Berlin, Monday (Day 4)

Monday we got up early again as a group but it wasn't too bad. We put all of our stuff in the hostel's luggage room and left it there for the day. Then we went to see the Bauhaus museum! It was awesome to see where the entire philosophy of the College of Design has come from. It was incredible to realize what great minds had come out of the Bauhaus and its school of thinking. Everyone from Josef and Anni Albers to Mies Van der Rohe and Wassily Kandinsky! Even some of their class projects were featured as exhibits and it was pretty much exactly what I have done in some classes. The idea that my thinking about design is so shaped by what these people came up with is pretty intimidating, actually.

We took the bus to Kaiser Wilhelm's church. It got bombed really badly in the 1940s, and instead of rebuilding it, they built a new church around it and also maintained the ruins of the old. We didn't get to go inside because they were cleaning it, but it was beautiful even from the outside. Then about 7 of us went on with Fernando and headed to a late lunch and a bookstore. Lunch was yummy, and the bookstore was awesome. I found a book that I'm going to try to buy used on Amazon or something about wartime propaganda being printed on clothing and worn as scarves and even used as advertisements. One of the examples was the army slogan "Keep It Under Your Hat," as in, don't run around talking about war tactics to everyone. Well, Stetson took the phrase and used it in their advertisement - "Keep It Under Your Stetson." They also had kimonos printed with anti-American slogans, and headscarves for American women working in factories with little patriotic phrases printed on them.

The train back was pretty long but not quite as long as the one there. I mostly just napped and then tried to get caught up on my journal. We did one of those stories where everyone writes a line and then folds it over so you can only see the line one before you. That was fun. Then John and I played Travel Scrabble, but we didn't keep score. When we got back to our hostel, it had been overrun with highschoolers from Sweden. Some of the guys stayed out in the lounge area to talk to them, I think because they were just interested in seeing some girls they hadn't been around constantly for 2 months straight. Jeremy cut my hair which is a lot more comfortable now, and I had popcorn for dinner.