Topography of Terror

Today some people chose to go to a Gymnasium, which is a German secondary school, and for those of us who did not want to go, we had the day free to do our own research. I did not go to the school, instead I decided I would do some studying near the hostel and then go to the Topography of Terror. My intention was to walk to Salon Schmuck around 10 am and study until 1:45 when we needed to leave to meet up with Natalie at the University. It turns out that shaving your legs after a week of neglect and a shower that needs to have a button pressed every 15 seconds to have water means it takes a very long time to shave. Also, washing your jeans, some t shirts, your underwear, and socks all by hand takes a while too (and is actually quite the hand/arm work out) So, I didnt end up walking to the cafe until 11:30, but i did manage to do some light reading before we headed out.

The Topography of Terror was an interesting place and I learned a lot, but I think it would take several visits to really go through the whole place. Outside there was a long length of the original Wall, and also a historical timeline that i didn't end up having the time to read. Inside the Topography of Terror the room was lined with even more walls of text and images. I started out by reading everything and taking my time looking at the pictures, but i realized after about a half an hour of getting through one section, that I was not going to be able to thoroughly read the rest in one day. I instead skipped to reading just the bolded introduction sections and randomly choosing a few photographs and quotes to read the captions of. There was an another entire section of the museum that i didn't have time to look at either that I think was about media and propoganda during the war.

Once we were done at the Topography of Terror, Natalie, Mira, and I went to Alexander Platz to go to both a DM (which is similar to a Bartells or Wallgreens) and a Primark (which is like a mix of a Forever Twenty-One and an H&M). This Primark was three stories tall, but didn't even get through all of the first floor before leaving as fast as we could through the hords of cheap clothing and people. We had gone in looking for a few cheap things that we could throw away before we travel back to the U.S., but it wasn't worth it to try to and find what we were looking for in such a massive selection of clothes and trying to fight through so many people. We unanimously decided that we were able to live with what we had with us. After that experience we were ready to go back to the hostel. It was about 8:30 by then and i didn't really feel like heading back to the cafe so late, so instead i tried unsuccessfully to do more research on my Kindle. Eventually I gave up and started writing some blog posts and I was going to do some reading, but at 11:30 it was time for sleep.