Post from Michelle

I decided to finally post something in the tick blog. We just got back at 3am this morning from a pretty fun weekend in Berlin. Well, Berlin-slash-Prague. We accidentally took a bad train from Ceske Budejovice to Prague... It was raining and the train was late from the get-go, then it stopped and we had to take a bus from one city to a connection in the next. There were what seemed like hundreds of school children on this bus, and at one point the driver pulled over so that one child could use the restroom in the forest, despite the fact that we were already running an hour late by that time. So, when faced with the choice of taking a 12-hour night train to Berlin or catching a 5-hour train to Berlin in the morning, we opted to make the most out of the situation and do a pub crawl in Prague Friday. It was fun but exhausting, and we met a fun crew from Australia. I really enjoyed touring around Berlin (we rented bikes from our hostel lobby and were able to see quite a bit). It has a really different feel from Prague. Prague has an older, more aesthetic feel, whereas Berlin is a very modern city, yet has a ton of history. It felt pretty weird walking through the Holocaust memorial; it was really quiet, and it was probably the only place in the entire city that didn't have any graffiti. I always feel pretty shocked after I read anything about the Holocaust. One thing I didn't know was that there were actually hundreds (maybe thousands?) of concentration camps all over Europe--not only in Germany. There was a map which showed the locations of 500 camps around Europe; there must have been at least one in almost every European country, and a few in north Africa as well. A number of religious and ethnic groups were persecuted to a lesser degree, including Catholics. Checkpoint Charlie was my second-favourite place we sight-saw in Berlin. There are signs all around it which have a bunch of pictures of some protest in which half a million people participated. There was a coffee shop in the background of the picture, and when I looked across the street, the same coffee shop, along with the U.S. Army checkpoint, were right in front of me.

News from the Czech Republic: Amy and I walked about a mile today to go tick hunting today. Amy hunted one off of her neck, although it escaped after a brief tussle.