We woke up to sunshine streaming through the windows - hurray! Ana made us breakfast (eggs, meat, bread and capuccino) and dropped us off at the start point for our city tour. She headed back home to finish up the PowerPoint presentation for our class that afternoon and we began our tour. It's amazing how much nicer things look in the sunshine :-) Coburg is a gorgeous city, set in the foothills of a small mountain range, one of which has a castle on top - Veste Coburg. More about the castle later.
As we ventured around the small city, I admired it's contrast to Munich. Munich is so clean and well-polished it's almost sterile, while Coburg is quaint and homey with classic German architecture. We visited several stolpersteins - gold plaques inlaid in the ground in front of the homes of Coburg citizens who were affected by the Nazis. They had either been deported to concentration camps or fled to other areas or countries in an effort to avoid persecution. Our student guide read biographies of each individual. This stood out to me and helped me to realize that understanding individual stories makes WW2 more personal. In other words, up until this point I'd been unable to relate to it on a personal level - it had just been a part of history. Standing in this quaint small town, you get a micro perspective on the upheaval of the war. As I write this a few days later I'm beginning to understand why this course is structured the way it is. And I also realize - surprise surprise - that I don't know everything about everything after all. As my dear professor Olsen advised me in response to my frustration, just being present in the moment is valuable in and of itself. Ignore the lack of structure and disorganization - something I clearly need to work on - and just be.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment