8 August- Day 45

Today, headed off to the Bode-Musem. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy it at all. Possibly the worst museum I've been to this summer, excluding the Bauhaus museums. (Actually they might have been better.) It's actually a very nice museum, even though it costs €4 to get in as a student. I'm not a big fan of this type of art though, so I guess I probably just should have gone somewhere else. Anyway, it's one of the 5 Museums-Insel museums, and focuses on Byzantine art, plus a little bit of extra stuff from all over the place. I'm assuming it's another collection of stuff that the Prussian nobility managed to hoard up. Everything looked the same to me though. So... I've picked out 3 favorites to show you (excluding that cute little peeing statue from Friday's post)

Bode-Museum

Inside, plus a great view of a horse's ass

The next statue was my favorite in the museum. It's supposed to be the Greek/Roman (not sure) goddess Hecate. This looks like a very very normal statue, and it's pretty tiny, and just sitting in this glass case. Then you go around to sides, and realize...

Young woman face

Old lady face

Child's face

That she has three faces! They're supposed to represent either the fates, or more likely, the 3 stages of life or something. They weren't particularly sure that it was Hecate as well-- she's holding Hecate's signature items, but this is the only time they've seen her with 3 faces so who knows.

Too sexy for his shirt...?
Apparently so.
It's Bacchus.
Ladies?

Byzantine gambling machine.
Not even joking

After that, the museum closed, and I went to grab a coffee and sit around for an hour before our concert was supposed to start. It was so far to my house from the concert hall, and I wanted to go see a museum, so I just didn't get home until.. midnight.

It was worth it though. We saw a youth orchestra, the Orkester Norden, playing in this grand (and square--terrible acoustics without acoustics I assume) concert all am Gendarmenmarkt. They were competing in the Young Euro Classic, and so they went all out. It was positively amazing.

• Jan Erik Mikalsen: Parts
• Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 3
• Sibelius: Symphony No. 5

Jan Eirk Mikalsen was actually seated in the audience-- I believe this was the premiere of his piece, or something to that effect, because he came out on stage.

They played Germans have an (unfortunate) love of coming out again and again for more applause. I swear, every show I've been to so far... they've really dragged out the applause until people start to stop clapping cause their arms feel like they're gonna fall off.

The encore was actually my favorite piece of the whole night. They dedicated it to the victims of the shooting in Oslo, and played a Norwegian piece. Geirr Tveitt- Velkomne med Æra, which apparently means "Welcome with Honor" or something to that effect. It's unbelievably enchanting. I highly encourage you to listen to it below. That's actually the orchestra that played it as well- it looks like that was their encore last year?

7 August- Day 44

Busy busy busy day! First stop, Flohmarkt am Mauerpark! A labyrinth of junk-- I could have gladly stayed there forever. This was so much bigger than the first flohmarkt.

Possibly the best flea market I've ever been to period.

The entrance. It went on for forever

If you went outside the park, you actually hit a park, and part of the Berlin wall.

Lots of delicious energy too.
Or rather... lots of delicious!

Yummers- I'm gonna try to make this at home.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After the flohmarkt, I went to the East Side Gallery, which was opened in around 1990. It's actually a kilometer or so long stretch of the Berlin wall, and they invited artists to come paint it. Essentially, it served as a perfect huge urban canvas. Here's some favs:

They liked Tromp d'oeil on the original wall, and so they used that again on the East Side Gallery wall.

Not sure what it says in Russian, but in German, it says:
"My God. Help me to survive this deadly love."

Self explanatory.

No idea, but it looked cool.

Near the "entrance", or rather, start, of the East Side Gallery, there was an art sale, with a huge canvas stretched down the middle, with free paint.

Nerd alert.

Mama, I'm in BERLIN!"

Then, I found myself in Alexanderplatz, where there was a fair of some sort. I actually was going back home, when I saw this from the S-Bahn and couldn't resist.

That's a guy's legs, and his torso is actually the woman's bottom half, and his arms, her legs.

Why was this missing from my childhood?

Eiermann. (literally, Egg man... but that can also be a last name)
Eggs were just one of many things balanced on top of his head.

Finally, I visited a memorial that we were supposed to visit for a paper we have to write later. We actually saw this on the 3rd or 4th day, when we were doing our bike tour, but I didn't post any photos of it now. The second time, I didn't take pictures... so here's my old ones!

It's a very interesting museum- if you want, you could probalby spend a couple of hours standing there, reading over people's life stories, quotes from letters/notebooks/memoirs, etc, and learning about the history.

Memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe

They're all on different levels, so when you walk in, you can get a little lost

6 August- Day 43

Okay. The start of my busy busy weekend.

Introduction: Basically, we have this assignment to go to a flea market here in Berlin and find something interesting that's older than 30 years old. Also, it had to be €2 or less. Technically €5 or less, but the program only gave us €2, so that's all I was planning on spending thank you very much. Then, we have to write some sort of creative history story about it.

There's a lot of flea markets in Berlin, and we were recommended to go to two of the bigger ones- one on 17. Juni Straße, near Tiergarten (in the middle, to the east) , and the other am Mauerpark, in the north, to the west. 17. Juni was on sat + sun, and Mauerpark on sunday only, so I decided to visit them both.

17. Juni Flohmarkt

These flea markets are amazing. I think you could literally live off the kind of junk they have there. Old coins, postcards, stamps, lots of silverware, china, jewlery (both crappy and antique), clothes, pipes, random miscellaneous crap, suitcases, purses, old boxes, candelabras, books, records, and more. So much crap. There were also fast food stalls, so you literally could live there. I had grilled veggies and halumi cheese (the best) in pita or some sort of wrap, and it was delicious.

After spending like 3 or so hours there, sifting though all this junk (they say Trödel), I found something pretty much as useless as possible. A box of needles for phonographs. Still not sure what kind of story I'm gonna write about it to be honest.

Afterwards, we went to our first (and hopefully only) soccer (I'm sorry-- Fußball) game of the summer. It was the season opener apparently, and there were like 60.000 people there. Hertha (Berlin) vs FCN (Frankfurt). So season opener, Berlin, in Berlin. It was.... crazy to say the least.

There's so much more beer drinking at Fußball games here... but the 'in-stadium' inflation isn't nearly as high in the US. You could buy yourself a plastic jug of sorts with like ,5 or 1,0 L beer, and then at the end of the game return your plastic jug to the stall to get €1 back. There were people holding stacks of those at the end of the game.

The atmosphere was pretty exciting. I, of course, know absolutely nothing about soccer, but the enthusiasm was catching (for a while). The best part of the game was actually before, when all the fans were anticipating a huge game. There were people drumming out the beat for their little organized clap routines, chants, songs (how German) and all that stuff.

Of course, Hertha lost... 0:1. It was actually a pretty terrible game by German standards (still better than American soccer, says the soccer girl in our group), so I guess it wasn't that bad. However, one guy's host dad said "Oh, you were at that game? I'm sorry you had to sit through that." Even I could tell it wasn't a good game. I fell asleep for 10 minutes in the middle of it, and apparently nothing of note had happened. The fans were still going crazy until the last 3 minutes or so, when it was clear that their team was gonna lose. Then the FCN side was ecstatic. It was still an experience though.

If you can tell by the photos, we were in Olympia-Stadion, which I visited on the 28. Juli.

They had us do that thing where everybody in a certain section holds up a piece of paper in the team colors, and it makes a bunch of stripes around the stadium.
Then everybody threw the paper down towards the field.

These guys in the front were the craziest.

They knew all the synchronized claps, chants, etc, and they were jumping up and down together like a sea of maniacs.

After their team lost, (that's not why that guy's kneeling on the floor though... that's a FCN player who fell known)

They started fights.

That explains why there's always police reinforcements around after a Fußball Spiel. Afterwards, we slowly made our way back to the U-Bahn station, and went home. There were a lot of sad, hung over fans on the trains. Poooor things.

5 August- Day 42

So... after class, I went again to Bilderbuch to do work. Brought more people than just MC and I though, so we bought out our hostel and train for -drumrollll- Paris! Then when I came back home, we had a dinner at this Korean place. M wanted to get her upcoming birthday party catered by somewhere Korean, so the entire family (plus a son-in-law) went to go try everything out, only to order mostly spicy foods where only the son-in-law liked spicy. Fun though. Host mom, dad, sister, sister, brother-in-law, and me. Luckily, only my host dad (J) could speak Korean, so I didn't feel too alone in being confused about what to order.
So weird seeing a menu in German and in Korean. I have trouble understanding them both!

Afterwards, I met up with some of the others, and we went to the 'hipster' part of Berlin. We were looking for this chocolate cocktail place, but couldn't find it. It was the weirdest thing-- couldn't figure out if it was one of those secret places, because when we went to the right street address, there were only apartments at that number. However, one of the apartment name-things, the ones right next to the buzzer, had the word Schokolade, so I think that was it. But obviously, we didn't want to go around buzzing the doorbell for this random person who just happened to have Schokolade in their name somewhere. (Now that I write that out, it seems rather unlikely)

Anyway, we got a recommendation to go to this place called Cocktail X Bar, and it was magnificently delicious. They had this deal where you could get 3 different (obviously smaller) ones for the price of 1.5, and mmmm they were delicious. Unfortunately, I have no photos.

In fact, I have no photos of the entire day. So, here's a photo of a cute statue I saw in a museum yesterday.

Hehehe.

Should I say.... 'peepeepee'? Or is that too immature?
Too late...

4 August-- Day 41

I saw this bunny rabbit near Potsdamer Platz!

Boring day. Went to Bilderbuch again with MC, and we sat around and snacked and did homework.
The end.

3 August-- Day 40

This was a huge day. So... let's begin! For class, our wednesday excursion this week was a trip to Potsdam. And when I trip to another city (and technically another state) , it was actually closer to my house than class. So, excellent! Basically, Friedrich the Great and all his Prussian royal family buddies built castles in one section of Potsdam. Friedrich the Great was a pretty snazzy dude- he was an intellectual, and pretty much spent his life sitting around at court, ruling, playing music, reading books in french, and designing ridiculously beautiful castles. At least that's the way I've come to understand it.

Anyway, his favorite castle of all time is Schloss Sanssouci, which is french (well... not the word Schloss) for "Without cares/worries" or something to that effect. Basically, his castle was designed to his exacting tastes. He hated his wife, so there were no rooms for her, but there was enough room for him to have Voltaire live in his castle for 3 years and talk philosophy. Anyway,
it's beautiful and grand, and maybe one of my favorite castles I've seen here.

Sans Souci

The roof of the Marble Room

One of the nature themed rooms- so many decorations

Not sure who or what this is, but I liked the movement of his hair and the mirror together

Pretty much every room here has a theme, depending on what it was gonna be used for, and stuff like that.

Example of a room.

Floral room.

After our audio tour, we went outside to take a look at the front. It's quite spectacular. I'll let the photos speak for themselves.

He had a bunch of these little metal pagodas installed.
They're 'copper green' and they have these huge golden suns in metal on the front.

Schloss Sanssouci

Those little retangular things are little greenhouses of sorts.Friedrich the Great's grave. Our prof brought us potatoes to stick on top of the grave. She says it's a tradition.
Everybody looked at us funny as we dropped potatoes onto a Kaiser's grave.

For fun, the Europeans would dress up as Chinese. This is the "Chinese house."

Next, we walked over to the Neue Palais. This was also designed by Freddy, but he really used it as more of a shock and awe tactic, rather than as a real palace. Therefore it's ridiculously ornate, even for back then. We also stopped to eat at the cafeteria of the University at Potsdam. Their cafeteria is literally in back of the servant's quarters of that huge palace. And lemme tell you, the servant's quarters are HUGE.

Neue Palais.
For a size comparison, click the photo, and search out the little teeny tiny people.

Talk to the hand.


The Grotto Room.
It's shaped like the inside of a treasure chest.

The types of rocks that adorn every other stripe on the walls of the Grotto Room

The alcoves in the Grotto Room. If you look closely, you can notice that everything's pretty much made of marble, seashells, or precious stones.

This room has pink marble!

This room was under restoration.

And this is how you do it!

Silver room!

Bathroom! The one and only.
(Not joking)

Afterwards, we split up from the class. Me and a couple other people decided to visit more of Potsdam, and check out other palaces, while we had day passes. Next stop (and almost the last thank god) was the Orangerie. It pretty much looked like the rest of the palaces before.

However, the front looked like a resort....
The Orangerie

Really liked this statue. Wonder what it looked like in copper.

This table has mother-of-pearl and other little goodies inlaid.

And I think this angel is the epitome of happy. I think he's supposed to be a tiny Dionysus.
I love his face.

Hollander Vierteil (Neighborhood)

All the houses are made of brick, a long time ago. I think this is maybe where all the Hollanders and their Hollandaise sauce lived. No idea though... we could only really walk through it on the way to the train station.
And then back home.