My stay in Berlin College

On my first day, I signed up for the Hohenschönhausen Memorial Center tour. As we went around the aforementioned prison, we were informed about the physical and mental tortures the people of East Berlin had to endure. The term prison is actually not quite right for this facility because It’s actually a holding facility where the victims were forced to often falsely confess their “crimes”, where they then would get sent to Gulags; Soviet prisons which are enough to mess with your stomach or even be a material for your nightmares. 

On the second day of my trip, after I had breakfast we, as in some of the gls students decided to go to the Alexander Platz. Typical tourist place, I’m aware. Unfortunately I didn’t find it as exciting as I thought it would be.

Later, we went to the Rotes Rathaus which had a great both interior and exterior.

Then we went to the chain restaurant “Nordsee” and proceeded to end our trip for the day.

On my third day of the trip, we went to yet another touristic site which is the famous “Brandenburger tor”. It was yet filled with a nice amount of tourist traps however with a nice view. There were a lot of bike riders which surprised me since my city, Izmir doesn’t offer much complacent bike trails. 

On thursday we decided to go visit Kreuzberg to pay tribute to our homeland, Turkey. It was definitely not what we expected out of “Kleines Istanbul”. It was rather dirty and seemed a bit unsafe.

 I felt a bit sad that a neighborhood whom a lot of Turks live in happened to be one of the worse neighborhoods although “Markthalle Neun” was really nice, filled with delicious streetfood options from all orund the world. Although I wish I was hungry when I visited there.

Apart from the food market, we also visited a turkish Baeckerei and got Simit; a bagel-like sesame coated pastry, Poğaça; a stuffed bread-like pastry and Mercimek Çorbası; a kind of red lentil soup.

On friday afternoon we went to the YAAM! beach which was a very chill 

place with a ton of african inspired clothes and dishes , merchandise but sadly

no beach since berlin’s a landlocked city:(

Overall the campus had a really nice atmosphere

with lots of trees. It also had a tiny basketball hoop, a 

table tennis unit and washer machines. 

The next day, I decided to explore the city by myself and planned on touring the city by bike. 

The lovely weather unfortunately made that not possible so I took the M1 tram to hackescher markt.

After taking a free shower, I finally paid a visit to a store to buy an umbrella. If you’re packing for a

trip to berlin make sure that one of the items you pack is an umbrella.

While I was window shopping along the rosenthaler street,

I happened to find a thrift store which was rather intriguing and

had to go in. The clotes had a lot of variety whether it were y2k, sports clothes

among other things. 

On Sunday, I went to the flea market in Mauerpark which opens 

it’s doors every sunday. Upon strolling through the park and looking at the

stands, I ended up finding cute hippie style pants and buying them.

To sum up, my visit to the GLS campus in berlin and the summer school was such a nice experience.

My teachers, whether it would be Konrad and Alexandra and many more, were teaching in a fun manner while also helping us improve our speaking and grammatical skills.

I cannot wait to visit German Language Schools again:)