Day of Shopping

Today was chill. We spent a good deal of the day shopping for gifts and returned to the hotel with little to show for it, except for a few books. The day started in Stadtmitte. I had a meeting scheduled with Anja who works for the Joint American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. She is of Jewish and Croatian descent and has lived in Berlin with her family for some years now. We met at the House of Small Wonder, a café near the Oranienburg Tor S-Bahn station. The location worked nicely, as the café is only a few buildings over from IES Berlin where I’ll be holding classes with my students next year. We’ll be lodging in the vicinity in either an apartment or hotel. I wanted to explore the area for this reason. Jessi ordered an egg breakfast dish of some kind and I had a crescent with scramble eggs inside of it, or at least that’s what I call it. The meeting went well. Our day of shopping, talking, coffee drinking took us to the Alex Shopping Mall on Alexanderplatz and The Berlin Mall of Potsdamer Platz. But it wasn’t just a day of mall shopping. We walked the city, again. In the photo, Jessi is standing next to a memorial for the Rosenstrasse Protest. Aryan women demanded the release of their Jewish husbands in 1943 and were successful.