I have several reasons for choosing Germany to
travel to over Dterm:
1) I’ve
travelled outside of the U.S. several times to Asia, but I’ve never been to
Europe. My sister has been to
Germany and Finland, and I’ve been to Japan and China. I’ve actually travelled more than she
has, but for some reason I’ve always been jealous of her because she got to go
to Europe.
2) A
friend and I also planned to travel to Germany on a Dterm trip together (Sam
Saurez, she’s going on this trip).
We planned to go our sophomore year (2010), but I ended up going on the
China/Japan trip instead. Our
junior year, neither of us could afford, so now is our last chance!
I’m also German on my father’s side (I don’t know
what year our family immigrated from Germany, but I think it was the early
1900’s), but the German heritage kind of disappeared behind my mom’s Japanese
heritage.
I also love historical sites. Anything old is really, really
cool. And Germany is definitely a
historical country.
For example:
My sister visited the Neuschwanstein
Castle. It was built in the late
1880’s by King Ludwig II, but after his death the castle’s construction ceased
and it’s, essentially, an unfinished castle.
How can something so beautiful be unfinished? It certainly doesn’t look like it.
I actually just read on this website
that King Ludwig II built it to hide from society. Funny thing is, the castle’s so magnificent I think it’s
created the opposite effect.
Other than Germany’s beautiful and historic
castles, buildings, etc., the country is also known for the brutality of the
Nazi Regime during WWII. German
history during WWII is one of the most horrific events in history, and is
certainly the most discussed during teachings of WWII. This photo is of Auschwitz in Poland,
but it’s the most recognizable and it does the trick to getting my point
across.
The point of the photo is so I can introduce
“dark tourism” (a term I learned just recently during my study in Hiroshima
this summer). It is defined as;
people who travel to specific locations because death, destruction, etc. took
place there (such as the concentration camps and Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Such places attract thousands of people
because they want to see these dark, depressing places.
And I am one of those people…I love WWII
history because it depicts the horribleness of human nature and how easy it is
for people to kill other people, especially the justification of killing
thousands of innocent people all over the world (The Nazi’s justified the
extermination and imprisonment of the Jewish people, homosexuals, and political
and war criminals because it threatened the existence of the Aryan race and
Hitler’s view of Germany, just as the U.S. justified the imprisonment of
Japanese Americans along the west coast and the use of atomic bombs on Japan’s
civilian cities).
All in all, I really want to go to Germany to
learn about its heritage and long history.
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