Erasmus 2020 – A Rathmines College Odyssey

We arrived in our room, we being myself and the lads, the lads being JoJo, Stephen, Vitalie, Adam and Michael. The girls shared a room together down the corridoor, the girls being Orla, Emma, Sarah and Roisin. The hostel we were to be living in for nearly two weeks together was called the Generator hostel. We celebrated our arrival by heading off to get some pizza together, then we ended up in a shisha bar and off we trotted then to a fabulous gay bar. Tremendous stuff indeed it was. Not a bad first day or more so night. The cigarettes were incredibly cheap and so was the food, nice change from Dublin for sure.

Day two consisted of a tour, the gang gathered together at the GEB offices, the place that organised the trip for us. We gathered around a long table with our tutour Aishling Breen gave us the lowdown as to what to expect from the trip and what was required of us. We all had different jobs, some of them were in a college doing IT work and the rest of us had random gigs. Roisin was to work in a book shop, Orla in an english language teaching institutuion and so forth. I was to work in the GEB offices, which came with some perks. Mainly a endless supply of free coffee and a nice swivily chair, which I spent 20% of my time spinning around on yelping wee! ( I was later arrested for these actions)

I was not arrested for those actions.

Funny old building, the GEB offices , it has quite the history. Back in the not so good days of the war it used to sell clothes. Specifically clothes that rather appealed to the Nazis. Which I guess is sort of odd, but not really at the same time. The Nazis weren’t known for nudism so I guess they had to buy clothes. Anyway, so downstairs under the main floor of the now GEB offices lies a basement which back in the war had a bowling alley and was a sort of social place for the Nazis to meet up in and sadly torture people.

So yes oftentimes I would find myself swiveling around in my seat and suddenly I would be hit with the history of the building in my mind and it kind of made the swiveling less enjoyable. Sad swiveling ain’t so fun.

Anyway our tour guide (and my boss) Gunther brought us for a tour around the city after a history lesson about the Berlin wall. We saw the Reichstag ( Angela Merkel was not to be seen) the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (Gerams are big into churches), the Brandemburg Gate, the Berliner Fernsehturn, the Rotes Rathaus and so forth. I can confirm it is a beautiful city.

Personally for me the best part of the Tour was when we got to the Bebelplatz which is a public square in Mittie. This area was the site of the major Nazi book burning ceremonies back in 1933. Book burning was started by the German sudent association. Books from the Library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaf were targeted and burnt to cinders. On the 10th of May 1933 the minister for propoganda , Joseph Goebells hosted a speech before the burning of the books. The Nazi student League, the SA, the SS and members of the Hitler youth group were in attendence. 20,000 books were burned.

Now in Bebelplatz they have what they call the empty Library memorial. It is essentially a large slab of glass set into the coblestone of the ground, if you peer down into it you can see way down bellow the ground a vast array of huge empty sheleves, which of course symbolize all the books that were lost during that time.

I am not an advocate for book burning, but if I could I would burn every copy of the Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey books that exist in this world.

I’m kidding of course, but heavens go read some Haruki Murakami or something. Actually the only good thing about Twilight is that it introduced the now gorgeous stud that is Robert Pattinson to the world. He can 50 shades of Grey me any day of the week!

I hate to dabble with the dark arts of clichés but I will very much stick to the old adage of what happens in Berlin stays in Berlin. I can tell you I personally survived off frankfurter sausages and chips for most of the excursion and it was fantastic. Besides, telling you would spoil the fun and it would be an invasion of everyone else’s privacy. It was an intamite two weeks and if you have the opportunity next year to take it up, you most certainly should.

Gosh knows some of us probrably brought back Covid 19, oops. 

It is for sure a trip we won’t forget.