emily of age

The weekend of October 9-11, I went with the International Office at Leuphana to Berlin.  Those of you with a decent memory for dates might realize that this meant I was in Berlin on my Oct 11, 2010, my 21st birthday.  Coming of age in the German capital, where, of course, the legal drinking age is 16.  Woo.

It was a most incredible weekend.  Berlin is a city with so much history and so much going on.  Unlike the tiny little Hanseatic city of Lüneburg where I live, pretty much all of Berlin was destroyed in the World War II, so most everything is new and modern.  Yet, even the new and modern buildings are racked with history, given that Berlin was a hotbed for Cold War tensions.

We took a walking tour of the city, ate pizza at this ridiculously cramped and amazing Italian place, saw La Traviotta auf Deutsch (Italian operas in German?  oh my), toured the Reichstag, visited the Stasi museum, and much more.  It was a very action packed weekend.

Unfortunately, my camera died my first day in town.  I took Flip Video of the rest of the adventure, but given that it's been a month and I'm just now WRITING about the weekend, you can guess how much video editing I've done lately.  So hopefully, more Berlin documentation is to come.

But one thing I do want to point out from one of the few buildings of which I took pictures, is this:
The words on this building, though difficult to tell from the size of this picture, say "Siehe, Ich bin bei euch alle Tage bis an der Welt Ende.  Unser Glaube ist der Sieg, der die Welt Ueberwunden hat."

The first half comes from the Gospel of St. Matthew 28:20, the King James Version of which reads, "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world."

The second half comes from the First Epistle of John 5:4, which reads (again KJV) "And this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith."

The building is, fittingly, the Berlin Cathedral, but I believe the words it displays are applicable to the history of this great city and this great country.  This church was built in 1905, and in the hundred years since, Germany has undergone changes in borders, structure, government, and culture about as many times as a country can and still be a functioning country.  But through the entire span, their faith in the future was a victory that overcame the world.