Hi again! So, to pick up where I left off yesterday...

Outside of the museum I encountered an "American Soldier" who convinced me that posing with him for pictures was worth 1 Euro. See the guy under the flag with the camera? He's a reporter from somewhere Scandinavian ... I think perhaps Norway? So, if any of you are reading Norwegian newspapers, watch out for a story about Checkpoint Charlie, and let me know if my picture is in it!

After that I went retrieved my cell phone from the hotel and contacted Alex. Then I went for a walk. I found a nice park, a river, and some giant flowers. The flowers made me think about the ones we found on the bike trip last summer ... I think those ones were niftier. But these may have been bigger.

After that I met back up with Alex and we went to the DB tower for a dinner event. I had a day pass on the subway, but Alex and Johannes (another MIT student working for DB who we happened to meet up with on the elevator in the hotel) didn't, so we were going to walk. But then some people in a car heard us discussing it and gifted us their pair of day passes, which they were apparently through with. I love it when people are awesome like that! So, we rode to the tower. On the way we encountered yet another MIT student who happens to work in Germany. Crazy coincidences! Anyways, the dinner was excellent, and the food was absolutely delicous. There were DB employees from various areas, Sigrid Berka (MIT MISTI-Germany Coordinator), Sam Mauer (friend and MISTI reporter), and the international interns. 15 interns attended the event, 6 of them from MIT! Here we are:

Left to right: Me, Alex, Johannes, Lucy, Jingwen, and Hiba.

After the dinner wound up, many of us headed out to a bar at Potzdamer Platz together -- including our hosts! Workplaces in Germany seem much more personal than I would expect, because everyone socializes outside of work.

The next day we had a case study, which was a lot of fun. The topic was "DB goes to China." We were divided into 6 groups, and at the end we were judged on presentations. Somehow, despite an amusing set of occurances, our group took 3rd place, earning each of us a DB memory stick! After the final wrap-up, Alex, Lucy, and I headed off to The Arkaden by Potzdamer Platz for some food. Here are our burger and lasagna...

... ice cream! A closer view of the hamburger:

This place is so neat... you can order all sorts of food, and it comes to you composed entirely of ice cream. The burger, for instance, is chocolate ice cream with small bits of chocolate for texture, plus raspberry sauce. It was sooo yummy! And after that we went out to the IMAX to see the 5th Harry Potter movie in 3D! It's apparently exclusively in Germany. We give it 3 thumbs up! Oh, and look what chair I was sitting in!

After that Lucy was nice enough to let me go over to her place and sleep on the couch, which was surprisingly comfy! She is in a 6-bedroom student apartment. Jingwen also lives there, although she's about to be gone for 2 weeks on a Chinese business trip. In the morning we had some toast:

Lucy and Alex's group won first place in the competition on Friday, and they each won a DB toaster! It's so neat!

Saturday's weather was beautiful. Lucy, Jingwen, and I headed out to Potsdam, which is South-West of Berlin and has lots of pretty palaces. We got a day pass for the Sans Souci Park and spent several hours walking around and taking tours. Here is our first view of Sans Souci:

This Encoded Dinner Invitation from Frederick the Great makes me so happy!

I guess it should be clarified that it's a dinner invitation in French. I'll explain, although the niftiness might be a little bit nullified by long and awkward explanation. But here goes. The proper way to read it is: "à under p; à; 100 under 6," or, In French: "à sous p à cent sous six" This sounds a lot like "à souper à sans souci," which is of course French for "to supper at Sans Souci."

Voltaires's response to this invitation was "J a," or "J gros a petit," which sounds like French for "[I have] a large appetite." Isn't that great?!!

Here I am in front of part of Sans Souci. Sans Souci is, incidentally, French for "without a care."

And here we all are, on the terraces behind Sans Souci.

(Left to right: Lucy, Jingwen, me.)

There are miles of beautiful gardens, and a guest castle, and a Chinese house, and fountains, and Roman baths, and all sorts of things around. In a couple of castles, we had to wear slippers so as to protect the floors:

(This isn't us, it's just some random people walking by in their slippers as we were resting on a couch.)

What do you think of this leaf:

(I thought it was interesting. I'm not sure whether or not it will be obvious to y'all why.)

I'm almost back to Kassel now, so I will work on writing about Sunday's adventures later. (I have been writing on the train ride) And then I'll worry about finding an internet connection so that you can actually see stuff.)

I'm having a great time in Berlin! Once I got in to the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) on Thursday, I figured out how to buy a 3-day subway/bus pass and got myself to the hotel. My hotel (an Ibis again, they're great!) was right in the center of everything! Alex arrived at the hotel shortly after I did, and we went out to the Museum at Checkpoint Charlie. The house stands just inside the American sector, and conspirators would watch furtively out its windows to see if their friends made it successfully past the checkpoint and into West Germany. The museum documents many innovative escape methods, some of which even led to patents later! Several men smuggled their East German fiancées out in suitcases or speakers. Two families built a hot air balloon together and successfully escaped. Another family improvised a zipline. One girl hid herself in a large radio, and another hid in a pair of kayaks. Some people built a secret compartment in a welding machine. There were also groups of University students who delivered Swiss passports to East Germans for a while, and coached them on how to act and dress so that they could use the passports successfully. The museum also had a lot of related art, a section on world religions, and of course a gift shop (where you can buy pieces of the Wall, among other things). When I reached this point, I realized that I hadn't seen Alex for quite a while. And I had given her my map.

Outside I encountered a smooth-talking paid actor

[note: at this point I got tired and went to sleep. See next day's entry above.]

I still don't have the majority of my pictures from Paris, because they're on Jen's computer. But we're going to use Devin's Photobucket account to transfer them. Jen is this amazing MIT student who is doing cancer research in Paris! She let Devin and me put cots in her room last weekend when we were visiting Paris. It was actually really funny, because she was at work when we arrived on Friday, but left us a note. Then we went out to The Louvre, leaving her a note. Then when we came back there was another note, which said that she was at a party, and since it was far away, she was going to stay the night with another friend. And then of course we were off to the Bastille Day parade and a busy day before she returned in the morning... Anyways, we finally actually met for 15 min on Sunday morning, but only for a few minutes as we were waking up and she was heading out to Disneyland Paris! It was kindof crazy that we lived in her room and used her computer (yeah, I told you she was great!!) for 2 days and barely saw her! Anyways, I put my pictures from Friday and Saturday on her computer so that I could have room on my camera for Sunday's pictures. As soon as I have them I'll post some.

Oh... this story doesn't have associated pictures, so I can tell it! So, it was late Saturday night... in the neighborhood of 1am. Paris's subway system actually shuts down around that time, so Devin and I had just taken one of the last trains back in the direction of Jen's place. We were waiting at a bus stop to cover the rest of the distance. So, I was sitting at the bus stop, next to a group of people talking happily, and Devin was standing a bit farther away, outside of the actual bus stop. A smaller group of people arrives, and they seem to know the group that I'm sitting next to. So, this one guy goes down the line, shaking hands and kissing cheeks. When he comes to me, it's clear that he isn't sure whether or not he's supposed to recognize me. Keep in mind that I'm working pretty much entirely off body language, because I know about 10 words of French. Also, I'm exhausted. So, I can't think of anything helpful to say. He decides that I'm with them and kisses me on both cheeks! And then conversation ensues. I can follow some French, since I know Spanish. But speaking it is something else. Anyways, about 10 minutes later the guy asks me where I'm going and I tell him and he gets confused and at this point its cleared up that I'm not in the group. But then it turns out that we're going the same way, and he can actually speak passable English because he spent some time studying industrial chemistry in Arizona. So, we talked for a while on the bus. It was nice.

This week at work was really short -- only 3 days! Well, 3 days of real work. Now today, Thursday, I'm off to Berlin for a conference. I'm writing this from a cabin in an ICE train :D All Die Bahn requires of me today is to get myself to Berlin and go to a welcome dinner! And then tomorrow there are supposed to be some sort of meeting and/or talks and/or group activities with all the other American students doing Praktikums (~internships) at DB this summer. They're putting us up in a hotel tonight, and then I think I'll try to find a hostel or something for the next couple of nights and explore Berlin!

In other news, I'm really proud of myself for getting to the gym 3 days a week every week so far, including this week, when I was only in Kassel for 3 days! With that, and also biking to and from work and the store and whatnot, I'm starting to feel so much healthier than during the school year!

Also, yesterday I met up with Jasemin from the dance class, her sister, and her sister's friend. We ate at Baguettski's (sp?) and then went to the movie theater. Actually, we went back and forth between 2 movie theaters, trying to find a showing of Harry Potter with English subtitles. But they didn't have them yesterday night, so we're going to go back on Tuesday, which is cheaper anyways. And then Jasemin and I went shopping a little bit, because she's going on vacation to Turkey soon and needed some stuff. And I finally found myself a german-style vest, and a couple of shirts. The vests are really popular here! It was a fun and relaxing evening :)

My laptop's about out of battery now, but I'll try to post this from the hotel in Berlin. I hear there's wireless! Take care :)

Hi! Wow, I had an amazing weekend in Paris! Most of my pictures are in limbo right now, so this will be a short post, just enough to assure you that I didn't die or anything. First, here's photographic proof that I drove a train last week!:

Thanks to Walter for taking the picture! Early Friday morning I caught a series of trains to Paris, home of the Eiffel Tower:

(picture from an advertisement in the subway station)

What is actually looks like is this:

It had actually been overcast earlier, and cleared up just as we were about to ascend! We chose to ascend by super-awesome-tower-car (or whatever they call it), which one can do from the North and East legs of the tower. You can only use the steps to go as far as the second of three platforms. And the view from the top is as follows:

That's the Seine River. Paris looks really huge from the top of the Tower, but it actually doesn't seem that crowded when you are in the streets, even when they're packed with people, as they were on Bastille Day (Saturday). I think the streets are wider or something. Or maybe it's just that there are a greater density of trees and a lesser density of skyskrapers, generally, than in places like New York. And, just to prove that I was there:

Ok. That's all for now!