Monday 2nd May: Arriving back in Nottingham!

I had to wake up early to get my plane out. I think I left the hostel at 6:10am. They had a free breakfast at this hostel and they are kind enough to prepare something for people if they are leaving too early to be able to have this breakfast. So, I got... a cheese sandwich. The most boring sandwich in existence. But it is better than nothing.

I waited at the airport for a while and that was fairly typical. Except that after checking in, I had to wait at an area by some screens to see which gate my plane would be leaving from. It said that passengers should not go past this point until they had seen which gate they need to go to. So I guessed that there wouldn't be any more indications after that point informing people of that. I was getting a bit nervous when, 15 minutes before the time when it was specified that boarding would be closed, there was still no gate number attached to my plane. Finally one appeared, also specifying the estimated time it would take to walk there: 20 minutes.

I also had to get through the metal detector. I had to take off my shoes which confused me. Later I realised that they have metal rivets for the laces to go through. But they have not set off any other airport machines. I finally made it through, and then went for a bit of a jog toward the place where the plane would be departing. I made it there fine. They were still letting people board. I had predicted that they couldn't stop people from boarding given that there must have been some problem which caused them to arrive later or something.

Plane ride was normal. I got a window seat. I was a little confused that the plane ride was only going to last for 20 minutes. Amsterdam is quite close to England. But, 20 minutes hardly leaves time to get into the air and then back down again, let alone the time in between. But Netherlands is +1 compared to England time. So it took 1 hour twenty minutes I guess.

There were lots of wind turbines in the ocean and in other places. I noticed that some parts in the water seemed to be getting quite shallow with sand buildup. I wonder if that is a deliberate attempt to claim more land, or if it's some kind of effect of water flow.

I wasn't sure if we were crossing ocean or the bay to the north east of Amsterdam (since we had to turn around a little bit which disoriented me). We hadn't seemed to have crossed much water before it was announced that we were over England now and would soon be coming up towards London. The channel seems to be really narrow. I think we started dropping altitude ready for landing as we went over London.

I think this photo is trying to observe that there are lots of freight ships around the bay near Amsterdam or somewhere. They are all bunched up waiting to get in. But you can't see it in the photo.

Still over Netherlands? I was starting to think that this might be the opening of the River Thames. I have consulted Google Earth and I'm fairly convinced that the pointy thing is called Foulness Island, which is just north of the mouth of the River Thames.

This is London. We got a really great view of it. I could see the london eye, Hyde Park, and all those other things.

We landed in England. It was good. Then I had to line up for a while to get admitted into the country. The guy asked the hard questions again "when are you leaving? Have you bought a ticket back yet?". "Leaving sometime in June or July. Haven't bought a ticket back, yet". He let me in. Yay. While waiting to get, I met a guy behind me who is also Australian. He's from... Adelaide. He studied at Adelaide uni, on North Terrace. He did some engineering thing and is now living in Ireland. He seems to be having a great time. He was a nice person.

I tried to change some money so that I could pay for the bus back. But the lady said there is a 5 pound commission fee. So I withdrew some sterlings from the cash machine. Then I bought a chocolate muffin from Gregg's. It is great to be back in an English speaking country. It gives me some understanding of what it would be like for international students who don't speak English as their first language. In a non-english speaking country, I found that it is sometimes easy to feel a little bit isolated, and because it is often impossible or very difficult to communicate with people, I've found that I might sometimes look a little bit rude. It makes me think quite differently toward people who might be in those situations, to have felt a similar thing in some sense.

It is good to be back in England. I can ask for a chocolate muffin without having to worry about the language. Despite some differences, the country feels really familiar and friendly. It is interesting to me that at the start of my journey, I found London to be a little scary and unfamiliar, but now the threshold has shifted a bit.

Then I waited at the bus station just outside the airport. It was cold outside. I'm back in England. While waiting, I listened to Fredrik Thordendal's amazing solo album again.

Then I caught the indigo bus back. England has changed a lot over the last month. It looks like spring. Everything is very green.

Then I got back to the university. That is my hall up in the distance. So close to home.

I picked up my key from the reception office and then made my way in. My suitcase of stuff was still in the cleaners closet where I had left it. That is good.

I tried to unpack some stuff. I put on some new clothes from my suitcase. I might have made some kind of attempt at a maths assignment that is due the next day or the day after that. Today is a public holiday. I think it is for the royal wedding that happened over the weekend. So there are no lessons today!

I had a meal in the hall for dinner. It was very strange to see everyone again and to be back in this place. It was also strange because everyone I know here is also an exchange student, so they have all had strange adventures as well. It was strange to hear how they had gone to some places close to where I was a week before me and that kind of thing.

I put these up on the third I think. These are some maps of places I've been. I made a really nice collection of maps I think. I like maps.

In the evening I went to drink some beer with Matthias, Fred, Charlotte, Paulo, Kristin, Mareike, Katrin, Marion, and some of Marion's friends from Austria. It was strange to be back in Nottingham again. It is also strange that has become normal to wake up in Amsterdam one morning and then be in Nottingham in the afternoon.

Sunday 1st May: Leaving Berlin, arriving in Amsterdam

I left Berlin. I arrived in Berlin through Shoenfeld airport (some kind of spelling) and am leaving via Tegel airport. I had a lazy start to the day. I could have run around and seen some things for a few hours, but I just felt like taking it easy.

I spent the morning talking with the guy from Portugal and the girls from Italy.

Then I caught some trains to Tegel airport. I got there and then had a comfortable time sitting around. Then I checked in and the guy told me that I had not paid for any checked luggage. I'm fairly certain that I did and I later checked online that I did pay the 7 euros for that. I had to pay 15 pounds extra for that. A bunch of other people had to pay as well. It didn't seem normal.

I didn't really take any photos this day.

At the airport I met an old guy who says that his brother lives in Australia coaching a soccer/football team. He advised me to be careful in Amsterdam. He lives in Rotterdam.

I got to Amsterdam. I couldn't figure out the train situation. So I turned on my computer and found that they have an hour of free internet. I got some directions about which trains to take by using that. I was supposed to go into Amsterdam Central and then take some train in some kind of direction and then get off at one of the stations. I got to Amsterdam Central but then I couldn't find where I was supposed to take the next train. I was in the regional part of the train station and there didn't seem to be any other section. Some signs were pointing toward somewhere, but I couldn't find where they were supposed to be directing. Then one sign was saying the name of the station where I was supposed to get off, pointing toward wherever that station was supposed to be. So I followed that. I got lost because the sign seems to just be a general "it's somewhere in that direction" and doesn't bother about giving you additional directions to make it the next 1.3km through twisting streets. But I asked someone and she told me roughly where to go.

I got to the hostel. It's a Christian hostel. I am not a christian, but the other hostels had reviews saying that it was a bit hard to sleep, whereas this hostel said that it was a good place to sleep. The people running the place seem nice. I am informed that I am not allowed to drink alcohol or consume drugs on the premises, but I can ingest nicotine, which is not a drug. I think what they mean is that some drugs which have been popularly termed as bad, are not allowed. I do not plan to do those things.

By the time I got to the hostel it was quite late. The sun was down. So I had a small walk around the place and then went to sleep. The town is quite strange. The hostel is right in the red light area. I have discovered why the hostels are all very expensive right now: it's the Queen's birthday celebrations in Netherlands. This is supposedly a well established reason to have a big party in Netherlands. It was quite busy when I was there.

When I got back to the hostel room I met some other people from my room. They seem nice. I asked them what they think of the place. One person said that he doesn't like it because he thinks that too many things are allowed here, and that there should be a good amount of things that are not allowed.

Saturday 30th: Sachsenhausen, Neuse Museum

[ pictures: https://picasaweb.google.com/110144623598348247797/20110430?authkey=Gv1sRgCIzWueef-Y-HZA#  ]

According to the photos I took (I'm writing this 20 days later), I took a few pictures of the room in the morning.

This is the eden room.

This is my last full day in Berlin. So I'm going to Sachsenhausen with some tour people.

I walked to the place. They are meeting up underneath the tower thing. I met the tour guide, then bought some food. Some bananas. Then we all went to the train station. Sachsenhausen, the concentration camp, is a little outside Berlin. So we're catching a train there.

Along the way I fell in with a guy from Nepal who is also on the tour. He's a teacher in Nepal. He's a nice guy. There are about 10-15 people on the tour, I think.

We got to the place, and then I bought a crossant and some kind of pastry thing with sugary things and jam.

The tour guide is a phd student who is specialising in the jewish holocaust and that kind of thing, so he was really great to lead the tour. He had a lot of information about everything. Also, the tour I went on is the only non-profit one. So that made my conscience feel good. The other tours don't give any money to the preservation of the place or anything like that. I think that is strange.

Walking through the town Sachsenhausen. The concentration camp is about 15 minutes walk from the train station. The tour guide says that the people who live here are for some reason not very nice people. A dog was barking at us, and the people with the dog said something in German. That's when the tour guide mentioned to me that observation. I asked him what they had said. Apparently they were praising their dog for being aggressive and barking at us. He also had other stories of some incidents. Complex situation. I imagine that a town next to a concentration camp isn't seen as a great place to live and therefore doesn't attract the best kind of people.

This is a building on the outside of the concentration camp. I think it is here that a lot of decisions were made affecting prisoners in all concentration camps, for example how much food people would get, etc. This was the main administrative place for concentration camps in general.

Right next to the concentration camp there is this facility for the training of riot police. Apparently this could be seen as distasteful. But the tour guide told us that the philosophy of the German government was to provide a new, more positive aspect of history to the location. They try to acknowledge the history and see what an abuse of power can lead to. All graduates of the place have to make some kind of study about that kind of thing and write some things about it.According to the tour guide, the riot police in Germany are really good at doing their job and avoiding violent clashes.

Place where the officers and others ate. They don't really have enough money to properly take care of these buildings. A while ago, the guy who designed the jewish monument that I saw two days earlier, made a proposal that the building would be burned to the ground, and then left, and that it would return to its natural state as a swamp or something like that... The people running this place didn't think that sounded too good. They already don't have very many original buildings remaining, so they don't want to lose more.

Place where the first warden of this place lived. Apparently he was a jolly fellow, specially chosen because he'd have to entertain visitors. His wife was a bit deranged, supposedly.

The soviets used the place after they took over. They built this thing and made some stained glass windows. The tour guide told us something interesting about this which is now forgotten to me.

Can see some of the perimeter that has been reconstructed. According to the tour guide, sometimes the guards would throw the hat of a prisoner into the bit of land immediately before the fence which was a no-go place, where you could be shot immediately for suspicion of escape attempt if you were to go there. Then they told the prisoner to retrieve it. I found it really strange to wonder how this behaviour has developed.

This concentration camp was designed to be the ideal model for all other concentration camps. This is the place, above the entrance, where they keep an eye on everything. Fanning out from here, along lines originating at this point, are placed long buildings where the prisoners live. So, from this point, you can see down the long sides of all the buildings and make sure nothing unusual is happening.

This is a roller for making the ground flat because apparently the ground got a bit shoddy regularly because the prisoners had to all come out and stand around here each morning to record who is still alive and other stuff. So, according to the tour guide, they would get a few prisoners to pull this roller along every so often. I think the tour guide said that they were feeding these people 300 calories per day, and so they really didn't have enough energy to pull this through slippery mud. If one fell while pulling it, supposedly the others were not allowed to help him up, and he either managed to get himself up again, or got crushed. I felt a bit sick hearing this.

Then we went to the place where prisoners are put into more intense confinement. Joseph Stalin's son was brought here. Hitler was happy that maybe a trade could be made for some of Hitler's friends who had been caught by the Soviets. But Stalin wasn't very fond of his son. I think his son was killed here somewhere.

They had some gruesome torture techniques here. They tied the hands behind the back of a prisoner, then hung them up from their hands. They could have strength to hold themself for a while, but eventually they ran out, and they fell, and their arms would bend the incorrect way, which would then lead to their sockets being pulled in some kind of way, and possibly the end result being that their weight is held entirely by the flesh only, after the sockets are no longer functioning. Sounds unpleasant.

One of the buildings kind of still exists. This one was recreated by the soviets I think. But the materials used are all authentic from various buildings around the place. It gives an idea of what the living places were like for the people. Apparently they were very crowded.

This is some kind of monument constructed by the soviets. When they took over, they were quite fearful, because the Germans had tried to create a kind of militia army out of the young boys not old enough to fight in the main army. There was an idea that if Germany was ruined, then these young people would go on fighting and make it difficult to completely end it. So the Soviets took the people of this demographic and shut them in this concentration camp indefinitely.

I think this might have been a pit for a firing squad. I forget what else the tour guide said.

Here is a place where they did some gassing. They didn't do very much of it here, relatively, because, I think this concentration camp was more of a place where they sent people to be processed before being sent on to somewhere else. However I think it was here that they did quite a bit of testing and developing of the techniques that they would later use. The Soviets tried to blow it up for some reason, I think, which is why the ground is a bit sunken. The germans did some mass killings here using a technique where they pretended to be measuring the height of the patient, but where there was actually a gun behind the measuring stick on the wall. The walls in those rooms are doubled to dampen the sound.

Some things to burn the bodies. It wasn't sure where all the ash was deposited. They later did some soil samples and found that it is probably variously dispersed in the ground outside this building where we were walking.

When the Americans came, they found the prisoners who were abandoned due to the bad shape they were in (some others were made to march away, to try and hide the evidence or something). The Americans saw that they were starved, so they were keen to give them food. The starving people ate lots. But apparently people who have been starved should not be allowed to eat so much straight away because their stomaches have changed. So, those prisoners died and were buried at this point.

We also heard that in this concentration camp, there was a plot to flood the British currency with counterfeits to devalue their currency. They had some skilled jewish people here working on that. Apparently there is a movie made about this. But the people who run this facility don't want to talk much about it, I was told, because they don't want to make it seem that that was a main part of what went on here, since most prisoners were doing other stuff.

The British were able to discover which coins were counterfeit because the counterfeits were perfect, whereas in the British facility for producing their currency, they had a machine which was not quite calibrated properly which caused some kind of characteristic slight wobble defect.

Then we walked back to the train station.

On the train back I talked a little more with the guy from Nepal. He was planning to go to the Neuse Museum and I was planning to go there as well, so he proposed we go there together.

The Neuse Museum. They've got really cool landscaping around here I think.

The Neuse Museum has a huge amount of Egyptian stuff. With the ticket you get a free audio guide in the form of headphones and an electronic thing to enter the track specified by any given exhibit. At this point I realised that the guy from Nepal was a bit annoying. He somehow caused his device to stop functioning and then was bugging me about it in a very confusing way. I suggested he swap it for a new one and then showed him how it works. I think he might have wanted me to walk around with him, but I really like these audio guide things and I like listening to all of them because they're quite interesting. I think he was getting frustrated, and then I lost where he was because he went a few rooms ahead of me.

This thing is measuring vibrations in the ground! Most rooms had one of these.

This guy made realistic fake eyes.

Nefertiti and Akhenaten. In the room next to this is Nefertit's 'bust'. But you can't take pictures of that. It's quite good. I had Philip Glass's 'Akhenaten' opera in my head while looking at this stuff. It's a really good one.

One of those crazy hats worn by religious people of the stone age or something like that, in Europe.

Then I think I went home and cooked some pasta. It was a good day. Seeing Sachenhausen was really sad and other things. The Neuse Museum was amazing.

Tomorrow I am leaving Berlin. I have thought this city looks really nice.

I met a nice guy from Portugal while here. I think I mentioned him before. He was born in Germany but then moved to Portugal. He is involved in media. He filmed a documentary recently. He's trying to make some new contacts in Germany because the employment situation is terrible in Portugal.

I also met a girl from Australia. I think I might have scared her off on our first meeting though, because, the first time I saw her was when she came into the room at 2am and turned all the lights on in the room so that she could put her bed together even though there are lamps on the sides of all the beds. At that time I gave her a bit of a look of "what is the meaning of this disturbance?" She's living in London because she has a British passport. I asked her what she does there for work and she said "a bit of this, a bit of that..."