So Berlin has one of the cooler city wide events I've ever participated in- Lange Nacht der Museen. Basically, twice a year, with a 15 euro (or in my case discounted 10 euro) ticket, people can visit a huge number of museums all over the city in one night from 6pm-2am.
Throughout the night, I hit up a variety of museums. These included:
- The special exhibits at the Deutsches Historisches Museum (which included exhibits on the relationship between the German people and the forest and a collection of photos from the annual German youth photo competition). Random fun fact from the museum: Bambi was originally a German children's book. This has nothing to do with the exhibits, but the lighting in this space between the main museum and special exhibits is really cool:
- Deutsches Guggenheim Museum which was currently staging a exhaustion about language entitled "Lost in Translation". One of my favorite pieces was the following which consisted of a variety of comic strip frames with the words removed:
- Science Center Medizintechnik, an interactive museum about the human body.
- and the Gemäldegalerie, which had lots of old Renaissance paintings.
Mostly, I really just appreciated the existence and experience of the event. Huge numbers of the city's residents attend Lange Nacht der Museen and during the event, I couldn't help but think that a comparable event in the US celebrating a city's museums wouldn't be so well attended and successful. Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic about my home country, but in either case, kudos to Berlin for loving and celebrating its rich museum culture. I feel lucky to have experienced it for a while.
Nightlife
So, I realized in this blog I've talked a lot about typical tourist things I've seen during the day and not about the "hanging out in the city with friends" part of my life. So here's a small section about that:
In addition to visiting museums, important sites, etc. I've also really enjoyed hanging out and living in the city: visiting cafes, cooking dinner with fellow students at one of our houses, going out to bars and clubs on the weekend, etc.
One highlight of my social life thus far was visiting der Klub der Republik. It is (or rather was as it closed on Feb 1) a nightclub celebrating the DDR and Ostalgie (nostalgia for the DDR). However, as it was located in Prenzlauer Berg, it was forced to close as part of the gentrification process occurring there. We hit up der Klub der Republik on its last full weekend of operation. The club had cool DDR reminiscent decor, chill music, lots of hipsters, and a bit more smoke than I would have liked. Overall, a pretty great experience that felt remarkably similar to typical Macalester house parties. Here's a few photos of said DDR decor:
The text translates to production outcomes.
Although it's not actually the top of the world, I did reach one of the higher points of Berlin when I climbed the 285 steps of the Sieglesäule, a famous national monument in Tiergarten, Berlin's largest city park.
To give some historical background, construction of the Sigelsäule began in 1864 to commemorate Prussia's victory in the Danish-Prussian War. However, by the time the monument was completed in 1873, Prussia had also won the Austro-Prussian War and the Franco-Prussian War, it is now a general symbol for the military victories of the Prussian Empire. As part of commemorating history, there are large bronze reliefs and the following mosaic about a fourth of the way up the tower depicting the victories.
There's also a bronze statute of Victoria (the goddess of victory) on the top as well:
I climbed up the Siegesäule to right below the Victoria statue:
which offered some great views of the city:
Along with a walk through Tiergarten, it made for a chilly, yet lovely, afternoon.
No comments:
Post a Comment