New Years in Berlin / A city under fire

Who knew Italians were so hostile?

Somehow we'd grown so accustomed to mean-faces these last 7 months, and it took a trip to Berlin to remind us what it's like to be around friendly people (funny especially considering Berliners have quite a reputation for being nasty). Our notions of nasty and nice must've gotten all off kilter.

(To be clear, I'm just talking about perfect strangers here.)

But really, from the moment we landed in Dusseldorf (a transit point between Rome and Berlin), strangers made eye contact and smiled at us and said hello. At first it made me feel all queer inside, like something was just a little bit wrong, I couldn't quite figure it out. Then it happened more and more - passing people in the courtyard of our apartment complex, passing people on the street, going into cafes and shops - people are so friendly! It's been a bit of a revelation.

(There are so many Italians here though - there's no escape!)

The day of the morning that it snowed.

Berlin was fun.
The area between where we were staying and the central city was full of really nice cafes and excellent secondhand stores. On our first day we went shopping and even Finn had fun! Berlin has a vibrant urban culture, full of people doing creative things in aesthetically pleasing spaces. It felt new and exciting, as well as like something we used to be familiar with, compared to the settings of our last months. With little of the pre-war cityscape remaining, wandering the streets here was a pleasure of a very different sort from that in Italy. Finn quickly decided he could live there, a feeling he hadn't had anywhere else on this trip. But he also wondered if it was just because it felt so much more normal, and really, Wellington will do just fine.
We'll see.

Sausages!
Fun once, but really quite gross. I felt a bit off for the rest of the day afterwards.

Less nice was the approach to fire crackers on New Years eve.

Boy oh boy, they sell some mean-arse bangers in this place. Remember those little red bangers you used to be able to buy in NZ? Well here they sell GIANT versions of those - say 3cm diameter and 15cm long. As well as many other crazy crackers (ones that you shoot from pistols and that sound like gunfire, littering the ground with metal 'bullet casings', for example).

From the day we arrived, afternoons, evenings, and especially nights were punctuated with explosions. Then New Years Eve was absolute madness, building in the afternoon to a deafening crescendo at midnight. From the moment it started getting dark until we fell asleep sometime after 2am, there was not a single moment when you couldn't here the explosion of a fire cracker.

Fire works, on the other hand, are not so popular. We did eventually see some, at about dinner time on New Years eve someone finally opted for some visuals with their bangs. (Dinner of roast pheasant, I should mention, stuffed with an almond, prune, lemon, pancetta, onion, garlic, bread mix, and accompanied by roast potatoes, buttery brussel sprouts, and rocket salad. A delicious feast to see the old year out.)

Anticipating a big public fireworks display from the Brandenburg Gate at midnight, after late dinner we set off for a wander in that direction. The streets were a madhouse. I had thought it was quite crazy how many fire crackers were going off, considering how cold it was outside. People must be really committed, I thought. Well, only sought of. As we walked along, we had to be constantly on the lookout for burning projectiles being thrown out of apartment windows. As we went deeper into the city centre, and the streets became more and more crowded with people, nowhere was safe. People were letting off huge crackers right under their own feet, right under their children's feet, and throwing them at their friends, or anyone walking by. By the time it struck midnight, we had got pretty close to the Gate, but not close enough to see it. We had anticipated this and figured it wouldn't matter, if it really was as big a show as promised - rivalling NY and London, apparently - then we should just be able to look up and see it. But no. And neither could we tell if we could even hear it, so SO loud was the cacophony of domestic explosions all around us. It was deafening, it seemed like the crackers people were setting off were massively loud, close to if not as loud as the public displays we've seen.

We continued further in, thinking the public display would last a while, but no, wrong again. By 12:10 the crowds were pushing against us, heading back out away from the Gate, it was all over. 10 minutes! It really didn't matter though, the experience simply of walking the streets at this time had been such a mad experience for us, probably (hopefully) the closest we'll ever get to a war zone. It was really really scary.

After New Years the bangs died down considerably. Phew.

As well as fire crackers, Berlin is a city of excellent art galleries. Not always the best exhibitions, but really great galleries.

Bauhaus.

The Bauhaus archives and museum turned out to be really more archives than museum. Interesting building (from the outside), but without access to much of it from the inside, so difficult to get a sense of it providing interesting spaces. The museum was full of big promises and declarations (such as the Bauhaus being the most important art movement of the 20th century), but very weak on displays.

Museum island - rennovated old buildings, beautiful exhibition spaces, perfectly lit. We'd already had our fill of Roman artefacts this trip though, so we just went to a couple.

Garden of Exile, Jewish Museum. 

Jewish museum - amazing new building, full of architectural metaphors and interesting spaces, but awful display design. Downstairs in the personal stories section (which could've been interesting, as with all of it), they had such small viewing spaces to see the objects and read the stories, you pretty much had to press your face against the glass to read the plaque, and with the number of visitors in there trying to see each one, it was terrible. And there was ample space available, if they'd wanted to make it better. Finn was convinced it was about really connecting to each story, but I felt so distracted by the procedure of simply trying to be able to read the story that all chances of there being some kind of meaningful connection were lost in the jostle for viewing vantage point.

Upstairs, the permanent collection was so heavy on interaction I quickly felt worn down. I think I was the wrong type of person for the displays in this museum, although I had really been looking forward to the visit. Maybe my expectations had been to high. Maybe I should give them more credit for trying to make Jewish history fun.

Tomas Saraceno's Cloud Cities.
Hamburger Bahnhof.

Hamburger Bahnhof is a super fantastic gallery of modern and contemporary art. The temporary exhibitions were excellent, both the Cloud Cities pictured above and works exhibited in their extensive western wing. The permanent collection throughout the rest of the building was not so amazing.

And many more. We filled three, kind of four days with galleries. That got us inside and around a lot of really nice buildings.

Berlin wall memorial.

Roman Finn by a nice piece of wall.

My wonderful proof reader thinks this is the most negative and peculiar posting of Flesh yet. I don't quite know how or why that can be. Berlin was certainly very different from all the places and themes of the previous posts, but by no means in a bad way. Quite the contrary, we had a lot of fun, saw some great shit, bought some nice things, and survived a terrifying new years unscathed. We did very well indeed.

Only two stops to go before we're home. Here's hoping I can recapture the positive writing energy of earlier days.

Happy new year!

9 January 2012