berlin

somehow we've been in berlin for four days now and have barely done anything here. part of the reason is that we came here to visit friends, so we've been spending time with them, but the other reason is that we tried a new travel experiment, planning our trip on the go, but it's been a sad, sad failure. especially as we're here during the peak season, we're just wasting our time and money and stressing ourselves out. back to the hardcore advance planning in the future :)

we did spend all day yesterday in the city, mostly visiting museums as it was raining steadily outside and i'd recently thrown our last umbrella away in disgust when it failed to withstand the christchurch winter winds. we wandered around museum island (though the lines were so long that we didn't actually want to be in any of the museums), eating wurst with hot mustard and cheese pretzels from the street vendors in the shelter of the neues museum's long portico overlooking the river.

 after lunch we took the underground train (getting anywhere takes three trains...no matter how close it may be) back to potsdamer platz to hit up the film and tv museum...can you guess who was particularly keen on seeing that? the displays looked cool, but didn't actually give enough information for us to understand why this particular director/film/actress was important to german and world cinema. there was a big exhibit on fritz lang's "metropolis", a very small one on michael haneke's "the white ribbon", and plenty of information about marlene dietrich, but overall we were a little disappointed. that didn't stop us from seeing the final harry potter movie at the english-language kino next door, though, and overhearing this conversation in the row behind us, just as the film was starting (the cinema had assigned seats):

young man: excuse me, but i think this is my seat. i wouldn't normally say anything, but it's quite full and we've actually just had to move as well.
woman: i'm sorry, but i'm sitting here now. you'll need to find somewhere else.
young man: it's just that the theater's quite full, so there aren't any other seats together. i did see a seat at the back that you could sit in, though.
woman: i'm not going to move. the movie's about to start.
young man: what can we do, though? these are our seats!
woman: you could find a cinema employee and they could find you other seats.
it continued in this way for a bit, but the guy finally gave up and he and his girlfriend went down to sit in the front row. poor guy.

my highlight of the day was our evening visit to the gemaeldegalerie, which houses the paintings of the berlin gallery that survived the bombings of WWII and subsequent fires in the underground storage locations where they were hidden. in new zealand i'd had a copy of the berlin gallery guide from the early 80s that painted a bit of a pathetic tale about the then-current state of the collection, divided as it was into multiple inadequate gallery spaces on different sides of the city and having lost many of their principal works during the war, so it was exciting to see the collection back together in a new building, looking towards the future. i got to see andrea mantegna's "madonna with sleeping child", a lovely, delicate tempera painting that i'd admired in pictures but had never seen up close. travelling in europe is so much fun...

-rachel