It's Bird, It's a Plane, It's a... School

today at lunch i sat across the street from a secondary school. i indulged in some people-watching and observed the students coming out around lunch. notably, i found the students to be a bit older on average than what i would expect high school students to be. which was odd, because my reaction to students these days leans more towards the "oh my god, they are so young!" end of things. there was also a lot less roughhousing and general "hanging-out" then i might have expected.

in general i find it hard to identify schools in berlin. they tend to look like other public institution buildings like a patentamt, a bürgeramt, a standesamt or a bürgerstandesamt. students also head to school before i go to work and schools have already let out before i leave work. school buildings are also missing other visual clues i would normally look for like sports fields surrounding the building, smoky crowds of students standing at the doors or a big backlit sign saying "Hey, This, This Here is A Secondary School. Home of our Mascot! Go Team!". at most there is a little plaque announcing the buildings function and district.

after a bit of investigation i found out that the school was the oberstufenzentrum, more of an upper vocational school. which helps explain why the students seemed a little older. the building itself is a protected monument, a 19th century barracks.