On Saturday morning I finally got up and went on that Alternative tour of Berlin I've been trying to goo on for the past three weeks. I'm really glad I did because it was absolutely fascinating!! We basically walked all over Berlin and looked at the more notable graffiti and street art. Berlin is famous for its graffiti, mainly because it's everywhere...
We looked at the works of a few artists in particular.
Little Luci is a character originally from some Russian comic strip or something. In the comic she is a little girl who has adventures with her pet cat. In the graffiti, she kills the cat in various imaginative ways. I have a few examples....(go to facebook for some more)
Then there's the graffiti artist that does pictures of Knut the naughty polar bear. Knut, who was famous a few years back for being the first polar bear born in captivity is apparently not very good at socializing with other bears and thus must be kept in an enclosure by himself. This artist makes fun of this by painting Knut doing bad things all over Berlin.
We then visited this building which is inhabited by a bunch of artists. (Coincidentally, its right next to Zapata's, one of the bars we went to on our first bar crawl)Out back they have a bunch of sculptures made from trash. We wandered around there for a while. At one point I walked into what looked like a large portapotty, it turned out to be one of the artists shops where he sold paintings and his CDs. I could only stay in there for a few seconds though, because he had obviously been smoking pot for hours and the place had giant black smoke clouds floating about inside it.
We then walked inside this building, under a caution tape, around the piles of broken beer bottles and up a stairwell. Everything, absolutely everything was covered in graffiti and I refused to touch anything because it was quite blatant to my nose that the stairwell also served as a bathroom. We went up three or four flights and made it to their little shop area. The artists who lived there sold paintings, jewelry, and other odds and ends.
We also looked at a graffiti exhibit called 50 faces and a whole block that used to be a secret, underground bar.
On Sunday I decided to hit up a few museums on Berlin I had been wanting to see. I first went to the Story of Berlin. It is a museum that focuses on the history of Berlin. As part of the admission price you get to tour a nuclear bunker built in during the Cold War. It is underneath a parking garage next to a shopping mall. The bunker has enough beds for 3 thousand people and is actually still on standby. So if there were to be some kind of nuclear threat, people would still be able to use it. It would not be fun though. The bunker has enough beds for over 3 thousand people but only 28 toilets and 28 urinals. It has a sick bay with enough room to accommodate something like 30 people and only 2 four by four foot square kitchens. Also, there is no one in charge of the bunker so if there were to be a crisis, the people in it would be in charge of managing and running it for he 14 days that it could be in use. At the end of the bunker tour, the tour guide turned on an alarm and a simulation of bombs falling on the bunker. It was really cool because the whole floor shook with the 'impact' of the bombs.
The rest of the museum is made up of themed rooms. I wandered into one room that showed old movies from the 1920's. I also walked through simulations of the Berlin streets after the bombing during WWII. There were rooms on Prussian fashions, 1930's cars and the Berlin Wall. My favorite part of the tour was definitely the bunker, though.
That afternoon (after I had three squashed pennies made for Adam. Those penny machines are literally on every other corner.) I headed over the DDR Museum. This museum focuses solely on life in Berlin on the Eastern side of the wall. It was fascinating! I didn't really know much about Eastern Berlin before this...
I first sat inside a Trabant (or Trabi), which was the car of Eastern Berlin. The government told everyone that if they saved so and so percentage of their wages every month, they could save for two years and get this car. It wasn't exactly true and not many people received their car... I sat inside it and decided that it was a good thing I did't live in Eastern Berlin in the 80's because I absolutely did not fit in the Trabi.
I also pretended to be a spy at the Stasi station. Apparently the Stasi monitored everyone! According to my tour guide form a few weeks ago, out of every eight people living in Eastern Berlin, 1 was a Stasi officer or informer. After the wall fell and the the Western government checked out the Stasi headquarters, they found oodles and oodles of files on practically everybody.
Inside the museum was set up a mock DDR living room, kitchen and bathroom. You could rummage trough the drawers, sit on the couch, change the channels on the TV and even listen to someone on the phone.
I watched s few DDR propaganda films which were campy and quite funny in their seriousness. In one of them, they interviewed children on what they though housing in Berlin would look like in the year 2000.
I also learned that nudism was really big in Eastern Berlin in the 80's. Apparently it was a way to rebel against the strict government without actually rebelling. I turned a corner in the museum and was totally not expecting to come face to face with a display showing people swimming, BBQing, and sunbathing all in the nude.
I then headed home to write up some lesson plans for Monday...
No comments:
Post a Comment