Doing a Lot, in a Little Bit of Time

This is one of the few churches we saw on our class visit to Potsdam (which is about 30 min outside of the state of Berlin).

An inside view of the church seen in the photo before this.

This area of the Berlin wall shows exactly what it looked like back in the late 1900′s before the construction of Berlin Wall in 1989! The sand strip, located in the middle, shows noman’s land (notice the watchtower in the top left corner). East Berlin is in the background and the West is in the foreground.

A photo of my friend Dainen on our class trip to check out the Berlin Wall. Here you can see metal rods sticking out of the ground as well as the concrete wall (on the left). The rods are all that are left of the wall on that side.

This giant mass of concrete (around 31 million pounds – 12,000 tons) is called the Schwerbelastungskörper – which translates to the “hard-bearing body” or “hard/stressful body.” It was a structure built by the Nazis to test the ground and see if it was able to hold enough weight without sinking (so that they could later build their massive world empire headquarters [if they had won the war] called ‘Welthauptstadt’ ~ World Capital). This specific spot would have been home to a large arch called the Triumphbogen.

A buddy of mine (right), Aaron, and myself (left) in front of the Schwerbelastungskörper. Check out the explanation above.

A picture of me in front of the Sanssouci castle. This castle was home to Frederick II the great/big (Friedrich der Große). This place was huge and several awesome different areas. It was a shame that it rained the entire trip!

This is a very elegant and ‘gold’ looking room in the Sanssouci.

This is a picture of Frederick II green chair. It was in this chair that he died at the age of 74.

Very cool Windmill outside of the Sanssouci, but still on castle grounds.

A Union soccer game (Berlin team in Bundesliga 2) against SC Paderborn. It was a tie 1-1 but was the best soccer game I’ve been to thus far (great atmosphere and very emotional fans).

Outside the Olympia-Stadion on my way to see Hertha Berlin play. They lost 3-0 to Hannover 96, but it was awesome to be in such a large stadium and experience some European Fußball!

A Panoramic view inside the Olympia-Stadion!