If you are considering a study abroad program with the University of Florida, may I recommend one of the programs in Paris? You’ll get your money’s worth, and those courses are much more suitable to non-degree/non-major students such as myself.

Reichstag:

Brandenburg Gate:

Pergamon Museum:

Hauptbanhof:

After this adventure, the group visited the dealership home of Mercedes, and then we did a trip to to the main Zoo. I always check out zoos for the parrots, and the ones at the Berlin Zoo were not in great shape. Parrots can become easily stressed in captivity, and several of the macaws we saw had started self-mutilating behavior – feather plucking. Once a parrot starts to do this, it is nearly impossible to get them to stop, even if the bird’s environment drastically improves or it is freed into the wild. I hope that these birds were taken in with this problem already present, rather than it being caused by the zoo environment. Many zoos will take in illegally captured birds or birds that owners no longer want to keep. There are also many charities who do this (I donate to 4 of these in the US and one based int he UK) and who work to stop the smuggling of these birds from countries within South America and Africa, among others. It is really a sad story – the birds usually are drugged and stuffed into carboard tubes to try to get them through customs – and usually customs officers are bribed if the birds are discovered.

Seattle, San Francisco and New York all have wild parrots populations from abandoned or escaped birds – surprisingly, many of these populations are doing well. I hope to document the Seattle parrots this summer.

As you can tell, I could easily do a story on the Berlin parrots and their caretakers.

The hope was that I’d expand my photogrpahy, or at least to start trying to think differently I actually dislike shooting many styles of people photos, so I don’t do it often. I hoped to learn about photojournalism here and try shooting something different than what I normally do. So, is it working?

I’ll probably have to answer that in another week. Yesterday I visited Cupcake, Berlin’s first cupcake shop, and did my photos and audio for our final project. I was probably more excited about the cupcakes than the project! Seattle has at least 3-4 cupcake shops, and it is good to see one pop up in Berlin – and the cupcakes themselves are delicious. The owners, Dawn and Daniel, sure have a great little shop going on – and I plan to go back and get some more cupcakes before I leave.

I also visited Spreepark, which is a partially abandoned amusement park – lots of old rusted rides sitting in a forest. I even found some dinosaurs. I’ll share some photos once I get through processing them.

Now I really want to focus on seeing Berlin.

Here is one CNN news story about the event.

After lunch and a quick visit through KaDeWe, a big department store that I would liken to Harrod’s in London, we visited the Allied Museum (Alliierten Museum), which is located at the center of where the United States occupation sector was in Berlin. If anything, this visit helped remind me how history is as much about past events much as it is really about those who write it. There are a few references to the “good” side (aka, the Allies) winning in the end, “like a fairy tale” (web site) and I can imagine that from a different perspective the hardship that these events brought may not have been something that would be called a win. Our tour guide mentioned yesterday that there are a few people  who may feel that the communist-style of government of the past was just poorly executed, but not a bad idea – although this isn’t an opinion that I have ever heard expressed in Berlin, so don’t take this as fact. . I’m sure this topic could be argued around the world about various governments.

I’ll share a few more pictures, but hope to have more tomorrow as there will be a bit of free time for exploration. There will be a group outing tomorrow night to see a play, and then a walk through another former squatter or squatter-style area.

Here are a few other shots from around Berlin:

Our starting point was Hackescher Markt, then a visit to Museum Island. One thing about Berlin – everything seems to be under construction/renovation, and it sounds like that is fairly normal for this city. Cranes stretch across the skyline, scaffolding hides the buildings from our cameras, and workers can be found around every corner. The photo shows one of the museums surrounded by cranes working on various projects in that area.

 One of the more interesting stops along Unter den Linden was Neue Wache, the “new guard house”. I only processed a few pictures I have from here, but will get the rest up eventually. The building has been in existence for quite a few years – Wikipedia dates it to 1816, and the meaning of the building has also changed over time – it was first dedicated to “Prussia’s role in the Napoleonic Wars (known in Germany as the Wars of Liberation). It shows Nike, the goddess of victory, deciding a battle.” (Wikipedia) Apparently this was an actual guard house until 1918, and after that the building was redesigned to commemorate war casualties. It was rededicated in the 1990′s as the “Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny.” The statue was apparently replaced with one of a mother and her dead son. Visually, this spot is very striking due to the simplicity of the building, the open space surrounding the statue, and the hole in the ceeling that lets light in.

One of the things I must thank my Seattle flickr friends for is getting me used to shooting in a fairly large group. This class is smaller than the vast majority of flickr outings, and people are extremely competitive here about their photos. This ends up making folks cranky when they see others shooting the same thing. Really, everyone should just relax and have fun – we will all take the same photos because we are all tourists, and those first shots we fire without much thought are not nearly as unique as we might wish they are. It should be our challenge to take the photos to the next level and get something more original. It makes me a bit homesick for the Seattle Flickrites because of the unbelievable willingness to share and teach others on our outings, and to challenge each other to find that next level.

Aaaanyway, that aside, our walking tour was good for the detail. I was interested in whether or not some of the objects at the various museums on Museum Island were being demanded back by their home countries (this is a common story at lots of famous museums), and our guide hadn’t heard of that, but had heard of the Germans requesting items back that are in Russian museums.