26 Juli-- Day 32

Today we went to an air raid bunker with the class, after class ended. Pretty snazzy- it’s in the middle of the Kurfurstendamn—the huge street with lots of expensive stores. (think 5^th ave) However, you walk into this shopping mall, and then there’s an exhibit about Berlin’s history (not that we haven’t heard enough about it yet). Then you go down, right where there’s a parking garage entrance, into an underground bunker. Very eerie. There were only these faint blue lights, because they couldn’t used the actual lights- it would have been too dark to lead a tour. The scary part of it is that they place is still on standby- if they needed to, they could still shove 3592 people in there.

Afterweards, me and MC went to go finish our tour of Pankow. This half of the tour was not nearly as exciting, unfortunately...we didn't meet any cute little old ladies, or eat excellent bread.

There's a lot of pregnant ladies in pankow.

The house of the first DDR President

A super duper cute puppy

However, we did get to visit Schloss Schönhausen. It used to be a summer palace for Prussian nobility... Then when Fredrich the Great realized how much he despised his wife, he sent her there for summers and lived somewhere else. In the end, his wife, Queen Elisabeth Christine, lived there full time, all alone. Anyway, then when the Nazis had power, they used it as a place to store "degenerate" art- ones that had messages that didn't quite fit with the Nazi belief. Afterwards, the DDR used that as the guest house for visiting important people (like Castro, Arafat, Gorbachev) Now, it's a museum.