School vs Vacation — On the Go with Hailey Jo

Guten tag everyone! It has been a really busy week for me, but I've had a lot of fun. Classes started last week and have kept me busy. Then this weekend, I decided to jet off to Berlin with my roommate. Lots to catch up on.

My school in Rome is located in a place called Palazzo Taverna, a big, beautiful 15th century building in the middle of Campo Marzio. I love it there, but its difficult to concentrate during the classes. All of the rooms are very unique looking and I usually find myself studying the ceiling paintings over the class lecture.

One of the main reasons of why I wanted to study abroad in Europe was the chance to travel. Rome is a great city, but I couldn't wait to leave it. It's a very exciting thought, that so many different countries, different cultures, are just a short plane ride away. And traveling here is a lot cheaper than traveling back in the States. So obviously I jumped at the chance to go to Berlin for four days.

Berlin was a lot of things, but the first thing I noticed was how cold it was. It actually snowed a few times while we were there. I actually had to wear my coat and it made me miss the 50-60 degree weather in Italy. We were very unprepared for this trip. We had a hotel, but nothing really planned for the weekend. That was one of the fun parts though, the thought that we could do whatever we wanted to in Berlin.

We were in front of the Brandenburg Gate (which was described by our hotel as the "Eiffel Tower of Berlin"), doing the tourist thing and taking selfies, when a guide from Sandemans New Europe Tours came over to us. This guide saved us, she told us all about the free three-hour walking tour that would take us to some of the best sites in Berlin. That tour led to two other Sandeman tours. I hadn't heard of this company before, but Sandemans are in multiple cities across Europe. They usually give a free tour, and then also offer other tours with multilingual guides. For two unprepared American tourists, this was a gift.

The three hour walking tour was fun. I'm one of those nerdy travelers that enjoys museums and learning random historical facts about places. Berlin was full of history, it almost made us forget about how cold it was outside. We saw the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as the Holocaust memorial. It was a haunting piece of art, one that I highly recommend if you ever find yourself in Berlin. We also saw remains of the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie and the memorial at Bebelplatz where 20,000 books were burned by the nazis. Our tour guide took us to some other places that are more unknown, like the site where Hitler's bunker was or the old nazi Air Force base. The tour helped us get to know Berlin and learn what we wanted to see while we were there.

We did two other tours with Sandeman after this. The first was a tour of Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp outside of Berlin. Unsurprisingly, it was an extremely sad tour. Some things don't seem real until they're right in your face. Sachsenhausen has a fascinating, but depressing history and it was weird to be both interested and emotional at the same time. Still, I think we're glad that we went. Seeing something as horrible as a concentration camp reminded us how important it is to learn from history. The second tour with Sandemans was a pub crawl; we felt like we deserved to have a fun night after everything. It was a good trip and I would enjoy going back to Germany one day.