back from the future_

we arrived at our hostel in berlin, late thursday night (apr. 28th), and pretty much went straight to bed. the next morning we went to the pergamon museum which houses numerous huge transported and reconstructed artifacts from ancient times. examples are the pergamon altar from ancient greece-170 BC, the market gate of miletus from ancient rome-120 AD, and the ishtar gate from bablyon-6th cen. BC (above). pretty incredible to have these artifacts inside in a museum. we also stopped in to the altes museum, just cause it was designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a legend in german architecture. after that we checked out the jewish museum by daniel libeskind. some spaces of the building were impressive,but the awkward nooks and crannies, lovingly called dead dog spaces, were not. the museum content seemed interesting for a range of ages, but unfortunately, i didnt examine too much of it. it prolly would have been enjoyable if i had more time or was actually jewish. i had dinner at an authentic german restaurant and ordered schnitzel. it was pretty good. especially the two fried eggs that were served on top of it. thats what i call home cooking. that night we went to the reichstag (german parliament) with the dome roof addition by norman foster, to catch some night views of the city (below). on the way back to our hostel from there, i happened to see something out of the corner of my eye. it looked like a lit up word, but when i looked over, all that was there was a single vertical light. after some scientific reasoning, i determined that it was blinking in a specific pattern very quickly so when the viewers eyes were in motion across it, it "stretched" these blinks out to form words. i was able to capture one of the words with my camera by panning it very quickly. if this concept is still over your head, either go to germany and see it for yourself, or just accept that germany is far more advanced than us. the next day i went to a museum which housed over 85 works of picasso as well as a couple other artists works. it was interesting especially cause with entry their was a free audio tour reciever thingie and the owner of the museum told some stories about how he acquired some of the works and had personal connections with the artists themselves. also had some haagen daas to try to fill the void of a gelato free world. it was delicious, but not the same. the rest of the day was just walking around and enjoying this modern city. because of all of the destruction here in the past century, the city has so much new construction and most of it is pretty sweet. everything is so efficient and calculated, a flatmate of mine thought it was like living in the future. oh, and they have the best gummies in the world (haribo, of course). finally that evening we boarded a train back to prague and back to school. i hope you enjoyed my trip, now leave a comment.