I got up nice and early this morning (6:15) so I could wash my hair & let it dry before catching a bus to Potsdamer Platz to catch a cheap train to Leipzig at 8. (I also needed to get breakfast & coffee at the train station.) I met C from my class, and we went down together.
I was planning to meet![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kriski, but she got a cold yesterday (it was terrible weather; I'm surprised I didn't convert from "getting over a cold" to "walking pneumonia" during the Potsdam trip), so she stayed home. Alas!
So, we walked through the old city. It's not very big, maybe a kilometer across. We saw several churches (Nikolai and Thomas) and some old buildings and a statue of Goethe. Then we walked to the building where the Stasi had their operations center in Leipzig, which has since been turned into a museum. They have everything from the spy equipment to disguises to jars of scents of detainees (for dogs to find them later). It's some really creepy 1984 shit, except 1984 was fiction. The emblem of the Stasi (MfS, Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit/ministry for state security) is really fucking creepy: a hand holding a machine gun with the DDR flag attached to it.
They also had a special exhibit about the popular uprising in 1988/89, which had a lot of participants in Leipzig. I hadn't known that before. Leipzig is called the Stadt der Helden (City of Heroes) because of the major role it played in 1988/89.
A lot of the documents had BStU stamps on them. With really low numbers: 0001, 0030. Of course, in November 1989, they started pulping their files, so many were lost.
Mostly we wandered around, had a late lunch at a potato restaurant (where the menu consisted entirely of dishes made with potatoes in some way; mine was baked and stuffed with tzatziki), tried to find the Bach museum and failed, wandered around some more, and had coffee and cake outside before heading back to the train.
My cold from last week has progressed from nasal congestion (though I still have a bit of sniffles) to an irritating cough, which basically manifests as an itch in my trachea, which I scratch by coughing. Yay. Then it works a bit of phlegm loose so I have to clear my throat, then, hey, I trigger another round of coughing. I had something like this twice in high school, and it lasted at least a month. Though it was winter, and my mom's cigarette smoking didn't help any. So maybe this time it'll be better. I hope.
So that was my day. Now I might go to bed, since I got up so damn early and am trying to get over this illness.
I was planning to meet
kriski, but she got a cold yesterday (it was terrible weather; I'm surprised I didn't convert from "getting over a cold" to "walking pneumonia" during the Potsdam trip), so she stayed home. Alas!So, we walked through the old city. It's not very big, maybe a kilometer across. We saw several churches (Nikolai and Thomas) and some old buildings and a statue of Goethe. Then we walked to the building where the Stasi had their operations center in Leipzig, which has since been turned into a museum. They have everything from the spy equipment to disguises to jars of scents of detainees (for dogs to find them later). It's some really creepy 1984 shit, except 1984 was fiction. The emblem of the Stasi (MfS, Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit/ministry for state security) is really fucking creepy: a hand holding a machine gun with the DDR flag attached to it.
They also had a special exhibit about the popular uprising in 1988/89, which had a lot of participants in Leipzig. I hadn't known that before. Leipzig is called the Stadt der Helden (City of Heroes) because of the major role it played in 1988/89.
A lot of the documents had BStU stamps on them. With really low numbers: 0001, 0030. Of course, in November 1989, they started pulping their files, so many were lost.
Mostly we wandered around, had a late lunch at a potato restaurant (where the menu consisted entirely of dishes made with potatoes in some way; mine was baked and stuffed with tzatziki), tried to find the Bach museum and failed, wandered around some more, and had coffee and cake outside before heading back to the train.
My cold from last week has progressed from nasal congestion (though I still have a bit of sniffles) to an irritating cough, which basically manifests as an itch in my trachea, which I scratch by coughing. Yay. Then it works a bit of phlegm loose so I have to clear my throat, then, hey, I trigger another round of coughing. I had something like this twice in high school, and it lasted at least a month. Though it was winter, and my mom's cigarette smoking didn't help any. So maybe this time it'll be better. I hope.
So that was my day. Now I might go to bed, since I got up so damn early and am trying to get over this illness.
