GIB 2025: Welcome to Berlin

After a wonderful but tiring spring semester back in Spokane we all managed at last to slink our way into the City of Spies. We spent the first day recovering from our 10–13-hour flights and 10-hour time distance by walking over 10 miles around the heart of Berlin taking in the sights and sounds of this wonderous city while trying to not pass out mid step.

While we will undertake many interesting and important trips and lessons throughout this course, I think that Saturday might just be the most important day to our class and our experience in Berlin. This day allows us to start to see and experience the culture and feel of berlin as well as get familiar with the U-Bahn (the subway) and start to understand the city but most importantly we started to gain some trust and comfort in the city that we would be staying.

I started the day by getting a full taste of jetlag with a bright and early wake up time of 5:30 am followed by tossing and turning until 6:30 am before giving up and heading down to the lobby. I was far from the only one who was plagued by sleep troubles and after some coordination a large group of us decided to head out on a morning walk over to this beautiful park that was nearby that housed a memorial. We then proceeded to get breakfast from an adorable café that we had spotted during the walk and spent time getting comfortable in the local neighborhood and try communicating in German with the locals (they saw through us immediately and just responded in English). We then went back for our big tour of the day.

We started the tour by heading over to the Brandenburg gate to meet our tour guide. We then proceeded to do a full walking tour of the city center and hit many of the major monuments like the parliament building, the holocaust memorial, the Berlin Wall, and Checkpoint Charlie. These sites were extremely fascinating to learn about and really helped us experience the city and some of its history as well as keeping us entertained and active enough to stave off the jetlag.

One thing that I personally found interesting was how many of the restaurants around the checkpoint were American fast food like McDonalds and KFC with these restaurants feeling like some kind of final brag over the USSR by putting American symbols and culture around the very line that once divided the city. It is also interesting from a world history perspective to see how many major events of the 20th century had been focused on the very locations that we were walking around. We also heard about numerous instances of information warfare throughout the cold war from soviet propaganda around the wall to western media’s coverage of the atrocities and of course the numerous spies and schemes that earned the city its moniker. We then went to the Berlin Museum to explore and experience some of Germany.

Once we returned, we decided to simply get some quick food from a nearby restaurant before all passing out from our busy day. It was a great start to our course in Berlin and a great introduction to the German culture as well as introducing just how important information warfare was to this history as well as how important it is in our modern life.