The bus journey went very smoothly, nice bus. Arriving in Berlin we headed for the Metro but had some trouble with the ticket machines as they didn’t accept Visa. After a coffee and doughnut, a visit to the atm and returning to the bus station to get the train tickets, we were away. Berlin has a great transport system, and although we don’t fully understand it all, we managed to get ourselves all over the city with ease.
We spent our first afternoon in the area near the hostel. This is a cool artsy area, so had a very laid back feel. We also found the locals to be very friendly, almost as soon as we left the hostel one girl came up to us to see if we needed help. We must have looked fresh off the boat, as were struggling to unfold our city map. Although we knew where we were going we had a chat and then she pointed us in the right direction. A bit further down the road we wandered into what we thought was an art gallery, open door with lots of art on the walls inside. Ooops, turns out it wasn’t, it was just a studio where some artists work, but again they didn’t mind and were happy to show us around the studio before we left.
The main direction of our walk was the East Side Gallery which is part of the Berlin wall which has been preserved. It is now covered in graffiti (art) some of which looks quite nice. This involved crossing the river over a bridge with small turrets along the side of it. The gallery itself stretches for about 1.5km and contained paintings of cartoony faces in bright colors, a Volkswagen driving through the wall, a cartoon of the US check point border crossing and memorials to the victims of the wall. 
At the end of the wall was a bar we had been told about called YAMM. This is next to the river and covered in sand to look like a beach. It is apparently some sort of charity to support African villages. It also had table tennis, basketball and soccer equipment. We finished the evening in the park eating chicken and chips and hoping to listen to some of the local musicians. Unfortunately there was a small fire so we think the fire brigade must have scared some people off as there wasn’t much happening.
In the morning we had a bit of a slow start as we had to change rooms. We booked the accommodation late and there was a problem with the booking, which means, while there are beds for us, they are in different rooms each night. Our first stop was one of the main focal points of town, the Brandenburger Tor which is the gate that used to divide the city into East and West Germany. We thought we might with a bit of a walk around this area, but soon found that it was off limits for the day due to some military procession. With not much to see we headed to tourist information and purchased a 3-day Museum Pass. This was brilliant and catastrophic at the same time. It was 19 euro for the card, and saved us heaps of money, but also meant for the next three days we locked ourselves away in galleries. At least we can say that the weather was very conducive to attending galleries.
Our first stop was the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum which houses lots of modern art. On the way we stopped off to admire the ‘Denkmal fur die ermordeten Juden Europas’ which is a grid of concrete slabs of different heights which commemorates all the Jewish people lost during WWII. The Hamburger Bahnhof building is a converted old railway station and has a massive open central hall which contained a number of earth works by Richard Long. It was a very big gallery and we probably spent over two hours looking around, we both really enjoyed it. 
After a bite to eat we walked along one of the main streets in Berlin the Unter Den Linden. This has a nice garden through the middle of the road as well as many nice old buildings, churches and sculptures. On this street was our second stop, the Deutsche Guggenheim. We have enjoyed visits to a few Guggenheims, but this one was just ok. They currently have an exhibition of 8-10 videos on at the moment, some of which were interesting but other not so much. After this we managed to sneak in another attraction, the Ephraim Palais which is now a museum but has a beautiful spiral staircase connecting the four floors. The museum was ok but all about a German Poet’s life who is quite famous, but we had never heard of him.
The next day we hit the galleries again. First stop, after once again moving all our things to another room, was the Neue Nationalgalerie which shows a collection of 20th Century art in a chronological manner. This was excellent as it had an audio guide on key artworks and an overview of the collections in each room which represented a key artistic style in a set time frame. It is housed in a modern glass box shaped building, with the gallery actually being below ground level.
After some really good currywurst (sausages) for lunch at Curry 36, we headed to the Berlinische Gallery which contains modern works created in Berlin from 1870 to now. This was also very interesting as it had some contempory Berlin art in the lower floor whilst the upper floor housed the permanent collection which was again set out in chronological order but showed the co-existence of different styles within set time frames. This was another place that wanted to charge us to use our camera, so our lovely photos are courtesy of Google Image, sweet! 
Our last stop, which we nearly didn’t do was the Judisches Museum Berlin which looks at German Jewish history from the end of the Roman age to today. We nearly missed it as it was 6pm and we thought that it would be closed, however we walked past anyway (to see the building), and found out that it closes at 8pm. The building was the highlight of our visit, a very interesting new building designed by Daniel Libeskind and is based on a zigzag. It used lots of concrete and iron sheets, I felt it was very cold and sharp but it also contained lots of windows that cut through the thick concrete walls to let in light. The installation ‘Falling leaves’ which consisted of thousands of faces cut from sheet iron was amazing as it sounded like music as you walked across the space causing them to strike each other. Ideally we would have had an extra half hour, as the lines for the tickets and cloakroom took a long time. But we probably saw 90% of it before we were kicked out at closing time. The gallery itself has a lot of history and some interesting facts, but a lot of it is aimed at young children with hands on type displays. I think Damien was actually relieved to be out of museums, we are certainly getting value for money with the pass. The hostel has a BBQ we planned on using tonight but due to the weather we opted to make some pizza in the kitchen instead. 
One last room change for Berlin and we were off. It was the last day of the Museum pass and there was still lots we would have loved to see. So many museums (60 on the card) and so little time. Our first stop was Museum Berggruen which is known for it’s collection titled “Picasso and his time”. It is named after an art dealer who collected work during his career which is now housed in the gallery. This, I felt was the last chance we would get for quite a while to see a large collection of works by Picasso (over 85 works), Giacometti, Matisse, Klee and some of my other favourites from this period. It was a lovely collection and worth the effort it took to get there.
Just before lunch we had a quick look in a gallery of hundreds of plaster casts mainly of famous Italian and Greek sculptures. We also walked past one of Berlins famous landmarks, the very impressive Schloss Charlottenberg a place that dates from 1695 and was the summer residence for Sophie Charlotte, Electress of Brandenburg and then the first queen of Russia.
We headed back to the train to make our way to the Museum sinsel (Museum Island) to visit Alte Nationalgalerie which contains 19th Century work. It was nice to see this after visiting all the 20th century as it becomes evident how some of the later artists were influenced. This entry included an audio guide which was great as it described what was happening in some of the paintings and what some of the artist inspirations were.
Our final stop was the Neues Museum which has an impressive collection of Egyptian artifacts. Again we felt this would be our last chance for quite a while to see Egyptian stuff, so even though we were thoroughly museumed out and have seen heaps of Egyptian stuff, we stayed until closing time at 8pm. The building was heavily bombed during WWII and before reopening the had to be major structural works completed to stabilize it. There are areas which retain the original décor which is very thematic whilst other areas are like blank canvases waiting for the exhibitions to give theme character. The collection of papyrus paper was the best we have seen, there were succoffix’s from around the world, a full temple and the audio guide gave very good descriptions of various displays. I’m a bit sad that the museum pass has now expired but at the same time relieved, it has been rather exhausting!
After a bit of a sleep in we headed out to have a very different art experience. It was an alternative walking tour which visited some of the streets and locations around Berlin which feature lots of Street Art. We caught the train from the station Kottbusser Tor near the hostel to Alexanderplatz where we met our guide Vee. When the tour started Vee loaded us all onto the train and took us to the starting point in Kottbusser Tor. Vee showed us some of the work by some of the more famous Berlin artist including a guy ‘named’ sixa because he rides around Berlin on his bike with a paint can on each handle bar and writes a ‘6’ on any peeling posters and property which is falling apart. Apparently he has been picked up by the police about 200 times but has never been fined as he is not painting directly on the surfaces. Another funny thing that ‘sixa’ does is paint a smiley face on the lid of the paint buckets when they are empty and nail them to walls or street signs. She also pointed out a space invader, these are in just about every big city around the world but in Berlin people have started to copy the idea but they never look as good. We were shown a rambling shack with was built entirely out of recycled materials when the Berlin Wall was standing. It was on a slice of East German land but on the West side of the wall as the wall diverged to go around a very beautiful church. We saw the squat houses, a series of angry polar bears and a cute little girl killing cats in numerous torturous ways. There is also a series of surveillance camera’s painted on walls, talking to each other, these have funny comments for example on camera says ‘I just saw someone throw up’ and the camera next to him replies ‘it was probably a tourist’. The tour finishes at Tacheles which is a squat house and art market. Apparently it used to be the squatter would sell there are to have money to live on, but these days it’s become a bit touristic. 
After coffee and dinner back at the hostel we headed out for the evening. We started with drinks in an old double decker bus which had been converted into a bar with beer garden. We then headed to a nearby club that was playing more alternate style music, with some German tracks mixed in. It was a good night but ended quite late.
After a hectic week of walking, art and galleries as well as a late night last night, we had a lazy Sunday. In the afternoon we checked out a market in a park, which turned out to be a bit of trash and treasure. On a grassy hill was hundreds of people sitting and watching locals doing karaoke. It was really fun watching the would be stars singing and the crowds clapping, cheering and singing along.
After the markets we headed to Postdamer Platz to watch the new and final Harry Potter movie in 3D! It had to be done, and it was good. I won’t say what happens! (but Harry dies).
Monday was our last day in Berlin and sadly, last day in Europe. That said, we are so looking forward to Asia! We were up early to pack and headed to the post office to send home some of the things we have collected over the past three months. After a coffee in a café full of locals, we headed back to the middle of the city for 1hr of mad tourism. We rushed past the Bundestag, Haus der Kulturen der Welt which is in a cool building, gardens, wall victim’s memorial, Reichstag and the Brandenburg Tor before returning to the hostel for our bags. At the airport we enjoyed steaks as one final meal in Germany before boarding our flight to Bangkok. After more than two years its, Goodbye Europe!
We spent our first afternoon in the area near the hostel. This is a cool artsy area, so had a very laid back feel. We also found the locals to be very friendly, almost as soon as we left the hostel one girl came up to us to see if we needed help. We must have looked fresh off the boat, as were struggling to unfold our city map. Although we knew where we were going we had a chat and then she pointed us in the right direction. A bit further down the road we wandered into what we thought was an art gallery, open door with lots of art on the walls inside. Ooops, turns out it wasn’t, it was just a studio where some artists work, but again they didn’t mind and were happy to show us around the studio before we left.
The main direction of our walk was the East Side Gallery which is part of the Berlin wall which has been preserved. It is now covered in graffiti (art) some of which looks quite nice. This involved crossing the river over a bridge with small turrets along the side of it. The gallery itself stretches for about 1.5km and contained paintings of cartoony faces in bright colors, a Volkswagen driving through the wall, a cartoon of the US check point border crossing and memorials to the victims of the wall. At the end of the wall was a bar we had been told about called YAMM. This is next to the river and covered in sand to look like a beach. It is apparently some sort of charity to support African villages. It also had table tennis, basketball and soccer equipment. We finished the evening in the park eating chicken and chips and hoping to listen to some of the local musicians. Unfortunately there was a small fire so we think the fire brigade must have scared some people off as there wasn’t much happening.In the morning we had a bit of a slow start as we had to change rooms. We booked the accommodation late and there was a problem with the booking, which means, while there are beds for us, they are in different rooms each night. Our first stop was one of the main focal points of town, the Brandenburger Tor which is the gate that used to divide the city into East and West Germany. We thought we might with a bit of a walk around this area, but soon found that it was off limits for the day due to some military procession. With not much to see we headed to tourist information and purchased a 3-day Museum Pass. This was brilliant and catastrophic at the same time. It was 19 euro for the card, and saved us heaps of money, but also meant for the next three days we locked ourselves away in galleries. At least we can say that the weather was very conducive to attending galleries.
Our first stop was the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum which houses lots of modern art. On the way we stopped off to admire the ‘Denkmal fur die ermordeten Juden Europas’ which is a grid of concrete slabs of different heights which commemorates all the Jewish people lost during WWII. The Hamburger Bahnhof building is a converted old railway station and has a massive open central hall which contained a number of earth works by Richard Long. It was a very big gallery and we probably spent over two hours looking around, we both really enjoyed it. After a bite to eat we walked along one of the main streets in Berlin the Unter Den Linden. This has a nice garden through the middle of the road as well as many nice old buildings, churches and sculptures. On this street was our second stop, the Deutsche Guggenheim. We have enjoyed visits to a few Guggenheims, but this one was just ok. They currently have an exhibition of 8-10 videos on at the moment, some of which were interesting but other not so much. After this we managed to sneak in another attraction, the Ephraim Palais which is now a museum but has a beautiful spiral staircase connecting the four floors. The museum was ok but all about a German Poet’s life who is quite famous, but we had never heard of him.The next day we hit the galleries again. First stop, after once again moving all our things to another room, was the Neue Nationalgalerie which shows a collection of 20th Century art in a chronological manner. This was excellent as it had an audio guide on key artworks and an overview of the collections in each room which represented a key artistic style in a set time frame. It is housed in a modern glass box shaped building, with the gallery actually being below ground level.
After some really good currywurst (sausages) for lunch at Curry 36, we headed to the Berlinische Gallery which contains modern works created in Berlin from 1870 to now. This was also very interesting as it had some contempory Berlin art in the lower floor whilst the upper floor housed the permanent collection which was again set out in chronological order but showed the co-existence of different styles within set time frames. This was another place that wanted to charge us to use our camera, so our lovely photos are courtesy of Google Image, sweet! Our last stop, which we nearly didn’t do was the Judisches Museum Berlin which looks at German Jewish history from the end of the Roman age to today. We nearly missed it as it was 6pm and we thought that it would be closed, however we walked past anyway (to see the building), and found out that it closes at 8pm. The building was the highlight of our visit, a very interesting new building designed by Daniel Libeskind and is based on a zigzag. It used lots of concrete and iron sheets, I felt it was very cold and sharp but it also contained lots of windows that cut through the thick concrete walls to let in light. The installation ‘Falling leaves’ which consisted of thousands of faces cut from sheet iron was amazing as it sounded like music as you walked across the space causing them to strike each other. Ideally we would have had an extra half hour, as the lines for the tickets and cloakroom took a long time. But we probably saw 90% of it before we were kicked out at closing time. The gallery itself has a lot of history and some interesting facts, but a lot of it is aimed at young children with hands on type displays. I think Damien was actually relieved to be out of museums, we are certainly getting value for money with the pass. The hostel has a BBQ we planned on using tonight but due to the weather we opted to make some pizza in the kitchen instead. One last room change for Berlin and we were off. It was the last day of the Museum pass and there was still lots we would have loved to see. So many museums (60 on the card) and so little time. Our first stop was Museum Berggruen which is known for it’s collection titled “Picasso and his time”. It is named after an art dealer who collected work during his career which is now housed in the gallery. This, I felt was the last chance we would get for quite a while to see a large collection of works by Picasso (over 85 works), Giacometti, Matisse, Klee and some of my other favourites from this period. It was a lovely collection and worth the effort it took to get there.Just before lunch we had a quick look in a gallery of hundreds of plaster casts mainly of famous Italian and Greek sculptures. We also walked past one of Berlins famous landmarks, the very impressive Schloss Charlottenberg a place that dates from 1695 and was the summer residence for Sophie Charlotte, Electress of Brandenburg and then the first queen of Russia.
We headed back to the train to make our way to the Museum sinsel (Museum Island) to visit Alte Nationalgalerie which contains 19th Century work. It was nice to see this after visiting all the 20th century as it becomes evident how some of the later artists were influenced. This entry included an audio guide which was great as it described what was happening in some of the paintings and what some of the artist inspirations were.Our final stop was the Neues Museum which has an impressive collection of Egyptian artifacts. Again we felt this would be our last chance for quite a while to see Egyptian stuff, so even though we were thoroughly museumed out and have seen heaps of Egyptian stuff, we stayed until closing time at 8pm. The building was heavily bombed during WWII and before reopening the had to be major structural works completed to stabilize it. There are areas which retain the original décor which is very thematic whilst other areas are like blank canvases waiting for the exhibitions to give theme character. The collection of papyrus paper was the best we have seen, there were succoffix’s from around the world, a full temple and the audio guide gave very good descriptions of various displays. I’m a bit sad that the museum pass has now expired but at the same time relieved, it has been rather exhausting!
After a bit of a sleep in we headed out to have a very different art experience. It was an alternative walking tour which visited some of the streets and locations around Berlin which feature lots of Street Art. We caught the train from the station Kottbusser Tor near the hostel to Alexanderplatz where we met our guide Vee. When the tour started Vee loaded us all onto the train and took us to the starting point in Kottbusser Tor. Vee showed us some of the work by some of the more famous Berlin artist including a guy ‘named’ sixa because he rides around Berlin on his bike with a paint can on each handle bar and writes a ‘6’ on any peeling posters and property which is falling apart. Apparently he has been picked up by the police about 200 times but has never been fined as he is not painting directly on the surfaces. Another funny thing that ‘sixa’ does is paint a smiley face on the lid of the paint buckets when they are empty and nail them to walls or street signs. She also pointed out a space invader, these are in just about every big city around the world but in Berlin people have started to copy the idea but they never look as good. We were shown a rambling shack with was built entirely out of recycled materials when the Berlin Wall was standing. It was on a slice of East German land but on the West side of the wall as the wall diverged to go around a very beautiful church. We saw the squat houses, a series of angry polar bears and a cute little girl killing cats in numerous torturous ways. There is also a series of surveillance camera’s painted on walls, talking to each other, these have funny comments for example on camera says ‘I just saw someone throw up’ and the camera next to him replies ‘it was probably a tourist’. The tour finishes at Tacheles which is a squat house and art market. Apparently it used to be the squatter would sell there are to have money to live on, but these days it’s become a bit touristic. After coffee and dinner back at the hostel we headed out for the evening. We started with drinks in an old double decker bus which had been converted into a bar with beer garden. We then headed to a nearby club that was playing more alternate style music, with some German tracks mixed in. It was a good night but ended quite late.After a hectic week of walking, art and galleries as well as a late night last night, we had a lazy Sunday. In the afternoon we checked out a market in a park, which turned out to be a bit of trash and treasure. On a grassy hill was hundreds of people sitting and watching locals doing karaoke. It was really fun watching the would be stars singing and the crowds clapping, cheering and singing along.
After the markets we headed to Postdamer Platz to watch the new and final Harry Potter movie in 3D! It had to be done, and it was good. I won’t say what happens! (but Harry dies).
Monday was our last day in Berlin and sadly, last day in Europe. That said, we are so looking forward to Asia! We were up early to pack and headed to the post office to send home some of the things we have collected over the past three months. After a coffee in a café full of locals, we headed back to the middle of the city for 1hr of mad tourism. We rushed past the Bundestag, Haus der Kulturen der Welt which is in a cool building, gardens, wall victim’s memorial, Reichstag and the Brandenburg Tor before returning to the hostel for our bags. At the airport we enjoyed steaks as one final meal in Germany before boarding our flight to Bangkok. After more than two years its, Goodbye Europe!
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