i had falsely learned that all museums in europe were free. such lies! it doesn't matter, but in case any of my american readers were also operating under this false assumption...
natural history museum - very good, would recommend it. there's a cool kind of imax show. it was funny, the circular couches are at a pretty relaxed angle so you're more or less laying down to watch the show. i sat down next to a bunch of third graders, and apparently they were the dramatic type - there was a special arrangement they were in (x sitting next to y, easy access to z...like a logic puzzle really) and one of them had gotten up temporarily - in the meantime, i had taken her spot. so for like 5 minutes i could hear them bickering about how to rearrange the seats for optimal conditions. but whatever. i fell asleep during the show, but it was good.
technical museum - boring boring boring! i thought it would be about german inventions/inventors, but it was more about innovations in in ship building, aircrafts, and automobiles. plus the audio guide did not correspond very well with the museum.
museum at checkpoint charlie - expensive (9 euros), but good i think. the best part of this museum is the sheer collection of memorabilia they have. the original rooms themselves were used in escape efforts, so a lot of grateful refugees donated items. so anyway, they have a lot of original artifacts. if you're truly interested in the wall, esp. the checkpoint, it's worth it.
east side gallery - after the wall came down, artists from everywhere came to paint the eastern side of the berlin wall. cool story, but unfortunately many of the original paintings are barely visible (if you're able to identify them in the first place), and a lot of disrespectful people wrote personal memos all over it like "danny and katya 2007" (in a big heart) or "miguel, miami." why can't they respect cultural heritage and leave it alone? stuff like that makes me so angry!!
we started to do a free walking tour (they are paid on tips),but since there were only three of us, it got canceled (real classy there guys...). we had two guides - one was a snob ("i think there's more to berlin than the tourist stuff" - OF COURSE there is, nobody says otherwise) and the other gave information that was just flat out wrong ("the only places where the wall still stands is at east side gallery and potsdamer platz"). wrong wrong wrong, and i've only been in berlin 2 months.
so, would NOT recommend that company.
it's weird being a hardcore tourist in a city where you live. i'd done tourist stuff before, but not all at once. coming back to neukoelln was like coming back to another city, just with less travel time.
Posts
3 comments:
so at first i got angry that people wrote crap on the east side gallery also... then i read one tag which was something like "i am here now and writing on this wall and making history" and that i thought was true. and then i read something like "people who wish the world to stay the same wish that it ceases to exist entirely," and i thought that was true also. so to conclude, the wall should always be changing, if only to mark the freedom of germany and the irrelevance of the wall as a wall which divides and partitions...
hmm, i think you're right. and who says all the additions have to be 'works of art' since it's the people's wall (ha). i guess i would still rather than expression on the wall be more thoughtful than someone with a sharpie and instinct. although drawing the line is difficult too...
Hey Puja,
I'm reading all your posts at once right now. I have to say, if people are mad at the graffiti at the Berlin Wall, I wonder what they would say about those 200 year old carvings in the room where Martin Luther transcribed the Bible in Thuringia?
Post a Comment