Hamburg: Rathaus -- City Hall

Jack Hadley and Kyle Shropshire at Hamburg Central Station

Lübeck: Lunch at the historic Kartoffelkeller

German Schools by Ali Gove

During our stay in Bargteheide we had the opportunity to go to school at the Kapernikus Gymnasium with our partner students. For the six days we visited the school we followed our students to their classes, attempted to understand their teachers, and sometimes participated.

The schedule at the Kapernikus Gymnasium is very different than our schedule which only changes once a year. Students at the Gymnasium take more classes at once, for shorter periods, and have them only a few times a week, not every day. These classes included Latin, French, English, biology, chemistry, geography, history, sport, music, art and more. Students also have the chance to practice their foreign languages by taking a major subject, like geography, in that language.

Food seemed to be everywhere in the school. Bread was sold in the morning in the school and everyone had a snack, which they had brought from home, which looked more like a lunch. Actual school lunch is prepared by volunteering mothers and sold at a similar price to our school lunches, although they were far tastier.

Aside from the academics, discipline and rules at the Gymnasium were also very different. The most obvious to us was the ability to leave the school during a break or a free period. Students use this freedom to walk outside during their breaks and visit the bakery during the longer periods. Other than the ability to leave, discipline for minor acts, like tardiness were also different. When a student comes in late (even 20 minutes late) teachers merely tap their watches to let the students know that they are late. In our school, unexcused tardiness is punished by serving a detention, something that does not exist in the Gymnasium. Compared to the Kapernikus Gymnasium, Beverly High School seems like a prison because of its strict policies.

Weltmeisterschaft by John Gallagher

Soccer of Fußball as it's called in German, is a sport that grips Germany like no other. in America we have other popular sports such as baseball, basketball, and American football so soccer isn't as popular as it is in the rest of the World. We left America for Germany in June and we were there through July 8th, which meant that the World Cup was taking place. I didn't anticipate the excitement that consumes the country until I experienced it for myself. In Germany they have a way to watch soccer called public viewing. Public viewing is when thousands of soccer fans go to either a stadium or a field and watch the soccer game on a giant screen together.
Our first public viewing experience was in Hamburg for the match between Germany and England. This was extremely exciting because Germany has a long soccer rivalry with England, and everyone knew this was a huge match. We were standing in a massive crowd, with fans blasting vuvuzelas, and many German flags flying. What made it even better was the fact that Germany dominated England and won four to one. It was a really neat experience to get to witness first hand the excitement that soccer brings to Europeans and everyone else in the world. The sport of soccer during the World Cup or Weltmeisterschaft unites the citizens of Germany like nothing else. It was great that we got to experience the excitement and intensity of European soccer.

Of Pianos and Prostitutes - by Nate Howard

Of Pianos and Prostitutes – The Steinway-Fabrik and Downtown Hamburg

by Nate Howard

On Tuesday the 22^nd of June, not long after we had become acquainted with our host families in Bargteheide, we took a day long trip into Hamburg to tour the Steinway piano factory and, afterwards, downtown Hamburg. After a comfortable ride into the city and a comparatively harrowing experience riding in the far-too-overcrowded city bus that would transport us to the Steinway factory, we arrived at our destination. Many of our host students traveled with us, thankful to have an excuse not to go to school. Upon arriving at the factory, we were allowed into the showroom and quickly dispersed as everybody ran to occupy one of the many pianos in the room. Needless to say, the entire showroom was quickly filled with the slightly discordant sounds of those who knew how to play and those who were trying their best. After five or ten symphonic minutes the group was herded out of the showroom and into the factory. The tour of the factory was interesting, filled with loud machinery, half finished pianos, and the asphyxiating scent of varnish, but after nearly two hours of touring the students were ready to head out. Back in the showroom we were presented with beverages to replenish our dwindling energy, and shortly moved on to the second part of our excursion.

What we experienced next couldn’t have been more different from our privileged, civilized tour of the Steinway factory. Traveling into central Hamburg, the students split up into groups and went off to see different parts of the city. I happened to travel with my group to the Reeperbahn, more affectionately known as Hamburg’s red light district. What at first was shock at the seediness of the area quickly turned into humor at the comical nature of it all. The Reeperbahn is a street in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district lined with various “entertainment clubs” and erotica shops, and whose sidewalks come alive with women of the night after sunset (or, sometimes, before dinner). After walking around the Reeperbahn, viewing various places where the fledgling Beatles played, commenting on the ironic location of an old church, and generally scoffing at the sexual environment, we traveled back to the train station and headed home to take a rest. It was, all in all, a very interesting, while somewhat morally lopsided, day.

Bargteheide

Meeting the mayor at the Bargteheide Rathaus.

Entrance to our partner school, Kopernikus Gymnasium Bargteheide.

WM: Fußballweltmeisterschaft

Daytime or nighttime, indoors and out, there was always Fußball to watch and talk about.

Hamburg: Touring the Hamburg harbor

Ahrensburg: Visiting the local castle

July 8, 2010: Saying goodbye at Hamburg-Fuhsbüttel Airport

Hamburg: The Steinway Factory Showroom

Hamburg: Kultur in der Großstadt

Kunsthalle: Touring the city art museum with an American docent

Schauspielhaus: Hamburg's oldest theater, where we saw Brecht/Weill's "Dreigroschenoper" (Three Penny Opera).

Stubben: The 4th of July Grillparty at Luk Klütz' house

Hamburg: Borrow a book on the bus

On the bus to Neuengamme a book rack offers free reading material for passengers.

Hamburg: das Rathaus

Hamburg's dramatic City Hall with a green copper roof.

Lübeck: Heiligen-Geist-Hospital

Starting in 1257, Lübeck established a

old peoples' home and hospital for the city's poor

Principal Menell welcomes BHS to Kopernikus Gymniasium

At welcome breakfast on the first day of school.

Nazi work camp Neuengamme by Frank Fecteau

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
by Frank Fecteau
The American students and some of the German students traveled to a Nazi concentration camp in Neuengamme that had been turned into a museum. The tour guide that accompanied us was very friendly and informed us of every single detail about the camp. She talked very quickly, so it was a little difficult to understand what she was saying. It was a very moving and emotional environment. The tour guide brought us into a large building that had actually once been one of the building used for barracks. The huge building was about 600 square meters. They were designed to hold only about a thousand people, but actually ended up holding about 2000 prisoners. Between this building and the front gate were large fenced areas that held rubble. These piles of rubble were once buildings, back in 1944 and 1945, when this camp was functioning. The building we were in had 2 floors and several different sections. On the first floor was a map of all the surrounding concentration camp in Germany, Austria, and Poland. There was a piece of the electric fence that used to run around the outside of the camp. There was also a small scale replica of the entire camp. The second floor had accounts of some of the prisoners held at the prison. There was another building that housed the names of all the victims from the camp. There was also a giant monument and what looked like to be a sculpture of a concentration camp victim. Overall it was a great experience that I will surely remember. Here are some pictures I took while there:

A Night at the Opera...The Hamburger Kunsthalle and Die Dreigroschenoper - by Jack Hadley

On Thursday July 1st, the American students, accompanied by a few of the German students, headed into Hamburg for the evening. The plan was to go to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the art museum in Hamburg, and then see Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) (Known for the song Mack the Knife).

We headed into Hamburg via train in the afternoon and headed over to the Kunsthalle, which was very close to the Central Station. We were given a tour of some of the museum, by a guide that personally reminded me of the crazy scientist from Independence Day. We were shown religious works (some by the painter Lucas Cranach, who was a friend of Martin Luther, whose house we visited during our time in Berlin), very realistic works by Dutch painters, works by Vincent van Gogh and Caspar David Friedrich, and finally, modern art, which portrayed many works created after 1945.

After dinner, we headed off to the opera house to see Die Dreigroschenoper. The premise of the opera was hard to understand, but it was about a criminal named Mackie Messer and his gang in London, who is in danger of being hanged. The opera was styled much differently from regular operas: there was actual dialogue in it instead of just singing, giving it the feeling of a musical instead of an opera. Another strange thing was that the band that played music for the opera was sitting on stage, walking around and interacting with the performers. The interactions included performers carry the bassist's bass to him to the saxophonist tickling a performer with his saxophone. The opera was very enjoyable and intriguing. After the opera, we all took the train back to Bargteheide to get a good night's rest.

Wittenberg: BHS visits the home of Martin Luther

Potsdam: Brandenburg Gate of Potsdam

Berlin: Entering the American Sector from East Berlin

Potsdam: Sanssouci Palace. Hohenschönhausen: the Stasi Prison

Bicycle Tour 7/6 - by Kyle Shropshire

Bicycle Tour 7/6

For our second to last day in Bargteheide we went on a bicycle tour with a teacher at the KGB, Herr Nagel. We met at the school around 8 with our bikes and departed soon after. We headed down Jersbek Strasse towards the small town of Jersbek, and traveled mostly along sidewalk. Soon after entering Jersbek we took a left down a dirt road and began the scenic portion of the bike ride. We rode on an old horse path for a few kilometers and eventually had to travel single file due to the cramped space. We eventually left Jersbek and entered Wohldorf-Ohlstedt, an even smaller town. We made our way towards the rest area up a long slightly inclined hill. After reaching our destination we parked our bikes and had a snack under a light rain.

After about 30 minutes we started our return journey, traveling in a circle towards the main road that would take us back to Bargteheide. Once more we entered Jersbek and traveled the four kilometers back into town. Upon reaching Bargteheide we enjoyed ice-cream that was bought for us by the Bargteheide school teachers. Our journey was long and tiresome, but interesting and fun. We had a few crashes, but we all came back in one piece.

-Kyle Shropshire

Week Two From Herr Guy

After my regular updates of the first week in Berlin, my silence in the second week has more to do with just being busy in school than anything else.  Today marks the end of the first full week living with host families in Bargteheide and attending classes at the Kopernikus Gymnasium. It came as no giant surprise to me that I saw a lot of bewildered faces a little overwhelmed by trying to process the German that was coming at that so quickly, but by the end of the week I was really hearing and seeing some progress with the kids´ ability to use the language to communicate.  We had one and only one field trip the whole week -- our tour of the Steinway & Sons factory in Hamburg where we saw the process of building a grand piano from start to finish, from the wood storage/drying shed all the way to small rooms with advanced technicians fine-tuning the instruments for shipping.  Following the tour, we went back to Downtown Hamburg, had an outdoor lunch while watching World Cup news, then headed for the Hamburg Rathaus, a mammoth building in the heart of the city, not far from Lake Alster and the canals. Then we set them free and agreed to meet back at the train station.

 

In the upcoming week we have a lot more trips planned, so there will be more to report and more pictures to share.  We just got the school to unblock access to our blog, so hopefully we can put a little time into uploading some content for you to read and see. 

BHS at Checkpoint Charlies by night, Berlin, Germany

BHS at Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam, Germany

The whole BHS group at the entrance to Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany

Mike & Frank in front of the 12 Commandments, Luther House, Wittenberg, Germany

Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany -- where Luther attached his 95 Theses to the door and launched the Reformation

BHS kids on the stairs of the Pergamon Altar, Pergamon Museum, Berlin

Jack, John and Kyle at some gate of Bagdad in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin.

Happy kiddies after pizza in Berlin.

Pictures at Last!

Nighttime at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

DAY THREE: Wittenberg & Disco

DAY THREE: Some of us were supposed to go to a plenary session of the Bundestag, the German Parliament, a treat arranged for us by Luk Klütz who'd interned with his local parliamentarian, but when push came to shove Wednesday morning, there seemed to be no one who really demonstrated determination to go. So we voted and it turned out everyone preferred our alternate, a trip to Martin Luther's city of Wittenberg and the home of the Protestant Reformation. So off we trundled to Hauptbahnhof, stood in line and negotiated the particulars of buying last minute tickets, which weren't as bad as we thought. We took a slow little regional train that still got us to Wittenberg in about 1 hr. 10 mins., then started walking from the stain on the outskirts of town to the historic district. Lucky for us, our ultimate goal, Luther's home and museum, was on our end of Collegienstrasse, so we were able to start our tour with the serious stuff. The museum has a remarkably well-done exhibit explaining the different stations of Luther's life and the rise of Protestantism, and superb examples of his publishing, art works by Cranach, church art and artifacts. We took our time and learned a lot from the experience. By the time we were done, we were really hungry and it was really late, but we found a totally charming courtyard restaurant with outdoor dining and good German food--people had very filling lunches or spectacular salad plates without spending a fortune. After that, we headed for the most history site, Castle Church where Luther's pounding of the 95 Theses on the church door really set the Reformation movement into action. We walked through the church, heard a choir from Minnesota, then climbed the 260 steps to the top of the church tower heralding in German "A mighty fortress is our God," the title of Luther's most famous hymn (--he was musical, too!) After looking over souvenirs and getting ice cream, we headed for our last visit in Wittenberg, St. Mary's Church, which is where Luther actually practiced as a minister and delivered sermons once he was freed and allowed to return to Wittenberg. By 6:30 we were on a train back to the city, and after cleaning up, to the D-Light disco off Warschauer Platz, a disco that is exclusively for high school kids on Tuesday and Thursday nights 8:00p.m.-midnight. We didn't really know what to anticipate--we were not prepared for three floors of music, totally packed full with teens and disco, disco, disco in a very safe environment. To get in, you have to be accompanied by your teacher, and you get wristbanded; once you're in, nobody gets out unless given specific permission by the teacher. So they danced the night away until midnight, we caught a late subway back to Oranienburger Tor, realized we hadn't eaten since the afternoon, stopped for a 1 a.m. snack, and then returned home tired but happy. Friday is dedicated to exploration of Potsdam and a visit to Sansscouci Palace.

DAY TWO: Wednesday continued our streak of stellar sunny summer weather and clear blue skies as we moved a little further outside our immediate environs in Berlin Mitte. Our morning tour of the Nazi exhibit of the German Historical Musuem got a little frustrated when our tour guide called in sick, but the end result of that was that everyone got a free audio guide and it we got in free. With a little help and taking time to focus on some key artifacts, I think we still got plenty out of it, and several students took in other parts of the museum on their own. Then we lost Frau Johnson. It was really weird, but while she went to the book store to pick up a couple of books she wanted, everyone -- and I mean everyone -- else went to the john, and when they came out, they ended up clustering in the hall outside the wash rooms instead of returning to the entrance area of the museum. Frau Johnson thought we'd gone without her, so she headed out on the street, to the university, to Alexanderplatz to find us. Meanwhile, after realized how weird it was to be talking at length outside the johns, we went back to the museum entrance: no Frau. We waited 30 mins--no Frau. Then in frustration we just decided to go and hoped she would find us later. We walked next door to Neue Wache, a memorial to the victims of the Third Reich, and then further to the impressive entrance gates of Humboldt University, when kids had time to pick up t-shirts and the like. Back outside, we headed for Alexanderplatz in the heart of Socialist East Berlin, grabbed a quick lunch and then took the tram out to Hohenschönhausen for a guided tour of the prison for political prisoners, where Frau Johnson found us! Our English guide was perhaps harder to understand than if it had been in German, but still he was hugely knowledgeable and gave the kids great insight into the machinations of a state apparatus dedicated to the complete and total control of thought and expression of personal opinion and the elimination of any contrarians. Lots and lots and lots of walking....and then back to the hostel and enough time to change and wash up before heading out to dinner with Kristi Decke, an old friend of Herr Guy and Frau Johnson. We opted for outdoor dining at Hackischer Markt, where there were projected TV screens everywhere for the World Cup soccer match, street performers, music, beer bicycles and an endless stream of visitors drawn to the action of the plaza, the beautiful summer weather and late night light -- it's still dusk at 11:00 here. And that was that. After returning to the hostel, kids were quite content to linger over a beverage in the reception/dining area and just talk with each other or e-mail, and slowly head off for bed. It's already Thursday, and today we'll slip up the group with part going to the Bundestag, the German Parliament, for a plenary session, and the rest heading out to Wittenberg to visit Martin Luther's home there and the key sites of the Protestant Reformation. There is so much to see, so much to do! More to come later! -- Herr Guy

Day One

Greetings from Herr Guy in late night Berlin, Wednesday 1:00 a.m.ish after our first very full day in Deutschland. Our flight arrived in Frankfurt/Main around 6:00 a.m., then we transferred to the Berlin flight and got to Berlin-Tegel around 9:00 a.m. After buying day tickets for the transportation net, then taking a bus to the train station, we found the train that got us within a block of our hostel, the Heart of Gold Hostel in Berlin/Mitte. Even though we were there by 10:00 a.m., they told us we couldn't check in in until about 2;00. So that made it a good time for culture: off to the Pergamon Museum to the see Pergamon Altar and the Gates of Isthtar, and after that to the Neues Museum for a look at the famous bust of Nefretete and othe Egyptian art works. By 2:30 everybody was ready to collapse, we went back to the hostel, officially checked in, got room keys and took a nap! At 7 p.m. Herr Guy's friend Andreas & Katharina met us at the hostel and suggested we go out for dinner and a little easy sightseeing. We walked over to the Friedrichstrasse station, then took the train to Savignyplatz for great pizza, conversation and a nice walk to Kurfürstendamm, the main drag of West Berlin. And then a nice bus ride back to East Berlin's Mitte. Before heading home, we took time for a spooky noctural visit to the Holocaust Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, then walked to Brandenburg Gate, hopped on the subway and finally got home in time for everyone to say how exhausted they were...and they watch them stay up for another hour checking e-mail and the like. It's been a tiring but satisfying first day! More to come. -----

day 1~ 6.16.10 (?)

I'm just going to do bullet points, more information will be edited in later. And pics will come later.

arrival at ~5:30 am in berlin!

-went to two museums in the morning

gate of ishtar

-naptime

dinner with herr guy's friends at the 12 apostles ( ? )

 Andreas and Katarina  ( ?) 

Jewish Holocaust Memorial

Brandenburg gate

Ahrensburg Castle

Yep, you willl be visiting here! Lucky kids.

It will all be worth the racing around to get all your finals done when you finally get there.