- Molly Wang
25th September
At 1:15 PM, when I’d normally be going to class, we met at the basketball court with exclamations of “this is surreal-“ and such. We left with our rolling suitcases and Mr Igor and his class waving at us.
The ride was exciting but somehow still quite unreal. I couldn’t process that I was going to Europe and rode the bus as if I were on a trip to G1 Camp. Sitting behind the teachers and in front of friends, we heard dry humor and gossip that I no longer remember.
At the airport, excited for two hours too early, I charged straight to the gate and didn’t remember dinner, It was pure luck that I got a seat on the plane with Tatiana, but at least I managed to sleep.
26th September
After two flights lasting over 14 hours on a plane, I was ready for Prague.
The weather was cold but not overly so. European roofed houses lined the road, and we ooh-ed and aah-ed at the tram going past once every few minutes. Car sickness then got the better of me, and I rested.
The Bene Hotel was quite a great experience for me as my dorm mates were the nicest people imaginable, and the temperature was perfect for getting ten-hour sleep.
The first afternoon, we went to the Prague Museum, passing through a park full of squawking pigeons. The exhibits we visited included 20th-century history, minerals and rocks, the medieval history of Prague, and so on. I saw a suit of Austrian soldier’s uniform that looked exactly like Rudolf’s costume in the musical Elisabeth, but apparently, none of the people I walked with were musical nerds.
We saw Bibles, holy scriptures, and translations of Prague into English and tried to murder each other with fake weapons models that were unfortunately pinned to the ground.
For dinner we had Italian food in ginormous portions, which was quite good but overly salty. Trading gossip at the table, we spent a night of hysterical giggles and walking in the drizzle, seeing a glimpse of the astronomical clock in the veil of night. Rest was very welcome.
27th September
The weather outside looked like oil paintings, and the sun warmed our cold fingers. Walking behind the tour guide, we explored the city, starting from the Powder Tower and the Theatre, in which Amadeus (the movie) was filmed, and after which Don Giovanni was composed. A horse cart marched past; the driver dressed in an impeccably straight and crisp shirt. The astronomical clock started ringing ten, and we were just in time to see a skeleton ringing a bell and heads of saints rolling past small windows in the clock. It was quite impressive as the intricate drawings and statues created a strange sense of absurdity and how everything seemed still again as if nothing had happened.
The sausage we bought in the middle of Europe was the best sausage I had (and, unfortunately, the best food I would come across in Europe, except German Pork Knuckles). The prim horse-cart driver marched past again, this time carrying passengers.
We marched from the town square to a Jewish chapel, then to the famous Gothic-style Charles Bridge (pop quiz: do you know why Gothic buildings had sharp spires? They were used to impale the evil spirits that descended from the sky). A church faced the bridge, the Jesus statue on the top catching the sunlight and glowing.
On the other side of the bridge was Prague Castle and the lesser town. Small red roofs and the occasional spire, combined with the low-lying white clouds, framed a perfect picture of a small medieval European town, with the lord of the city perhaps resting in his chambers in the castle, the peasants farming their crops, and the soldiers sharpening their swords.
We followed the tour guide and walked through the Old Town, finally having lunch back where we started – near the powder tower.
In the afternoon, we visited the Museum of Communism. After realizing that any one of the descriptive paragraphs could be a perfect Paper 4 Part A IGCSE question, I started taking photos after I finished the tours. The museum gave me another perspective on something I only knew in fragments before.
There was a section of the museum that was wallpapered black and was barely lit. This section told of the deeds of the Secret Police and their torturing methods and of the stories of many poor people who died while trying to cross the border. There was a wall full of the names and dates of the people who died, like a memorial wall, which made the whole exhibit come alive with pain and truth.
After the museum, my friends and I went back to Charles Bridge. It was raining harshly on the way, and as I forgot to bring my umbrella, I had to buy a rain jacket. The bridge was misty in the rain, and we felt rather disappointed – not for long. As the sun came up suddenly from behind the clouds, a full rainbow appeared from one side of the bridge to the other, and at a specific angle, it seemed to adorn the crown of a Saint. The sight made my night.
That night, we had dinner at a medieval tavern place, which had performers who chatted along with us and played Jasmine Flower and tried to get us to sing in Czech. The food was not as great as the socializing, though.
28th September
Breakfast, and then we went straight to the nuclear bunker. It was situated near a disused mini basketball field, and when I identified the smell in the bunker, I borrowed a mask from Samuel and doused it in mint scent.
Our guide was a tall man with a touch of drama and humor (I still can’t get the picture of him holding a machine gun from my head). He explained the structure of the bunker first – built within a hill with three-meter-thick cement walls and twenty-centimeter thick lead doors that curved outwards to avoid caving in during impact.
The first thing we saw in the bunker was a revolving staircase that had, as the tour guide told us (none of us counted), 84 steps. Inside the chamber, it was dusty and smelt of mold, but as the walls were quite thick, I felt strangely safe there. The brightness of the graffiti on the basketball court contrasted sharply with the grey, undecorated walls inside. We were shown gas masks, machine guns, statues of Stalin and his giant ear, pictures of Communist propaganda, baby boxes, toilets, human statues that peeked at you from behind the corners (sometimes they were your classmates), and a gigantic Soviet flag. It seemed there was not enough oxygen for everyone, so after talking about how you were only to stay three days in the bunker after nuclear contact, methods of cleaning nuclear waste and dust, and the Velvet Revolution, we headed back outside.
The afternoon was filled with jumping on and off buses to get to Prague Castle and the Lesser City with it. The first thing we saw was the Gothic Church that lay just beside a natural ravine that was used as a moat. As it was to close soon, the church was our first destination. Right into the Church, the stained windows poured down colored glass that described Christian stories, the lines of glass fluid and neat. A statue of Jesus was mounted on the wall high above our heads, and it seemed like he was looking at me as I stood under the crucifix. The slanted light came in from somewhere and hit the flower on his chest where the wound was. I took pictures of Saint Vitus, who was a Roman teenager who got killed by his beliefs. I took a picture of a gold coat of arms painted on the walls with the writing Pravda Vitezi. I took a picture of the Lesser City through an opening in the walls upon a high-looking hill. The darkness of the walls contrasted sharply with the warmly-coloured red roofs down below. After the tour of the castle, we visited the Baroque-style gardens. I spent the whole time trying to find the second statue of Apollo that was indicated on the map but could not find it. Finally, we walked back to the Italian restaurant after a few wrong turns, but the food was great.
29th September
Having packed the night before, we went right on our way to Berlin. On the bus, I slept on and off, each time seeing different scenes outside the window when I awoke. First, the red-roofed buildings in Prague, then the wide plains of, perhaps, Germany, then golden fields of wheat, and then at a service station, we stopped, and a few friends and I took a detour into the forest with Bella as our fearless guide.
That afternoon, we visited the Reichstag, and in the glass dome, everything was coated with a golden sheen of sun. The evening soon came upon us, and we huddled in the cold. We wrote down a new quote from Mr. McCabe – “Is it snowing? Then it’s not↘️ cold↗️,” originating from our question. The food that night was average. Poker in the dorm was noisy, and I was way too excited to sleep, but the joy of being in a new city.
30th September
The hot sausages were nice, but the jam was tooth-achingly sweet. We went to Friedrichstrasse, which I think had a few music shops, but I didn’t know where exactly they were, so I settled for hoping for the Philharmonic Hall. On the metro, a girl sitting opposite us had a big dog tucked under a seat. There were a lot of music posters advertising for Chopin, Mendelssohn, and Mozart concerts that night and several others.
Our guide took us to see a thin section of the Berlin wall and then the former headquarters of the Nazis, which was located opposite the road to a hot air balloon labeled Der Welt. The Jewish Memorial was an anonymous, grey-blocked graveyard commemorating all the Jews who died in World War Two. The grayish blocks were of unequal height, and the ground between them flowed. The blocks were perfectly rectangular, with sharp edges and undamaged corners, trapping grey air between them and insulating sound.
The Stasi Prison, quite ironically, had Freiheit (Freedom) printed all over it. There was graffiti of FREIHEIT just across the entrance, then a group of iron letters spelling FREIHEIT upon which we took our seats. The guide took us through a hallway that had underground cells on both sides – to mess with the prisoner’s sense of time. We then walked to a soundproof cell that had thick rubber “wallpaper” that was pitch black.
The walk to the Berlin Wall wasn’t as solemn as it would’ve been sixty years earlier. It ended up with many memes being made – especially at what we named the Kissing Wall. We were next to the Spree River and the air was beautifully clean, the sky pure blue, and everything looked like an ‘80s movie. In the small sandbox, we drew each other’s names and took pictures of footprints. As the sun went down, we visited the TV tower, which was said to be the tallest building in Europe. My ears popped as the elevator veered up, and I was glad to stumble out of the crowded elevator (reminiscent of SCIE). The view downwards was beautiful with the sun starting to glow red.
1st October
That morning, we went to the Allied museum. The sky was grey and it was drizzling rain. The weather forecast said it was 3 degrees Celsius, but since I was wearing my thickest clothes, I felt all right. Guilty of saying, I was not paying my fullest attention to the tour and wandered around the museum myself. Mr. McCabe took a picture of a propaganda poster and asked, “What’s the message?” Which I secretly noted down in case it would be in our EOY. The museum was perfectly quiet and the dim atmosphere contributed to the feeling of solemness. We climbed into the model airplane in front of the museum building. It was once a flying airplane but too old to fly now. The belly of the plane was surprisingly comfortable (although it probably wasn’t back when it was flying), with nice wooden benches and being much warmer than outside.
Our lunch was absolutely the best thing I’ve ever tasted. I knew the Germans knew how to make pork knuckles (and beer-) but I didn’t know they were so good. I ordered one to share with Irene, as it was quite a large thing. Delicious German food!
We had free time after this, and I decided to visit the Philharmonic Hall, with the sign of Berlin Philharmonic on top. They even had a street called Herbert-von-Karajan Strasse! Unfortunately, the museum of instruments was closed for the day, so we settled for going to the City Library of Berlin (Duolingo German lessons helped!), and I started reading a copy of Beowulf for no reason. It was the biggest Library I’ve ever seen, with large bookshelves and empty space in between shelves to perhaps sit.
Final thoughts
As an ardent history student, I used to believe that history was just timelines, events, and rigid words in a textbook to remember since history textbooks tend to describe events in a dispassionately collected way. WW1 was ‘a lot of people died.’ The Holocaust was ‘Jews were imprisoned and put to death in gas chambers,’ eliciting less emotional impact than ‘Uncle Tom’s Little Cabin.’ The Berlin Wall stories were ‘140 people died trying to climb over or pass the Wall,’ ‘The Wall was broken on November 9, 1989,’ unlike the shaking, black-and-white videos of joyous, hysterical people screaming, shouting, pouring beer down the Wall that was chipped away. Blank and cold words, lacking any verve, painted a rigid and edited picture of history. Realising this on my recent history trip to Prague and Berlin with my classmates and history teacher, I started to paint this rigid skeleton with the colours of imaginative writing.
As our guide led us down the streets of Prague, to the Theatre, to the bronze engraving of Dubček, and the bronze hands with flowers, she told us stories of Jan Palach, who self-immolated in Wyncelas Square, of her mother telling her not to sign any documents during the Velvet Revolution, of how students started by singing for their dead peers and then decided to peacefully protest on the streets. As I walked over the Charles Bridge, wandered amidst the grey blocks in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and looked within the walls of the Stasi prison, history was touchable and imaginable to me for the first time – you never get to know the history of a place until you get there. I saw flashes of thrilling action that happened in this period of history, heard yells of passion, and touched cold stones beneath my fingers. This lively narrated history made me look at the guides and people on the streets differently as I thought, they’d gone through a lot to be here today. I learned that history is not just words on a page, not just a static photo, but something everyone holds in their wrinkles and customs, like the rings in a tree. History wasn’t dead to me anymore – it was vividly alive. I realised that everyone holds history in themselves – our guides were walking history documentaries, the buildings were once alive and shining, and similarly, I am a retainer of history myself.
- Jinyuan Li
…
No matter how many times I froze to death wearing shorts in Prague, no matter how many times my feet fell apart walking, and no matter how many times we were left no time for lunch, this trip was the most exciting, interesting, and bluntly put: fun trip that I have ever gone on. I’m sure that all (not most!) of my peers would agree with me. Being able to read, look and feel the places and events that our textbooks do not do enough justice to is such a surreal experience: being able to say, “I’m really here!” was an accomplishment and something that kindled this fiery love for history, not only for me but for everyone else!
The tours, museums, and monuments that we journey throughout this week-long adventure took us not only to living history, but also took us to “live” through it. Though, saying that we “felt” the people’s pain of the past is something inappropriate; we could never truly experience their lives, and to claim that would be tarnishing their harsh lives and nullifying the horrors they had to live through; I would say that we understood the wounds of the world, and know now what to do to prevent something that terrible from happening, ever again. The Stasi prison, Museum of Communism, and Topography of Terrors, just to name a few, only dent the iceberg of the perspectives of those who lived throughout a turbulent and terrifying period of history. A feeling of pity looking upon tattered photographs, a gut wrench hearing the terrifying stories of the past; this was what the trip was truly about. Taking a leap into the world of our textbook: into the life of a person whose only legacy is a statistic, into the ideologies that were smithed from blood; envisioning ourselves as humans living in history, instead of a passerby. One who ran away from the police, one who would collapse in their cell, one who would sacrifice everything for freedom.
History is not just exams, essays, and books. It is not just the study of what happened; to truly understand History, envisioning oneself into History is the first step.
- William Wen
Nobody could have expected how worthy this trip would turn out to be, no matter how much of it my A1 peers spoiled before we left. Despite the limited time and endless sites we had at hand, the experience was still memorable and it dives deeper than the boring paragraphs in our history textbook. Instead of reading about the events and places, we got to see and feel it for ourselves.
We, as enthusiastic history students, were given the valuable chance to cherish and understand history from a different perspective – the perspectives of those involved. And cherish it we did. That gut feeling of sudden nostalgia or that uneasy sensation when the horrors of history are seen upon one’s very own eyes instead of the usual numbers and pictures, it made me think. Thinking about if any of these people, any of these places, would have been offered a place in modern history if it wasn’t for the suffering and hardship endured.
History isn’t something that should only be learned, it is something that deserves to be experienced. Place yourself into the shoes of the past, and the world would present itself in a different light, a different tone, a different image. The textbook is only the tip of the iceberg, what truly activates one’s reflections upon history is to see, to feel, to envision themselves inside history.
