Yesterday, woke up, breakfast, which included some sort of cake thing with chocolate chips that just seemed ridiculously decadent. Class, mostly biomes, lunch break, and then it was off to see Schloss Charlottenburg, this old summer palace. Beautiful place, it was shelled really badly in WWII but they've done an astounding amount of restoration work. Everything you think of when it comes to 18th and 19th century royalty, gold-plated everything, beautiful oak furniture, more porcelain than you'd think possible, mirrored walls, huge portraits everywhere, you get the idea. We had audioguides and it was mostly pretty interesting, actually. There was a whole room dedicated to Alexander von Humboldt at one point, which almost seemed rigged for our trip. After we spent some time in there and in the New Wing, we went out back to the garden, which exemplified the absolute worst in English gardens. Everything extremely controlled, no actual nature, bah. In the back it got more natural, we saw lots of ducks, a dog chasing some of them (the owners had no control of the dog, or of their daughter for that matter, it was funny), trees that looked less heavily manipulated. We couldn't go into the building out back, though we did see a field just COVERED in signs of moles, which apparently means that they're eating invertebrates in the soil which means that the field doesn't have insecticides or herbicides in it.

We headed back to the hotel and I went out to a haircut. The guy was from Paris but has apparently worked in Australia, Canada, Germany, I don't remember all the places he mentioned. He spoke German and a little Italian, as well as English and French. A little fancier than I'm used to, but it was a good haircut. Towards the end a woman who also worked there came in and when he told her I wasn't German, she guessed Russian. One more on the list of nationalities, eh? I could ALMOST understand her German but she just spoke too fast for me to pick up much of it, unfortunately. I'm really missing how good I was four years ago. That was 15 euros, tipped him 3, back to the hotel.

Thursday, March 18th, roughly 11:25-11:35 PM local time