fully walled city left in Ireland so we had to wander to find a gate into the city. Anyway, dinner was delicious and dessert was included... Bailey's cheesecake. Yum.

Free Derry is where a lot of "The Troubles" took place from 1968 - 2008 between the Protestants and Catholics, Nationalists and Loyalists. Because of this, there are murals all over commemorating events that took place during this period.

The Free Derry sign. You can see the news crew, this is across the street from the Bloody Sunday memorial. The day we did this walking tour the British Government said they would pay reparations to the Bloody Sunday victims' families.

first civilian victim of The Troubles, the students
still wear these uniforms, were walking the streets
as we learned about this mural

Free Derry got its name by someone writing  "You are now entering Free Derry" on the end of a house during one of the riots during The Troubles. This was modeled after whoever wrote a similar line at Berkeley in CA during the anti-war demonstrations, a lot of how the Irish rebelled is based on protests in the US and South Africa.

The  mural to the right is really cool, up until a year or so ago the butterfly was black and white and the gun was black and whole. The people of Free Derry commissioned an artist to change the mural, the colorful butterfly representing life and hope and the broken gun to say that it will never happen again. Our tour guide was very emphatic about this point, that things have changed. He thanked us as tourists for helping to show the world that there is nothing to fear by going to the North.





There are two main events that took place in Free Derry, the Battle of Bogside and Bloody Sunday.  The Battle of Bogside was the first major event of The Troubles, it was a three day riot during which over 1000 people were injured and led to British Troops being stationed there which most people were okay with as they were viewed as a non-biased group...


Bloody Sunday was when British troops shot and killed 14 Nationalists who were not armed. It wasn't until 2010, 38 years later that the British Government gave a formal apology and admitted that those 14 victims were not armed.


In Free Derry there is a Civil Rights museum which is essentially a museum dedicated to The Troubles, inside they have clothes the victims wore during Bloody Sunday (with bullet holes showing the victims were shot in the back), letters like the one below, rubber bullets which killed at least six people and other artifacts from this time.  Our archaeology prof came with us, she grew up just outside of the army checkpoint and had to walk through it every day to go to school. She saw a 12 year old boy shot in the face with a rubber bullet on the way to school, had to run to the church during school multiple times because the school she attended was on the main riot street (our hostel was one street over) and could tell us all these first-hand stories about The Troubles.

A letter sent to one of the Bloody Sunday victims' families by the head of the UVF, the IRA's counterpart. One of the many interesting things in the Free Derry Civil Rights Museum 

On a lighter note, Thursday was Arthur Guinness day. I drank my first and last Guinness (and by drank I mean like a third of it) at 17:59 on Arthur Guinness's birthday at the year/time of its creation, 1759.

We left Derry on Friday  and stopped at the Bushmills Whiskey distillery and Giant's Causeway on our way to Belfast. The distillery tour was very cool, the end result mostly disgusting but that may just be personal preference.

Giant's Causeway is an area of naturally occurring hexagonal stone columns that was formed 60 millionish years ago. The Irish legend says that Finn McCool was building a stairway to Scotland to fight his Scottish counterpart, however his counterpart was huge so instead Finn McCool dressed up as a baby and when his enemy came to fight him he saw how large Finn's child was and decided he did not want to battle the child's father.

The "peace wall" designed to keep the peace between
the Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods.

We did a bus tour in Belfast because the city is much larger than Derry. We saw more evidence of The Troubles, the most significant being a 25 foot tall wall that separates the Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods and still stands today. There were more murals, more fortified police stations. We drove through both the Protestant and Catholic parts of town (we didn't in Derry because the Protestant area is across the river) and it was a very distinct difference. In the protestant area you saw murals about the UVF, their current slogan "engaged in peace, ready for war" and plaques to those killed. The Catholic part was very similar to Derry.

The rest of the pictures are things we saw in Belfast...

The red brick building on the left is where the Titanic was designed, the new modern building is the new Titanic museum.  The titanic was built on the wharf behind these buildings and dry docked there until it sailed in April of 1912

Belfast Castle - on a hill overlooking Belfast. The gardener had a much loved cat. If you can find all 9 images of the cat in the garden it is supposed to bring you luck 

Belfast City Hall - with a statue of Brittania on top and a statue dedicated to Edward Carson, the lawyer who argued for Northern Ireland's right to stay with the UK 

Queen's university in Belfast

So that was my weekend! We got tired of going to pubs so one night in Belfast we went to a movie instead, The Guard. It is about an Irish cop and a drug deal that takes place in Spiddal and Barna (the next town over) so there are scenes in the movie shot in Spiddal. It was kinda weird becuase we would laugh at different parts than the rest of the theater (like the ad before the movie about no cell phone usage) but it was fun!

We had some delicious white chili tonight for dinner, perfect because it is kind of chilly here. Any easy soup recipes (or other delicious and easy recipes) would be much appreciated now that we have time to actually make meals! Just email them if you get the chance.

michelle