Berlin!

       berlin is awesome. yesterday was a day full of firsts for me. we woke up pretty early and went to the berlin medical history museum where we saw tons of specimens and learned about the awful medical practices that existed before anesthesia. left there feeling a little sick and we all went to the anatomy building of the university hospital and medical school. Here we went into one of the cadaver rooms and our guide had 2 corpses in the room both wrapped in white cloth. you could see their entire shape beneath, like mummies, and it was kind of creepy. she pulled it off of the female, who had been a pretty old lady who died in 2007!!!! her skin was pretty hard and pale (we got to touch it with gloves on) and then she pulled back the lady's whole breast and stomach (pre-cut) and taught us about all the organs while we looked at and identified the lungs, heart, diaphram, liver, small and large intestines, and ovaries. it was actually amazing, and it was easy to forget that we were looking into the real body of a real human. which is kind of scary.   we also got to feel human bones that had been soaked in acid to dissolve all the organic substances, which made them bendy!, really bizarre.

after this extremely cool visit, a few of us went to a nice italian restaurant for lunch, and it was so delicious and really cheap. and i think my noodles were made in the restaurant. I had them with a creamy mushroom sauce. then four of us (in our 5 hours of free time) went to the Ritter sport chocolate flagship store and spent over an hour there and might have bought quite a lot of chocolate. They have at least 30 flavors/varieties of chocolate. it was insanely awesome.

then we ran over to the East side Gallery of the berlin wall, where it has been painted on a lot, and looked at all of the art. The wall is so cool to actually see. next we went to a blind bar for dinner with the rest of the group, and it was actually pitch black. there was no way we could see a thing and we all had to get in a line and put our hands on the shoulders of the person in front of us to be led blindly to our table. the servers are also blind. don't know how they do it. we couldn't tell what we were eating so we all had to eat with our hands and fingers. with the fork it was too hard to tell where we were on the plate. we had  tofu, red peppers, and potatoes and for dessert vodka sorbet, a coffee mousse, and mango jam or something, which i discovered by accidentally putting my hand right into it after he set it down in front of me. it all made me kind of claustrophobic, but we all felt that way so we just talked a lot and tried to eat slowly so as to have something to do. (we didn't know what we would be served ahead of time)

finally after dinner we all (22 of us) went out together and spent a long while walking down this street of bars that had a prostitute every 10 feet. I have never seen one and it was totally surreal and sad and disgusting all at once, and it made us all really curious. they all had thigh high boots, either black or white "leather" that were also platform, then hose and a super short tight skirt, either black or hot pink, and then a leather jacket on unzipped in a way that maximized cleavage exposure. plus the leather jackets were like corsets around their stomachs and up to the bottom of their chests, and then the whole jacket poofed out above it. really strange, so it made their torsos look tiny and their boobs huge. then they were coated in makeup and all wore fanny packs. and they were all tall with very long skinny legs. and we saw probably close to 50 of them. never ending. so extremely eventful day.

and this afternoon lizzy and i said goodbye to the tour group as they headed back to denmark and we went and found the house of my family's family friend monika, and the flat is gorgeous! i am going to take pictures its so beautiful--and old fashioned. we hung out with monika for a while and then took off for this huge open area in berlin where the soccer game between  germany and turkey was going to be shown on a huge screen. The crowds were wild and huge, and we were afraid of getting trampled on the way in because they had to sets of fences to regulate the flow of people and tons of police as well. it was so cool, and most of our crowd was actually turkish immigrants. It was a very cultural experience, and we had a great time. tomorrow we are hoping to go to the Zoo which has more species than any other zoo in the world (and was the first zoo in europe).