2 Juli-- Day 8

So, after a late night... me and one other person from our group managed to drag ourselves out of bed and go to the Pergamon museum. They have those "you get the ticket and have a 30 minute window to enter the museum" tickets, so J and I were like "okay, gotta get there early because it's a saturday morning and it's gonna be full of tourists." So we planned to meet at a u-bahn stop at 9:45 to get there around 10 or so when it opened. I was getting on the u-bahn at 9:50, just like "ahhh crap. I'll just text and tell him that I'm gonna be late, and that he should go ahead." Then, as I'm writing this text, he ends up getting on the same car as me. So yay, we're both late! So we get to the museum around 11 (there's construction work going on at a pretty major junction) Luckily, we managed to go right in, and wow.

Wow is right, right? This is only half of the steps, let alone the friezes.

When you first walk in, there's the Pergamon Altar. They literally took this entire place, and moved it back. So on 3 sides, surrounding the steps, there's magnificent friezes depicting a battle between the Greek gods and the giants. My favorite scene was Athena and Nike, where Athena is grabbing the giant Alkyoneus by the head and wrenching him from the earth. The story goes that he only has power when he's touching the earth. As Athena flies upwards, Gaia, the mother of the giants holds out her hand, rising up from the ground to stop the goddess from killing her son. As this is happening, Nike, the goddess of victory (Roman equivalent is Victoria, like at the top of the Siegessaüle) flies upwards to put the victor's laurels on Athena's head.

Apparently it's a very famous art thing, but I'm not artistically cultured enough to have known that, whoops! I lucked out though, cause J is a Classics/Ling double major, so he was able to explain every story and fill in the huge ominious gaps in my knowledge of history.

My terrible photo of it

Part of a temple. HUGE.


The Market Gate of Miletus

The second big thing was the Ishtar Gate. When Nebuchadnezzar II was livin it up in Babylon, this was one of the gates to the city. Ishtar was the Babylonian goddess of love, fertility, war, and sex. From what I read on wikipedia about her, she seems like a bit of a bitch, but that's not much of a surprise, given her description. She was mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh though, which I *do* remember from world history.

Anyway, there's dragons and aurochs all over this gate, as well as an entire cuneiform wall building inscription. All of it is one big self-call. (I, Nebuchadnezzar II, prince, appointed by the gods, the wise, the humble, King of Babylon, have built this magnificent wonderful beautiful gate out of pure blue stones, over water, as part of my amazing city, of which I am king. This is some other great stuff that I did, now everyone can marvel in awe of how powerful the empire that I am King of is....). The dragons are funky. They have the head and body of a snake, forelegs of a lion, hind legs of a bird, and tail of a scorpion.

This actually the smaller part of the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate. The larger half was considered too big to put in the museum.

After you go through the walkway, you have this huge walkway with the blue "bricks" at the top of the walls. And the original was actually like 4 times longer. Shock and awe in the Babylonian empire for sure.

Some awesome old stuff. Think middle east around the time of the Mughals or so.

Think Middle East around I don't know when...

Could have just seen this at the Hood museum. Seriously, I swear they took these from the same freaking wall.

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So we saw all of that by around 2 or 3. We were scheduled to go see the Berliner Philharmoniker (Berlin Philharmonic, in case that was unclear) at their last concert of the season. This was a huge huge open-air concert at the Waldbühne (Forest theater), which is an amphitheater originally designed for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. They had cultural events and gymnastics there. Nowadays, they have concerts and whatnot. Approx 20,000 people had tickets to this that they bought back in January. I actually heard (understood!) people talking about the concert on the U-Bahn.

Originally we were gonna go to the Waldbühne and do a picnic, going there early to get good seats. Unfortunately, it was supposed to rain that day. Despite the rain (thank you rain jacket, thank you Beijing Olympics umbrella, thank you literature prof for bringing plastic bags for us to sit on), the place was packed.

Everyone was surprisingly optimistic despite the cold and the rain. However, when we were all seated and whatnot, a man came out and announced that they needed 5 minutes to decide whether or not the concert was gonna happen.

The Waldbühne. As you can see, it's super easy for rain to blow onto the stage.

Turns out that the rain was blowing into the theater, and the string instruments would have gotten soaked. (They were actually squeegeeing water off of the front of the stage.) So, all the musicians came out, the conductor came out, and they were like "sorry, we can't do it. It's just not gonna work. However, we are gonna be putting the show on, on the 23 of August." So we were like "welllll we're not gonna be here the 23rd of August. (we leave the 20th) This sucks. let's go eat" And so we walked back to the S-bahn station, with like 10,000 other people hahaha... not really joking about that. I feel sorry for all the people who were on that train line, and hadn't gone to the show, and were crammed in with soaked people trying to get out.

We all waited a bit, and then decided to find some cheap food. Unfortunately, nobody knew a place that was cheap and close by, so we were wandering around with our prof, looking for this place she knew. In the end, we didn't find it, and ended up in this kinda sketchy bar. We sat around, our prof paid for our 1st round of drinks, and we all just chatted. After she left, we went to this döner place, which are excellent and delicious and cheap and everywhere, google it. After a while, half of us headed back home, and who knows where the other half went hahaha.

And this is why I haven't been able to update (or do homework) until now.