Weimer and America Day

Today was our last full day in Jena and our schedule for the day was packed again. The first thing on our agenda was to take the train to Weimar, which is a small city that was the center of German Enlightenment and home to the author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. When we arrived, one of the program coordinators from Jena led us on a guided tour of the city. She pointed out the homes of Goethe and Schiller, different historically important buildings, a bust of Johann Sebastian Bach, and we spent a majority of the tour walking through a romanticized park to Goethe’s garden house. T

here was lush green grass all around, trees providing shade on the dirt paths, winding stone staircases, and the garden had a variety of beautiful flowers. After we were done with the guided tour we were free to decide whether we wanted to go back to Jena to hear a talk by a local politician in Germany, or we could stay in Weimar for four more hours. Natalie, Hannah, Mira and I all decided to stay in Weimar to have lunch and explore a bit. For lunch we got a Bratwurst, and several of us almost got 2, but instead we went and found something sweet to supplement our lunch. Natalie, Hannah, and Mira all got gelato, but since I didn’t have any lactate pills on me I decided to decline the gelato and instead got a pastry from a nearby bakery. Once we had eaten we perused the shops around Weimar for a bit, making our way back to the park. We sat in the park reading and resting for an hour in the sunshine before we had to meet back up with the rest of the people who stayed in Weimar to go back to Jena.

After we returned to Jena we had a short amount of free time before we had to meet back at the University to hear a speech by Lecia Brooks, who is an outreach director for the Southern Poverty Law Center in the U.S. as a part of America Day at the university. In her speech, Lecia talked about the history of the civil rights movement, which led into the role of Martin Luther King Junior in the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. and his presence in East Germany. I had heard about MLK’s involvement in the Civil Rights movement, but I had never heard that he went to East Germany while it was still under control by the GDR. He wasn’t supposed to do a speech in East Germany, and it was not advertised by the German Government, but when MLK showed up in East Germany he had an audience of thousands. He gave a speech that told the East Germans to keep faith and that together they could overcome their oppression. His original speech is quite beautiful and I encourage you to look it up because my synopsis doesn’t capture the power of his speech. Lecia herself was a wonderful speaker and I really enjoyed her lecture and was extremely interested in the work she is currently doing in the U.S. After her speech was over we went downstairs to see the exhibit for America Day and have refreshments while discussing the topic of the civil rights movement in the past and the current battles that need to be fought in society. Before we left for dinner, a group of us made a point to thank Lecia for her wonderful speech and we heard a bit more about her involvement in current events.

For dinner, Mira, Hannah, and I ended up going back to the same Asian food place and got the same meals to take back to the hostel. This was largely because we still needed to finish our laundry and it was already 9:00pm. We took the rest of our laundry to the laundromat/bar and washed all of our clothes, then pleaded with the bar owners to let us dry our laundry even though it would be later that they normally allowed. We must have smelled particularly bad or been pitiful enough because they allowed us to dry our laundry despite the late hour. Once we got back to the hostel again with our clean and dry(ish) laundry, we packed up what we could so we would have less to do in the morning when we would be heading back to Berlin.