Something Brewing: Trip to Europe, Berlin

The elective courses that I want to take are scheduled so that I was frontloaded with two courses in January and early February and backloaded with three courses in March and April. In between, I had 6 weeks of free time...well mostly free time. I got a job as a teacher's assistant for a 4th year commerce course on management of new enterprises and the Tricolour Fund is an ongoing project course.

3 of my classmates were on exchange in Mannheim, Germany, for a couple of months. They had some travel plans laid out and talked me into going over there and travelling with them for 10 days. It doesn't take much to convince me to go on a trip anywhere...I just checked my finances and made sure I didn't have any outstanding deliverables for the fund or my TA work.

I met up with them in Mannheim on a Friday and that night we took a train to Berlin. Berlin was an interesting place. Apart from the old buildings like Reichstag, it felt a lot like Toronto...except with Germans. We spent a couple of days there...had an awesome dinner at a rustic Italian restaurant and went to a club. We checked out the historical sites...the holocaust memorial put a somber tone on the second day...kind of depressing combined with the cold snowy weather.

Here are some pics in any case:

A square in Mannheim

From the Reichstag

Sometimes the people around you make a picture...it's worth putting them in your shots. Here are a couple from around the Brandenburg Arch. You get some surprises like this one...

...or you can people watch and take some interesting ones.

Had to stop and check out this Bugatti

There are some really nice spots around the area...like this pano shot of the museum and cathedral (forget the names) near the arch

(I forgot to set the camera to manual so the exposures were all different. Had to photoshop it quite a bit to even things out...)

Of course, had to check out the wall...