My brain hurts. Germany is really neat and I’m so glad we got to come and I’m having a really good time here… but that good time includes a lot of very rushed meals and early mornings in congruence with Prof. Katrin’s “We don’t have much time, let’s not waste any” mantra. Truth be told most of the time is wasted by the inertia of hauling 21 people through downtown and onto metro’s and trains and tours. I’ve clocked a lot of nap hours on public transportation. The startled feeling of waking up and jumping off a metro car is distinctly unpleasant, but something i’ve had to get used to here in Europe.

Today we toured the Bauhaus which is pretty special for an architecture student, although from outside appearances it looks like a big boring white boxy building in the middle of the weirdly empty suburb of Dessau. It’s the place where Walter Gropius started his movement for the gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of art” inclusive of painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, music, etc. It was a big deal in the early 1900’s and changed a lot about art and architecture. The Bauhaus building, which housed studios and a technical school, was radical for its time and exhibited Gropius’ vision. There. Free history lesson, y’all, don’t say I never did nothin’ for ya.

To finish off a long week of traveling, we visited the Holocaust Memorial in downtown Berlin. I guess I won’t say much about that because there’s too much to say. Not something anyone wants to think about, but we must.

I tried German beer and… it’s still gross beer-tasting beer. Sorry, I am just not cultured enough to tell the difference between a good and bad beer. Perhaps I could measure it by the amount of ounces I am able to consume before giving the rest to someone else. So I am not planning on going to a beer garden (biergarten?) while i’m here. Just not my thing.

My favorite things so far have been the memorial chapel at Bernauer Straße, the Berlin Wall monuments, Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, and the Düttmann Hansa Library in Berlin; The Einsteinturm (Einstein Tower) and Telegraph Hill in Potsdam; the Speicherstadt (warehouse) district in Hamburg; and the Bauhaus tour in Dessau.

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Two more days and we’ll be back in Barcelona, hitting crunch-time for final deadlines. Simultaneously I’m applying for internship positions for the summer. This whole organization-and-self-promotion phase is not my favorite thing. But I am hopeful of finding some good work experience for the near future. I think I have finally figured out what kind of architecture I want to work on and what kinds I usually hate. All this traveling has been good for that; I’m just seeing and learning tons of things until my head is about to explode. I need some time to fix my projects from the last 3 semesters… they all ended in pretty rough shape.

Spending every moment with the same 21 people is also changing my perspective on how much social interaction I actually want in my life. I have been in a pretty people-needy phase the last couple of years. Right now, I’m fantasizing about living by myself. On a farm. In the middle of nowhere. You’re not invited.

Haha. But seriously, it’s easy to cop out and just say, people are annoying, I’m not going to deal with them. That’s cowardly and not particularly realistic. I do, however, look forward to transitioning back to a lifestyle that includes a lot more working and resting alone.