Class!

Contrary to prior belief, I have done more than run around Europe with a camera since arriving in Berlin. Last week, we began to lab portion of our program, which will continue on through this week and conclude next week with presentations of our findings.

But let me back up to the very beginning (because I don't remember what all I talked about before, haha). Our first two weeks here in Berlin were dedicated to a crash course in the German language (and traveling, of course). Obviously it's impossible to even get a beginner's grasp on a language in two weeks, but we managed to learn a lot. We covered all survival words that we might need, and spent a good amount of time on food so we could both order food and grocery shop without playing the food equivalent of Russian roulette (believe me, before the lessons, I made some less than tasty mistakes). The lessons were very informative over all, and while I may not be much of a German speaker, I am a decent German listener, and I can pick up on what people are trying to tell me most of the time. Truth be told, Berlin isn't much of a place to learn German. Everyone here speaks English, so when the going gets rough, the German speak my tongue, haha. With or without forced practice though, I've come a long way in learning German.

Last week, the third week of our program, marked the start of our lab sessions, as I mentioned before. Specifically, there are three different lab sections that the 16 of us in the program are divided more or less evenly across. For one, there is an automotive lab which is based around the construction and tuning of a motor, as well as the implementation of a turbocharger (if I've heard correctly). The second lab revolves around energy and efficiency. While I'm not sure what the big goal is for that project, I know that they have done a lot of work with energy and mass transfer diagrams, and are currently testing different energy production methods and collecting data. I myself am in the third group, microcontrollers. Our task is an extremely specific one: construct and program a sensor that can take a picture, store it to an SD card, and then use advanced filtering techniques to greatly reduce the size of an image so it can be easily compressed and transferred from computer to computer, all with an extremely limited amount of processing space. If that sounds like a long and complex problem, that's because it is, haha.

While it is only the second week of lab, we have already made a lot of progress towards our goal. Every member of our 5 person group was tasked with constructing a complete microcontroller from only a bare proto-board and separate capacitors, resistors, voltage converters, etc. I myself had never soldered before, so I had some serious doubts about my ability to construct an entire sensor from parts, but I actually did quite well. In fact, every member of my group managed to create a complete and working board, which was pretty impressive. After making the boards, we were able to test them using a series of programs that our student instructor had created and confirm that they were working properly and were capable of completing our main task. Today we started approaching the picture filter and transformation process, which is and will probably continue to be extremely difficult to wrap my mind around. Fortunately though, Stephan is extremely helpful, and is encouraging us as much as possible to find our own solutions to the problem.

It's cool to know that our work is going to be helping this project in the long run. While Stephan has already created a program that completes the goal laid out for us, he believes that it can be improved to take up even less space and to run even more quickly. On the very brightest side, one of us will uncover a method that is more efficient than his own, really pushing the project forward. Worst case scenario though, we solve the problem in less efficient ways, but our approaches and thoughts might inspire further research that could create more efficient programs. Basically, there's room for optimism even in failure here, because our screw-ups could unknowingly be the cornerstones for better methods. I'll stay optimistic, haha.

As time continues, I'll try to keep you posted on the progress of my team as well as the other two project teams. Hopefully we'll have some cool stuff to show for our work!

Oh, and sorry for the entirely pictureless post. Pictures of class work exist, just tragically not on my camera. If I can get a hold of a few I'll try to throw them onto this post later. Until then, thanks for tuning in, and I'll talk to you soon!

To put it shortly, Prague was fantastic...

(note: I haven't had a chance to fully proof-read this post yet, so forgive me if there are errors here or there, I'll get back to them soon)

to put it in length though...

Basically, I couldn't have hoped for a better weekend. We were a bit worried going into our trip because the forecast called for rain all weekend. Luckily though, it only rained for about 15 minutes, all while we were inside a restaurant eating.

But I should start from the beginning.

I'm extremely glad that we decided to take the train to Prague instead of flying. I've always heard that the travel across Europe is half of the trip, and that couldn't be more true. The first hour or two from Germany to Dresden was a bit drab, seeing as how the majority of that stretch is just farmland, but even then the massive windmill fields that dot the countryside are extremely impressive to see.

Dresden itself was a pretty amazing city to drive though. I've never really heard much of the town, which is south-southeast of Berlin and one of the easternmost large cities in Germany, but even from the train tracks beautiful cathedrals and other buildings were clearly visible. I never had any intention of visiting the city before, but now I might if I get the chance. Unfortunately, at this point, the train was pretty packed, so it was impossible to get out of my car and take any pictures, but many people got off the train in Dresden and I was able to reach an open window and take more pictures.

Outside of Dresden was easily the most beautiful part of the trip. A huge network of rivers make up the border between Germany and the Czech Republic, and we were lucky enough to have the chance to ride along this border river, as well as a river leading into Prague from the border, for a few hours with almost no one else on the train. It was amazing to see all of the bordering houses and cities. Even cooler to see were the castles and other ancient architecture that exist to this day. It was funny to think that on one side of the river, you were in Germany, but on the other, you were in the Czech Republic. They even had a nice little row of buoys that cut the river in half so you could know which nation's part of the river you were on.

After our 5 hour ride was over, we got dumped off about 5 minutes away from our hostel. Fortunately there were signs, because Czech does not even kind of resemble German, and we couldn't read a thing. We made out extremely well with our hostel though. We were able to stay there for 25 Euro for the two nights, and because there were 8 of us, we got to stay in our own room without any other travelers. It was funny to see how many Americans were staying in our hostel with us though (we met some kids from California and Arkansas when we arrived). Being the tourist city that it is, almost no Czech was spoken to us at all the whole time we were in Prague. I can't help but feel lucky that I know English, because it's definitely the world language, and you can get by just about anywhere if you know English and have patience.

On Saturday, we were able to go on a walking tour of Prague with a fantastic company known as New Europe Tours. They offer entirely free walking tours, as well as very reasonable bike tours. The idea between the tours is that if you feel that you were given a great tour experience, you'll tip your tour guide, though it's not required. It's an excellent way to see any city on a dime, plus you know that you're getting a guide who is passionate and involved in his or her tour, because if they don't put their all into it they don't get paid, haha. Our tour guide, Isaac, was a ridiculous guy, but he was very knowledgeable and he knew how to keep a crowd of mostly 20-somethings engaged for 3 hours while walking around Prague under the sun.

Prague itself though is probably the most beautiful city I've ever seen. As it was almost untouched by World War 1 and 2, the city exists in nearly original condition (unlike Berlin for instance). While most of the buildings have been modernized, everything has its original (typically Baroque) facade, so the entire city looks like it came out of the past. Prague is also extremely cheap to visit. Their currency, the Krone (translated to English as crown), can be exchanged at a rate of 18.5 Krone's to an American Dollar. It wasn't hard to find good meals for under 100 Krone, with some excellent, restaurant quality meals costing around 200 Krone. Basically, we ate like kings and queens for less than 10 dollars a meal, which was excellent. Also, The Czech Republic just entered the European Union this year, so they are slowly converting to accept Euros as well. Typically you get a slightly better price on things if you use Krones, but sometimes it varied either way, and it was nice to know that we could always fall back on our standard European tender.

Also, Prague is one of the top five visited cities in Europe, and has everything you could hope for from a tourist destination. Namely, the shopping is fantastic, and if you are willing to venture a little out of the city center, you can find excellent deals on almost anything you like. The best part for me, as an American, is seeing how different a brand's clothing is from country to country. Carhartt, for instance, is typically purely workwear and rough-and-tumble clothing in America, but in Prague there were skate and snowboard shops that stocked Carhartt clothing that was entirely different. If nothing else, window-shopping can be extremly fun and novel. Of course, if you have a few hundred thousand Krone to kill, you can stop at Gucci or Versaci or whatever you'd like too, but I don't fall into this category so I won't dwell.

Beyond that, Prague was full of more sites and stories than I could hope to learn and remember in one day. That said, I'll try to recap places and figures as best as I can. Be warned, I am not wikipedia, and I'm just telling things back as best as I can remember, haha.

Where else to start but Old Town Square? The most amazing thing to me about Prague is that Old Town Square has been the center of the city since it has been created. In Old Town Square, two sites dominate, and this picture captures them both. The large cathedral that you can see in the background there is called the Church of Our Lady before Tyn. In its conception, Prague was a very Catholic city, and this giant gothic church was the basis of the religion in Prague. In the foreground is the Monument of Jan Hus. Like I mentioned earlier, Prague was a very Catholic city. Jan Hus, on the other hand, was an open minded guy, and was largely responsible for the spreading of Protestantism in Prague. The powers at be were pretty cool with Jan for awhile, but eventually they felt that his heretical teachings were getting out of hand, and he was burned at the stake. Brutal, right? Don't worry, Prague is full of Karma.



In another corner of Old Town Square stands, quite creatively, Old Town Hall. This is one of the few buildings in Prague, to my knowledge, that underwent substantial damage. If you look closely, you can see how the pink wall on the front of the tower juts out a bit. I don't remember the exact cause, but at some point in time a large portion of the building that would exist in the foreground in this shot collapsed. Fortunately, the tower, another landmark of the city of Prague, still stands. Now that the intro is out of the way, let's talk about that Karma. As I mentioned before, the Catholics decided to burn Jan Hus at the stake for his hereticism. What they didn't know though is that Jan Hus' right-hand man, Jan Zizka, was, as our tour guide Isaac put it, "one of the greatest badasses of all time." To provide some perspective on that comment, Jan Zizka lost an eye at age 5 in a fight, which he supposedly went on to win. He also, typically unaccredited, invented the flail, utilized the "wagon-wheel" tactic that is so commonly attributed to American settlers, used armored wagons loaded with cannons and muskets (the first tanks ever used) as well as housed small cannons which were the first field artillery ever used in combat, and finally was the first general to effectively use the handgun in his army. Oh, did I mention that he never lost a battle, even after he lost his other eye in combat and would literally have people explain things to him and make commands off of that knowledge? Yeah, badass is correct. Anyhow, after Jan Hus was killed, Jan Zizka was obviously pretty upset. In protest to this action, Jan Zizka and the Protestant followers of Jan Hus, known as Hussites, invaded the Old Town Square and through seven members of the town council out of the top windows of Old Town Hall in what came to be known as the First Defenestration of Prague, defenestration literally meaning the throwing of someone out of a window. In case you caught that, yes, there was more than one defenestration in Prague. Another fun fact about the first defenestration is that, as gravity wasn't well understood, Jan Zizka and his pals weren't too sure if a toss off of the top of Old Town Hall would be enough to kill someone, so they set up spears down below for them to land on at the end of the fall (I call that overkill). A war between the Catholics and Protestants broke out at this point in what is now known as the Hussite Wars, with the conflict culminating in the Catholics allowing the Protestants to live peaceful among the Catholics, and the Protestants allowing a Catholic to remain king. Long story short though, don't go burning someone at the stake because you don't like his ideas, because his crazy best friend might through seven of your friends out of a window onto spears and start a war.

While Old Town Hall its own special history, perhaps more famous than the tower itself is this piece of art and technology that is attached it, known as the Orloj. Unfortunately, my little camera doesn't have a panoramic lens, but suffice to say that at the top of this tower is also a beautiful clock, but these two circles, and their outlying elements, are more interesting. The top one is actually a very old clock based off of the sun dial. I have no idea how it works, but that's what it is, and it's cool to see it in action. The lower circle is actually a calendar. Unlike other calendars which typically just named their months after numbers and added embellishments as rulers saw necessary (See Roman emperors Julius Caesar and Augustus on getting July and August renamed and adding January and February to mess everything up), this calendar was based off of agriculture. As Isaac explained it, "June basically means berries. July means bigger berries. August means, well, pick those berries." The statues around the clocks and calendars are also important. The top four embody four deadly sins, while the bottom four symbolize (I believe) four salvations. Additionally, at every hour, the two windows above the sun clock open up and the 12 apostles emerge from them in succession. It is an amazing spectle, and was basically the 15th century equivalent of holographics when it came out. The town senators were so taken aback by the completed tower'ss beauty that to reward its creator, Hanus, they burned out his eyes so he could never make another one elsewhere. Yeah, the life of an artist is rough.

This is the Saint Nicholas Church in Prague. While its uses were varied while the wars between Catholics and Protestants were going on, when there was peace, Saint Nicholas was the Protestant place of worship in Prague. It's Baroque architecture was intended as a juxtaposition to the jagged and intimidating Gothic Church of Our Lady before Tyn. The idea was that if someone had to pick between two churches, they'd pick the one that scared them the least and therefore take the Protestant approach.










This is the famous Divadlo Hybernia theater in Prague. Little information exists about it online, but our tour guide Isaac informed us that this is the theater where Dracula was first played on stage. It is easily one of the most iconic and famous theaters in Prague. Fun fact: In the Vin Diesel film XXX, this is the theater that Vin was eating in front of before a sniper attempted to kill him. Okay, it's not really fun, but it's a fact.












I realize that I have in no way attempted to put up a group photo of the kids in the program. I'm going to half address that problem (only 8 out of 16 kids went on the trip to Prague). From left to right, we have Ryan, Calvin, Lauren, Andrew, myself, Paul, Steve, and Mike. Don't we look cute?







You've already seen bits and pieces of Prague's Old Town Square, so I figured I'd bring it all together with a video.


Prague is broken up into multiple areas, one of which is the Jewish Quarter. While the people in the Jewish Quarter were denied many of their rights when Hitler rose to power, somehow many of their buildings stand to this day. This picture shows two of the most famous of those buildings. In the foreground on the left is Central Europe's oldest synagogue, called the Old New Synagogue due to a translation error that caught on. In traditional Hebrew, the synagogue was actually called the "On Condition" synagogue because its cornerstone was an original stone from the Temple of Jerusalem, and this was only allowed on the condition that when the messiah appeared, the stone had to be brought back to Jerusalem. Unfortunately, the term "on condition" must have been pretty close to "alt-neu" (old new in German), because that's what the Germans who really didn't care about the synagogue's story called it. The building is famous for another reason as well. Legend has it that an old rabbi used a blessing from god to turn a clay figure into the Golem so that the enchanted creature could defend the Jews and help them construct their city, but in time because aggressive and dangerous, so the rabbi drained the Golem of its life and stored it in the attic of this synagogue. According to legend, no one who has gone into the attic to look for the Golem has returned alive.
The building to the right in the background was the old Jewish Town Square. Important desicisions may have occured in that building, but we weren't told about them, so I wouldn't know, haha.

This is the Church of St. James, which is located in the heart of Prague. Apart from being an absolutely beautiful church, a legend also accompanies St. James. At one time, inside the church was a statue of the Blessed Virgin which was adorned with a large gold necklace. One day, a theif tried to steal the necklace, but right before he was able to reach it, the hand of the statue reached up, grabbed him by the arm, and again became innanimate. The next day, the priests who ran the church found the thief in a panic. The thief promised to never steal again and become a devout follower if they would help him release his arm. The priests believed this to be a miracle, so they refused to damage the statue. Instead, the theif's arm was cut off. However, immediately after the man's arm was cut off, the statue released its grip and returned to its original position. The priests decided to enbalm and hang the arm as a reminder to sinners and thieves everywhere, and it still hangs in the Church to this day.


This is the Charles Bridge, the most famous bridge in Prague and one of the most famous in all of Europe. It was designed by King Charles IV to be a sturdy bridge that would not collapse in a flood as the bridges before it had. The bridge is also surrounded by three guard towers which are also beautiful in their own rights. While before the bridge was one of the major land connections between Eastern and Western Europe, today it is just an extremely popular and frequented tourist stop.




While the bridge's architecture alone may be beautiful, the 30, mostly baroque, statues that adorn its length add a great deal to the site. Typically biblical in nature, though varying widely in terms of size and content, each statue adds its own story and flair to the bridge. Another fun fact about Prague is that it is the city with the most statues in the world, period. Statues can be seen everywhere on top of buildings, lining bridges, decorating streets, and fulfilling other tasks. Heck, they even have a statue of a statue holding a statue, haha.










This is a shot of Potsdam castle from the Charles Bridge. Clearly, it is a massive structure, and it can only be fully captured from such a great distance. Unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to take the full castle tour, but we got to walk around the grounds ourselves and get some great shots.








As the last image made it pretty clear to see, it's hard to get a good shot of the entirety of Prague castle up close, but you can see some cool details of the castle when you draw near. One good example is the Prague castle entrance. I can't say that I would ever feel too welcome in a castle if I was greeted by two guys, stabbing and clubbing other people. But hey, what do I know about ancient cultures?






This is a shot of St. Vitus Cathedral at Prague Castle. This is the largest, and arguably most important church in all of Prague. It's presense dominates the castle, both up close and at a distance. We weren't able to look inside unfortunately because the tours had ended, but I hear it is gorgeous inside.








The other church in Prague Castle in St George's Basilica. We weren't able to glean much info about it, but have read a bit about it online. It is both the best preserved Romanesque church in Prague and the oldest church building on the Prague Castle grounds. Literally in the shadow of St. Vitus, it doesn't look like much, but it's unique and cool in its own right.







And so concludes my wrap-up of Prague in so many words. Obviously we saw so much more, but if I included it all I'd never get this post done, and I'd really like to have it finished so I can get to work on a Munich post next week, haha. Man, all these trips keep me on a tight schedule.

Be sure to tune in next week for a post about my lab experience so far as well!

Until next time,

Cody

So much to talk about, so little time to say it all!

The past week or so has been a total whirlwind. We've been busy every day, and every experience is something new and exciting. I'm going to try and get everything up to speed now because I'm going to Prague in the Czech Republic this weekend, and I want to be able to talk about that all by itself when I get back. So, here goes!


First of all, last Wednesday, we went on a tour to the Bundestag, which is the German house of Parliament and a truly amazing building. While the facade of the building looked very old and regal, the entire inside of the building was modern, sleek, and extremely eco-friendly. The history of the building also showed through in decisions to retain graffiti and damage sustained to the building while it was occupied by the Soviet Union after World War 2. The building was shockingly full of art, a large deal of it symbolizing this restoration from foreign control to domestic grandeur.

Most notable though was the giant glass cupola on top of the building. It is truly an architectural marvel that serves many purposes. For one, mirrors inside the cupola funnel light into the parliament floor of the Bundestag, which in turn radiates a huge deal of light throughout the building. Secondly, it funnels hot air out of the building, which is necessary since almost all of the Bundestag is "naturally cooled" as they liked to say. I'm not entirely sure what "naturally cooled" entails, but it was definitely cool and comfortable inside the building, so I'll take their word for it. Most importantly to me though, the cupola could be walked up, giving an excellent view of Berlin in the Tiergarten area, which provided for many excellent photo opportunities. Ultimately, the building was beautiful, and the sites that could be seen from the cupola were fantastic.

Honestly, I can't remember what happened for the remainder of that week (it's easy to do when you're constantly busy, haha), but Saturday we went to Potsdam, which is a city just outside of Berlin. It's so close to Berlin, in fact, that it often mistakenly gets called Berlin. Potsdam is famous for two main reasons. For one, Potsdam was the location chosen by the Prussian and later German kings for their royal estates, so the city is full of beautiful palaces and gardens. Secondly, seeing as how Potsdam did exist right on the border of West Berlin, it was once the home to a substantial chunk of the Berlin Wall. The bridge that we had to cross to enter Potsdam from Berlin is called the "Unity Bridge," which is ironic because within a year of its creation it was shut down to prevent West Berliners from entering Eastern Germany. The bridge was so new when it was shut down, in fact, that after West and East Berlin had become reunified, no one was allowed to drive on the bridge for over a year because they never had a chance to see if it was stable enough to support the weight of cars before the separation. We also got to see the Potsdam Brandenburg Gate. Most people think that the Brandenburg gate exists only in Berlin, but the truth is that any city old enough to have city walls that had a gate facing towards the city of Brandenburg had a Brandenburg gate, so there are many of different shapes, sizes, and artistic flairs.

The next famous location was saw was the Cecilienhof, the summer home of the German crown prince that was vacated when Hitler rose to power. Because of its large size and vacant state, it was chosen as the perfect place to have the post WW2 Potsdam Conference (Berlin was in such shambles that the Allies decided that there was no good place to have the conference in Germany's capital). It was in this conference that Germany and Berlin were split, leaving Joseph Stalin in charge of Cecilienhof as a part of East Germany (as can be seen with the large red star).


Eventually, we made it to the famous palace gardens of Potsdam. The first place we stopped was the Church of Peace, which was constructed by the German King Frederick William IV. While certainly not one of the grandest churches that I've ever seen, it was one of the most beautiful. It was built to look like it was floating on the water, giving it an ethereal feel, and its use of courtyards and statues gives an open, almost transient feeling to the building.


From there, we bee-lined towards Sanssouci, the famous palace of Potsdam. For being the most famous palace of Potsdam, it is actually the most modest in stature. While beautiful, it is paled by its massive garden, which goes on for as far as the eye can see in all directions. We ended up walking the full length of the garden, more than two kilometers, to see the other palaces.

In route the New Palace, which was constructed by Frederick the Great to house the ever increasing and impossible to put up number of visitors to Sanssouci, we ran across another palace that we unfortunately weren't able to explore and I cannot find a name for yet, but it was extremely beautiful nonetheless. Ironically, the New Palace that we eventually reached is drastically larger than Sanssouci, and its grand scale was extremely impressive. One thing that we noted was that no matter where we went, reconstruction work was being done on everything. You'll have to excuse the scaffolding, haha.


We took the earlier part of this week to relax, enjoy the slight bout of good weather on the beach, and catch up on some much needed sleep. Yesterday (Wednesday), however, we went to the Volkswagen factory and museum. We were lucky enough to get to take a tour of the Volkswagen plant where Golfs and Tiguans are made, but unfortunately were not allowed to take pictures. You guys will just have to take my word for it that it was pretty amazing. I was extremely surprised to see that almost no safety equipment was worn by the workers in the factory, and that the entire factory was very clean and quiet (they opened the doors of our cars so we could get some air in our car, and at no time was it nearly loud enough to make us want to cover our ears). After receiving our tour, we were able to look over the factory grounds.

Amazingly, the Volkswagen factory has its own power plant that not only powers the factory, but also the city of Wolfsburg that the factory resides in. We also had the chance to look at the Audi and Lamborghini exhibits. The Lamborghini show was extremely weird, consisting of about 10 minutes of flashing lights and loud noises around a stationary Lamborghini Murcielago. The Audi museum was quite cool though, and we got the chance not just to look at many new Audi models, but sit in and experience them. My favorite was the Audi R8. Oh what I would do to have one.


Finally, today we visited Sachsenhausen, the famous concentration camp in Berlin. It was, above all else, a sobering experience that warranted and received the utmost respect. I knew that it would be moving, but little can prepare you for the harsh realities of what humans were capable of doing to other human beings, and what people were able to endure to stay alive.

As a large portion of the camp was made out of wood and only a fraction out of brick, it is difficult to today see the camp for what it once was, but there are reminders everywhere of the brutality that once existed. From the multiple watchtowers of various size and eminence, the cabins where people had to live in inhuman conditions, the infirmatories where people were experimented on or deemed unfit to live and tossed to the wayside, the plots of land that today look like nothing, but contain the ashes of tens of thousands of people, to the remains of crematoriums where the bodies of so many innocent people were burned.

There really is no right way to react in a situation like that. One second you see a field, and the next you see what once was. It makes it all very real, not just a story in a history book, and it is something that I think everyone should see in their lifetime. If not to learn about the history, one should go to learn about the human condition, and what hate is capable of creating when it goes unchecked.

The site itself is amazing because it served both as a Nazi and Soviet prison camp, and sites and propaganda from both regimes exist. A huge monument exists, made by the Russians, to commemorate their liberating of the camp, though they made it into a prison camp of their own thereafter. Despite its past, a great deal of Sachsenhausen exists to this day, and the museum is a beautiful testament to the human loss, as well as the human strength, that will always be attached to those grounds.

Tomorrow though, I am off to Prague! I'm not yet entirely sure what we're going to do and see there, but it should be a fun and exciting trip. My next goal for tonight is to plan out some destinations, and to make sure my camera battery is good and charged. Exactly half of the kids from the program are going (which makes 8 by the way), so we should all be able to have a fun time together.

I'll be sure to post stuff about about the trip when I get back. Until then, guten Nacht!

Zoo Time!

Wednesday, we had the chance to go and see the Berlin Zoo. Apart from being absolutely massive, the Berlin Zoo is home to more species of animals than any other zoo in the world. Since we were cramming a zoo trip into an already busy day, we didn't get to see everything that the zoo had to offer, but I managed to collect a pretty good assortment of photos and videos of the different animals that I managed to see.

Accordingly, this post is basically going to be a large list of photos and videos with some captions, because I don't think I could do the zoo justice by blending it in with other events. So, without further ado, I present to you (in no order whatsoever because the image uploader for blogspot is crazy and mixed them all up), The Animals of the Berlin Zoo....















Even from outside of the zoo gates you could see the llamas. They basically did what they do best: be furry and eat hay.















German art at its finest: a little boy holding water hoses and peeing on a frog. I like to think that it symbolizes the way that man oppresses animal-kind without regard, but it might just be an R. Kelly crack.















Yeah, that's quite a flight. To put it in perspective for my more US standard audience, that's a little more than 6017 miles.















The grizzly bears were nice enough to stay as far away from us as humanly possible and obscure themselves with logs so it was nearly impossible to get a good shot of them. Just to spite them though, I took an alright one.















A pack of African Wild Dogs looking everything but wild. If they didn't eat large antelope on a regular basis, you'd almost think that petting them sounded like a good idea.















An owl, giving me his best pose.















The ever noble bald eagle. On a side note, if I had one issue with the Berlin Zoo, it was that their bird cages made it almost impossible to get a good shot of a bird.















A Sea Lion, cruising around and enjoying himself. I'd definitely say that out of all the animals, it looked like these guys were having the most fun.















One of Berlin's famous polar bears, on a rock they like to fight over.















Two of Berlin's famous polar bears, fighting over the aforementioned rock.















For all critics of zoos, saying that they torture animals by removing them from their natural environments, I present to you... the (aptly named) Sun Bear.















Two of the smallest (and least aquatic) hippos I've ever seen. It was kind of hard to decipher the German signs, but I believe these truly are some kind of Hippo species.















A group of penguins, who all looked like they had nooooo idea what was going on.















A Black Bear, embracing a lazy position trumped only by his sunny cousin.















While the animals tended to draw the most attention, it was worth noting that all of the plant life in the Berlin Zoo was also beautiful. That said, I took one shot of a flower and spent the rest of my time taking shots of way cooler animals.















What I believe to be called a Sun Cat. The room it was in wasn't the brightest, but we can't all live up to the bear standards.















More penguins of a less aquatic sort.















The black stripes on the Zebras must generate a lot of heat, because not once all I day did I see one walk in the sunlight so I could get a decent shot.















A jaguar. While most of the big cats just lounged around, this guy seemed pretty serious about guarding his perimeter. Maybe he's new to the zoo.















A mongoose, which was literally the hardest animal to snap a shot of ever. You can't tell here, but they had ridges and slides and all kinds of things to run around on in their exhibit, and they were using them all constantly.















Clearly, this lion was as excited to see me as I was to see it, haha.




















One of the Berlin Zoo's many cool antelope (I believe this to be a Kudu, but I could be wrong). These guys were actually hanging out with the zebras, and they too liked to hide in the shade.















A Black Panther. It's kind of hard to pick up the killing machine vibe when the cat looks like it just fell out of a tree.















About 1/3 of a Giant Panda. These guys are notorious sleepers, and this one lived up to his reputation.




















I have no idea what this bird's name is, but I like his haircut.




















Believe it or not, this is a baby giraffe. They had most of the adults caged up to keep them separated, but this little guy still managed to roam around and pose for a decent picture.















A huge family of mountain goats. Note the massive beards that all the guys are toting.















The most important part of that above picture. This little guy was still small enough to not have the creepy, dead eyes that his elders did.















One of Berlin's many antisocial Elephants.















Another Leopard who was much happier swinging and looking at his log than acknowledging us.




















Some kind of Heron. Many of them were still able to fly, and it was amazing to see groups of these things just taking off and heading to a different pond within the zoo.















A Rhino, doing his best to take in the sun even though he was mostly shadowed.



I believe the American term for these guys to be Spring Hares, but who knows. They had a ton of cool animals in their nocturnal exhibit, but the lighting obviously didn't make for the best photo-ops.




















Some kind of Lemur. They're basically as prone to hopping about and hanging as you'd expect.















Very protective monkeys. I have a feeling that this little guy might lead a very sheltered life.




















Crazy monkey-squirrels with unique coloring. I may not know exactly what they were, but I definitely know that these guys could run around like the wind.















One big, colorful monkey.















These two little guys seemed to just take turns hiding and looking. They were basically the monkey equivalents of Chihuahuas.















The ridiculous baby Orangutan. He looked like equal parts baby, disheveled old man, and gymnast.




















This is the gymnast part shining through.















Daddy Orangutan, who looked like he was wearing a cape made out of his own hair.




















Eventually, after sitting for about an hour, daddy Orangutan decided to get up and swing around and let his dread-locks drift in the wind. This is where he ended up.



And this a video of part of his trip to get there.















The last animal I saw all day was this guy, a crazy little red deer fellow. I have no idea what he was called, but it's fun to end the day on a mystery.


And that, in a nutshell, was my day at the Berlin Zoo.

Sadly, this post has taken me about four days to create because the internet we have here in Berlin is terrible at uploading, and because our days are packed as it is, so thanks everyone for having patience with me. I'll try to have the next one up as soon as possible.

Talk to you all soon,

Cody