The Photogenic Berlin Post

I'm back from the big city! (...Well technically Hamburg is also a big city, so:) I'm back from the really big city!

Die Gruppe von Smith took the super fast ICE train from heyah to theyah on Sunday, which took just over an hour and a half. We then deposited our things at our hotel, which was a large fancy schmancy townhouse with lots of chandeliers and big ornamented ceilings that is famous for being the residence of Asta Nielsen, a famous movie actress from the first half of the 20th century that I learned about in my Weimar Cinema course last semester. No time was lost before we were back outside and on to our next adventure : Der Schloss Charlottenburg! The Charlottenburg Chateau/Castle/Sparkly and Expensive Royal Residence is the largest remaining of its kind in Berlin. We took an audio tour around the many opulent rooms and oohed and ahhed over this and that. My favorite room was one completely decked out in over two thousand pieces of porcelain.

That night we had our first of several delectable dinners at upper-end restaurants around the city. Thanks again to Sophia Smith for those most wonderful extra pounds.

The next morning we took a Stadtrundfahrt (double-decker bus tour) around the city, got off part way and walked around looking at all the fun architecture.





That afternoon we visited the big Holocaust memorial, which was a huge area filled with almost 3000 of these rectangular stones of various heights. The ground dipped way down in the middle so it was like walking into a pit with the stones rising above you. All the air inside was very quiet and still.


Afterward we took a tour of the Reichstag building, where the German parliament meets and all the governmental stuff goes down. Because of the recent elections, all the suits were out of session during the change-over from party to party. The building was comprised of parts of the old building that was destroyed in the war and new modern architecture. My favorite part by far was the roof.


It was a huge glass dome with staircases spiraling around the sides with a mirror... thing ...coming down from the center. We even got to go up on the roof where there was a nice view of the city.

Once at the top of the dome, we could look down into the meeting room of the parliament.

That night a group of us went to a small but snazzy theater to see Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape auf deutsch. It was interesting and well-performed, though hard to understand at times. Mostly it just made me crave bananas.

On Tuesday morning we went on a tour of Berlin's Unterwelt - an underground bunker beneath part of the metro system. Some rooms were left in their original condition while others were set up in museum format with historical displays about the war.


Later on Sarah and I went to the Film & TV museum which was located in the shiny Sony Center.

I particulary enjoyed this museum for it's awesomely trippy use of mirrors and because it had lots of information about things I learned about in my Weimar Cinema course.

That night we went to a wonnnderful concert at the Berlin Konzerthaus. We had front-row tickets and enjoyed a program of the Festival Strings Lucerne with piano soloist, Martin Stadtfeld, playing Britten, Bach, Mendelssohn, and Haydn.



Wednesday morning brought us to the Berlin Zoo! There we got to see the legendary Knut of the world famous Youtube video. (I would highly recommend it.) He was in a habitat with his new girlfriend away from the rest of the polar bears. I thought he was rather small for a bear of his kind and quite dirty. He was still cute, but kindof a letdown after the most entertaining polar bear at the Albuquerque Zoo.


Carolyn was looking forward to this meeting for far too long. I was a little peeved that Knut only did entertaining things when my camera wasn't focused on him. Note this photo.

The brown bears were also quite wonderful and shared a habitat with wolves. This bear reminded me very much of my own brown Ber at home in the States.

Many of the big animals, such as this lion, were very kind in that they came quite close to Helen and I. It's my understanding that she can see light in somewhat short distances, so she was able to see a lot of them. (Helen, please do correct me if I'm wrong.) I was pretty satisfied with the zoo except for how it caged its big cats in small and unrealistic compartments. There I was not impressed.

Later we visited Checkpoint Charlie and the museum about the Berlin Wall. I hadn't known much about the wall and the consequences thereof before and found it very tragic, like most of everything else about WWII.


Afterward we walked along the Eastside Gallery, the longest remaining section of the wall that has been repainted be various artists.



On Wednesday some of us visited the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche, which like the one in Hamburg was left in its mostly destroyed condition after the war. A new modern church in blue glass was built on one side of it with the belltower on the other and the remaining mid-section contains its historical exhibit. The mosaiced ceiling is still very shiny.


There was still a good chunk of time before our train left, so I went to the photography museum by myself before heading to the Hauptbahnhof. It was raining.

While waiting for our train home, I was wonderfully surprised by my Handy ringing with a call from Jesse. Hooray for fantastic brothers!

So that was my trip to Berlin. In conclusion, I didn't think the city itself was all it was hyped up to be, but I still had an enjoyable visit. I'm just not a ridiculously-large-city-person. But then again, it was very shiny.

(P.S. All of my Berlin photos can be found by clicking on this link.)