Public Policy 85: The Final Day

On Saturday, our final day and night in Europe, the group spent time unwinding from the busy trip, exploring Berlin, and then furiously finishing our policy memo.

 After the fun evening on Friday night, many of us spent Saturday morning working on the memo over breakfast, then exploring Berlin in small groups, despite the rainy weather.  Some went to see the Berlin Wall memorial and museum, Checkpoint Charlie, and East Side Gallery, and reflected on the significance of the Cold War.  Others went to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and Berlin Jewish Museum and reflected on WWII and the Holocaust.  Many visited the famous Brandenburg Gate.  And others simply took advantage of the opportunity to sleep in.

 We took a nice DB train from Berlin to Frankfurt in preparation for our flight home on Sunday.  We arrived at the hotel, checked in, and then went to a burger restaurant for our last sit-down meal as a group (though some lobbied for a return to the African Queen for yet more Eritrean food).  At the burger restaurant one of us even had our first ever hamburger -- we will leave it to our readers to guess who that might have been. 

After dinner the group returned to the hotel to complete our memo, while the Professor and Brandon tried and failed to follow up on some of Prof. Lechterman's nightlife suggestions from the night before (via Lime, though, so not all was lost). 

Throughout the final memo work, many McNuggets, fries, chocolates, coffees, waters, bizarrely-named German desserts, and other assorted delicacies were consumed.  The hard work paid off -- at 10:12am Frankfurt time, we turned in our final memo, 128 pages in all. 

With a deep sigh of relief we began to reflect on all we had learned and experienced over the course of our term at Dartmouth and our time in Europe.