Sierra Summit

Since I have still not made it full circle back to San Diego, the adventure continues. Today we went to Sierra Summit for some snowboarding. It has been raining a lot here so the snow was perfect, the sun was out, it wasn't too cold. I have been coming here to ski since I was a little girl and these were the best conditions I have ever seen.

Andrea and I snowboarded.

Mom and Dad skiied.

The day really could not have been more beautiful.

You can see mom here tearing up China Bowl, a black diamond. This is the second time this season I have been and I noticed a big difference. It was much easier the second time around which of course made it more fun. I need to start going more regularly. Such a fantastic day!

Home???

After all last nights festivities Charlotte drove me to James' house at 4am, then James took me to the airport at 5am, I got on a plane at 9am and said goodbye to England....

19 hours later.....I said hello to LA - could they be more dramatically different??? It was so nice to fly over LA and see familiar stores and people driving in their cars and houses instead of flats, all things that are familiar to me. But there are so many things that have become familiar to me about London. I saw a big Target and thought, "I am really going to miss Tesco". I also saw a big parking lot and thought, I am really excited to drive my car to the grocery store and not have to walk 15 minutes home with heavy bags. Bittersweet...

Dad picked me up at the airport....heaven.....and helped me acclimatize with some In-N-Out. Excellent!

When we got home I met this little lady and newest addition to the family. Patches. So precious!

Mom had of course made me a welcome home sign. I can always count on that. It was so nice to just sit around the living room and be at home with my family. Andrea is super cute as usual and way energetic and it was great to see mom and catch up on the news. Nothing interesting to report about the night, it was perfect!

Saying Goodbye

Can't think of a better way to end an epic adventure than to be with those who made it epic. I gave Lauren a Michael Buble (our obsession) cd for her birthday tomorrow and she gave me a book with all her favorite British recipes and some rocky road...yum.

We all met up at the chapel at they Hyde Park YSA dance. Here is Felicity, Charlotte and James (is that really a smile James??)

Josh, Emily, Loren and Charly.

These are "my ladies". Could not have asked for a better group of friends. I am really sad to leave them. They were not just friends I happend to make because I had no other friends.... well I didn't have any other friends, but I would have picked them even if the circumstances were different. Amazing girls.

After Hyde park we drove into town to Leichester Square (which was not an easy thing even at 2am....the city was just getting going) and wandered around and got some ice cream.

As mentioned, it is Lauren's 26th tomorrow, so James gave her this button which she sported all night and told everyone that it was her very first YSA dance....hehe.

What an fantastic way to spend my last night. With these great people just wandering around the heart of this great city, couldn't have been better.

Special thanks goes out to James, (another failed attempt at a smile, it must be too cloudy for people in Leeds to smile...) if it weren't for him I wouldn't know any of these amazing people.

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Finishing the Book of Mormon

I finished reading the Book of Mormon today. I have read it many times over but this time I learned a new appreciation for Alma. For some reason I had it in my head that it was all war in Alma. Not true, there is tons of great doctrine in that book and from the war chapters I learned a very important lesson. One that is taught over and over again. If you keep the commandments the Lord will bless you and if you don't keep His commandments you will be punished. Very applicable to life. The Lord keeps His promises.

Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

This is an aerial view of the camp, it was opened as a work camp in 1936 and housed all kinds of people. Political prisoners, homosexuals, Jehovah's witnesses, criminals, gypsies and Jews. The center triangle portion of the camp is where we visited, which is where the inmates were housed. The surrounding areas were where the prisoners were marched daily to fulfill their work duties in a brick factory, aircraft manufacturing, forestry, and even counterfeiting money.


This is where the SS guards were trained for all of Nazi Germany. Before any person could be considered to be a guard in the concentration camp they had to show 5 years of dedication to the Nazi party and then they would enter this facility where contact with the outside community was limited and they were psychologically brainwashed.

In Biology they were taught about the racial hierarchy. They learned about Darwinism and the survival of the fittest, the fittest being the Aryan race. By destroying these lower human beings they would be helping along the life cycle of the earth.

They were also taught courses about how Jews have been the cause of great problems for the last 400 years, wars, famines, pestilence all caused by the Jews.

This is now the training center for the Berlin Police force, a constant reminder about how power can corrupt.

This building was where the SS guards had nightly entertainment. The prisoners called it the green monster.

Prisoners were the bar staff, particularly the Jehovah's Witnesses as an additional slap in the face since they were against such things. Working here was a very dangerous job. SS guards were themselves very harsh, but a drunk SS guard was even worse, so one small slip up would prove to be very grave.

You will also notice that this is built of wood. Hitler had many of his buildings here built with wood as he fully intended to win the war and said that in 20 years there would be no enemies to the Nazi's and that these camps would no longer be needed.....very confident.

The prisoners would arrive at the train station in the town outside the camp and be marched to these gates.

They would be "briefed" which meant stripped naked, dunked in a cold antibiotic bath (no matter what the weather), have their head shaved, receive a cotton uniform and be given a number. All this was meant to demoralize the prisoners and strip them of their identity so they would be easier to control.

Speaking of the cold, today it was windy and about 30 degrees. At one point the tour guide actually turned around and said, "What a nice day", he wasn't joking....I guess it is very commonly hovering around 0 degrees.

They would then line up the prisoners and tell them the rules of the camp and while they were talking the SS guards would be watching the crowd for one person who was looking down or seemed to be not paying attention and bring them to the front of the group and beat them to death as an example to the rest, all part of the routine briefing.

Through these trees just outside the camp you can see the home of the commandant of this camp. He had supreme rule over how this camp was run. The guide told us a little bit about the barbarian of a man running this camp. When it was liberated they searched his house and found a lamp made of human skin, mostly tattooed skin (when he saw a tattoo on someone he indicated that they be taken care of so he could have their skin), Mien Kamph with a cover in human skin and a necklace make out of gold teeth.... Some of the SS guards may have had some humanity left in them and simply been brainwashed, but this guy was certainly working for the devil.

The inscription on the gates reads, "Work will set you free" This is what they were told upon entrance to the "work camp", but once inside it became very obvious that the only way out was through the chimneys. 200,000 people entered these gates and only 100,000 ever came out.

In this main square directly behind the gates is where the prisoners lined up each morning for roll call. They woke up at 4:30 in the summer and 5:30 in the winter. They had exactly one half hour to be out at roll call. You had to use the toilet and wash before coming out since morning and night were the only times you could use the toilet. If you woke up next to a dead person, it was your job to drag the body and pile it in the square to be counted as well. One time they actually had to stand out at attention for 11 hours. They had received orders from the commandant to identify the weak prisoners. After 11 hours of standing in the cold 400 of the weakest prisoners had dropped dead.

These are some of the security measures. the sign reads neutral zone. Any prisoner caught in this zone would be shot immediately, that is followed by an electrical fence of 400 volts ( a popular way of committing suicide was to throw yourself into that), then the huge wall then guards and dogs and then another wall. No one ever escaped from inside these walls.

When the camp was liberated it was left to its ruin, these barracks have been reconstructed using the degenerated materials, the actual walls these people slept in. These were their bunks, two to three in a bunk. The barracks were built for 100 men, but 400 were usually kept in each.

These were the toilets for 400 men to used in a half hour, people would get trampled while trying to get into this room and out for roll call.

Wash basis for your face and for your feet on the right. There are accounts of prisoners being drowned by SS guards in those foot baths as well as in the overflowing toilets. A favorite punishment would also be to cover over the ceiling vents of the barrack so that the stench became stifling.

This walled area inside the camp is where the high security prison is kept and where the torture took place. Most prisoners could not see the torture taking place but they could hear the sounds of the whips and the screams of their comrades. Here is where a prisoner would have their hands tied behind their back then the rope attached to that nail and be standing on a chair. Another prisoner would then be ordered to kick the chair out, dislocating their shoulders. It wasn't fatal immediately but what good are you in a work camp without the use of your arms.

This is the high security prison where well known prisoners and prisoners that could start an uprising among the other prisoners were kept. They lived their whole lives in solitary confinement, and as you can see by those boxes over the windows, often without light. Life expectancy was longer since they were kept indoors.

This grate covers a deep pit that would be filled with a little bit of water and dead corpses. A live prisoner would then be put in that whole with the rotting bodies. If they didn't die of exposure, they most certainly died of some kind of disease.

We then went outside the walls of the camp to where the extermination portion began. Apparently, Hitlers intention was not to kill the Jews. He tried making life hard for them at first by banning other from using their shops, then when that didn't work he tried scaring them and that was "The night of broken glass" where their shops were burned and their people terrorized, but that didn't work well enough he started putting them in concentration camps and ghettos. As his empire grew and he had Jews streaming in from Poland and Italy and Austria and all over he decided to start the genocide.

This was the original method of death in the camp. You would be marched outside of the camp and tied to a pole at one end of this pit, then those two doors would open and an SS firing squad would open fire. It was decided that this was too slow and too traumatic for the SS guards who had to look into the eyes of their victim, so they became more creative.

This is the remnants of the gas chamber. It is very small because it was only used experimentally. This was not the main method of killing in the camp.

These rooms were set up to look like a doctors office. The prisoner would be told that they were going to be examined by the doctor and taken outside the gates of the camp. They would go into a waiting room with a gramophone playing loud classical music. They would go into another room where an SS guard dressed in a doctors coat would have them remove their clothes and weigh them, they would check their mouth and if they had gold teeth they would mark their arm. They would then be led into the last and smallest room that is built with double brick for sound proofing.

This measuring stick would be placed against the wall. The prisoner would stand against this measuring stick and an SS guard in the secret room behind would open a trap door and put a single low caliber shot through the prisoners spinal cord. 22,000 people died in that small room.

The bodies would then be thrown in this oven. Other prisoners would then open the back and shovel out the ash and wheel it out to be dumped in huge open pits. If the prisoner had any family they would be contacted and would be informed that their family member had died of "natural causes" and would be allowed to buy "their" ash for an astronomical price.

Back inside the walls of the camp is the infirmary, or medical testing facility. The testing that took place here was used to improve the war effort.

Many soldiers were dying of gangrene. They would throw grenades at prisoners and if they survived wait for gangrene to set in and then try all sorts of acids and burning to cure it. There is still no cure for gangrene.

Many sailors were dying from hypothermia. Prisoners were put in an ice bath and once hypothermia set in the would do all kinds of test to see how they could be saved. This is how it was learned that it destroys the tissue if the body is rewarmed too quickly.

They also did racial studies. Could a gypsies skin be bleached white? They tried. Could blue dye be injected into the eyes to change eye color....they tried that too.

If you were not shot and burned in the ovens, your body would have been considered to have died of "natural causes". You would have been brought here for an "autopsy" This was all for show. Prisoners would make an autopsy incision in the chest of the corpse and then sew it back up and pick one of the natural causes of death.

The prisoners who worked here came up with their own code. So if someone died of hypothermia their death certificate would say heart attack. So now families members can often find out the true cause of death.

On April 20, 1945 as the Nazi's were losing the war and the soviet soldiers were fast approaching the commandant told the SS guards to get rid of the prisoners. They started on a death march to the northern border of Germany where boats were waiting to be filled with prisoners, sailed into the middle of the sea and then sunk to destroy the evidence. The road quickly became littered with the dead, many were too weak even to leave. The red cross intercepted the march before they reached the sea and told the SS guards that the soviets were hours away and to give them the prisoners which they did and fled. They were then marched to the closest town and the locals there were forced, sometimes at gunpoint to care for the prisoners.

As I saw in first person all the evidence of these atrocities I wasn't quite sure how to deal with it. It felt weird to talk about normal things or to eat my sandwich. I just kept thinking...."Oh Heavenly Father, these are all your children!" What a terrible time it must have been for him and what a sweet release it must have been for these men and women to meet death and their maker. I guess what I take away from my time in berlin is to enjoy the rights that I have. The right to simply be free.....how massive that simple thing is!

Berlin

This is the Pariser Platz. It is a very prominent symbol of the city. This city is incredibly historic. WWI and WWII were both started here and the cold war began and finished in this city.

This is the very posh Hotel Adlon. This is the building where Michael Jackson dangled his baby from the 3rd floor in 2003.

This is the Reichstag, which is the German government building.

Next stop was the Jewish memorial, suprisingly only built in 2005.

It is made up of this blank slabs of dark rock. No jews acutally died on this sight but it is right in the center of Berlin where people pass very often and can remember the attrocity of the Holocaust.

The spot where the tour guide is standing, just beyond tha blue car is the sight directly over the bunker where Hitler committed suicide. He ceremoniously killed his wife and favorite dog first with cyanide and then shot himself (because soldiers die from gun shots not cyanide). Our tour guide pointed out that it is very fitting that there is nothing to mark the spot of his death except a big ugly parking lot.

The wall.... It was interesting to learn more about it. Apparently there were 4 different parts of germay and west berlin was in a part of the country where they were offering 100 deutchmarks to immigrate and life was better and thriving there, so they built the wall to stop immigration, then to stop it, they had to shut all the borders and eventually people were trapped there. It finally came down on November 9, 1989 and people from east germany flooded in and ran around and eventually went home, they didn't necessarily want to live there, they were simply fighting for the right to travel...

This area on the west side of the wall is where the building stood where all the masterminding of the holocaust was done. You can see remnants of brick walls underground, this would have been where prisoners were kept and tortured before being sent to concentration camps.

Here is Checkpoint Charlie. It was one of the most used crossings between west and east Germany.

This is the book burning memorial which is in the same spot where 20,000 books by forward thinking authors were burned in 1933. You can vaguely see book shelves under the glass. There is just enough space on those shelves to hold 20,000 books.

There is also an intersting plaque nearby that has a quote by Heinrich Hein in 1821, "Where they have burned books, they will in the end burn people" Very prophetic.

This is Humbolt University. Anciently teaching was very different, teacher taught student, student grew up and became a professor and taught what he was taught from his previous teacher. Someone here came up with the idea that professors should also be students and thus was research born.....curses!

This is the German national cathedral. It was built in the late 19th century mostly because they were trying to keep up with St. Paul's and Notre Dame.

After the walking tour I went to one of the best muesums in Berlin, the Pergamonmuseum. This is the Pergamon altar, where sacrifices were burnt to their gods.

This is the ancient gate to the city of Babylon. The lower tiles are the original tiles and the rest is a recreation.

This is the recreation of the path walking up to the gate, very ornate.

This is a mini model of what it would have looked like int he time of Nebacunezzar II.

After the museum I headed back to the Reichstag (governmnet building) to climb up in the dome. It has spiral walkways all the way to the top. The view of the city was amazing.

I have really seen just a tiny piece of this huge city.

While the dome offers a great view it is also very symbolic, this is the view looking down on the parliament room where all the politicians meet, so this may serve as a reminder that they are very literally under the the people they are representing.

There is a good night view of the dome, not sure what is with the rainbow of lasers to the side, kind of cool though. It was really very intersting to come face to face with so much recent history today, very educational.

Walking Prague

This is for real! Not a disneyland fake, how incredible! This is the Prague Cathedral. This is where I met up with a group for a walking tour of the city.

In the same square is this astronomical clock which was built sometime in the 15th century. Very complex for that time.

This is the Estates Theater. It is famous becasue Mozart conducted the first show of Don Giovanni here.

This is the Jewish quarter. There are quite a few synagoges left in the city, the tour guide explained that Hitler occupied the city for 7 years, which was plenty of time for him to destroy them all, but his plan was to keep this Jewish quarter intact as a museum of the extinct Jewish race.....twisted.

I got a little history on the Prague castle. It is apparently in use today as one of their government buildings. It was started in 870 and finished in 1926....they certainly took their time. It is also the largest medieval castle in the world....very cool.

I am in Wenceslaus square, you can see a statue of him sitting on his horse behind me. This is the king the christmas carol was written about.

I finished off the day by going to the National Theater to see an Opera, "Vec Makropulos". The theater was amazing, the orchestra sounded fantastic and the singing was really beautiful. The opera had the english translation to read, in the last 10 minutes I figured out that it was about a beautiful opera singer who had found the elixer of life and lived to be 337 and how life had lost all meaning for her. I wouldn't put it in there with the classics, but I am glad I went.

Prague Day 1

This afternoon I flew into Prague. Such a beautiful place. I didn't do anything particularly exciting, just wandered around town and checked out the shops and sights.

This is the main street of the new city of Prague, you can see the natural history museum at the end of the road.

I sat down on a bench here to write a post card to Justin and just as I did this bum who smelled strongly of cheap wine came up to me and started saying something in Czeck and put his hand out for money. I only had a few coins for my tour tomorrow so I didn't give him anything. Instead of just going away he just stood there over me while I wrote my post card. I tried to offere him an orange I had just bought but he just pointed to his one tooth and put his hand out for a coin ( apparently oranges are too hard or their alcohol content is not high enough...) For about 5 minutes he hovered over me about 1 foot away while I wrote and held onto my purse and then I finished and walked away. Weird!

I have no idea what this is, but it looks very cool and classically eastern european.

There is the castle in the background.

I got some traditional Czeck food tonight. This is really good braised beef with potato pancakes, very tasty.

Saying Goodbye to Tommies

Today was my last day of work at St. Thomas Hospital. As a parting gift Heavenly Father gave me some amazing sights and some great people. This was the view when I got to work this morning.

And the view was just as stunning as the sun went down.

This has been my view for the last two months. Probably one of the most well known views in the world. I have been very lucky.

I was also lucky to work with Jon, one of my favorite people to work with.

And Charlie.... We had a good and reasonably busy day. Most of our patients were confused which left us never a dull moment. I have had a good experience here at Tommies. I wouldn't want to repeat it (purely because of the different nursing style) but I am so glad I was able to meet some great people and learn a a new way of doing things.

...won't miss the uniform too much.

Spa Day with Lauren

Today I met up with Lauren for our much awaited Spa Day and massages. It was the same spa I went to before with Hannah and this time we got 50 minute massages....amazing! I had tons of knots in my back from travling around, so it was really nice to relax and more than that it was really nice to hang out with Lauren. I haven't seen her in a month and she is great! I am feeling very bittersweet feelings about leaving London. I have some amazing friends here.

After the spa, we went (very slowly - we seemed to be moving in slow motion - very relaxed I guess) to the Hummingbird Bakery in Soho.


AMAZING desserts. I had a chocolate cupcake with cheesecake chunks and cream cheese frosting. It blew my mind! I need to learn to cook like that! Although, it is probably better for my health if it don't....

We were headed back to the tube when we walked by this amazing looking Italian place. It had a glass counter with all this incredible food and it was packed (always a good sigh) so we wandered in for a little post dessert dinner. Again, amazing. I am sure I could live in this city all my life and still find wonderful adventures.

Lauren is fantastic. I had such a fun time hanging out with her today. She didn't just fill a gap in my life, I would have picked her to be a friend. And hopefully we will stay friends for a long, long time. I am really going to miss her.