Days Four and Five

Day Four in Berlin:
Anne had yesterday off randomly, so that was why she was able to walk around, but today she had classes (she is a TA in a German high school, to fill in the gaps for people), so I was on my own. I did fairly well. Four hours in the Pergamon Museum (the Greek and Islamic art museum) and an hour or two in the National Gallery (18th and 19th century paintings and sculptures). Wow. I loooove the Pergamon. Free (and very thorough) audio guides. You can design your own tour and a lot of the displays have little audio pieces that go with them so that you can get more background on the stuff you are looking at. They have recreated the entrance to the Pergamon Altar from Pergamon. The fraises are beautiful…I wish that these pictures did them justice (later: because the internet is slow in Anne's, I'll put up the photos when I get back to Paris). Four hours in that museum and I was not at all tired. I didn’t even notice that so much time had passed! The National Gallery also has a free audio guide, but I didn’t get it because I had to meet Anne at 4 and I didn’t want to be late by inadvertently spending 4 hours in there. I didn’t take as many pictures in there because paintings are hard to photograph (although the ones like this one of Philipp Veit's Die Religion turned out well) and because the guards were eeeeeverywhere. Weird thing: one of them corrected the way I was holding my purse. I had it tucked underneath my arm and towards my back and he followed me from one painting to another on the other side of the room and said “Excuse me. This. Like this.” and moved the purse from underneath my arm and on my back to my front where I could clutch it. I said “Danke” and he went away. I have no idea why that was important. No one else was in the room, so I could be knocking into them and there were no sculptures for me to brush in that part of the museum. Just funny. So, then I went to the Lindt store to buy Julie’s chocolate (it is on its way Julie!) and met up with Anne. We walked around bit and went back to Anne’s to make dinner. Chicken curry. Then we met up with another of Anne’s friends for a beer and I had a red Berliner Weise, which is basically beer with cherry syrup. I know that sounds disgusting, but it is good! Try it!

Day Five in Berlin:
Again, I was on my own today, but again, I think I did pretty well. Off to the Altes Museum to see the Bust of Queen Nefertari. Spent two hours in the Eygptian Museum. Like the Pergamon, it is amazing with a wonderful audio self-guide-y thing. Problem is that they only have the upper floor of the Altes Museum to work with because the Neues Museum, where the Eygptian museum originally was, was destroyed in WWII. Now they are rebuilding it and it will open in 2009. When it does, I highly recommend that everyone go there, because the small collection that I saw was *enter a praiseful adjective here because I don’t like the ones that I can come up with at the moment* and I can only imagine what the full exhibit would be like. Did some of my reading in Starbucks while waiting for Anne (the chairs, remember, the comfy chairs) and then I had ice cream and bought more chocolate. Back to Anne’s for comfortable evening surfing the internet, writing this loooong update, chocolate and the Great Music Exchange. Um…yeah, I now have about 15 days (14.7 days, to be precise) worth of music on my lappy and no more space on Paris. I had to move all my documents to Oxford to free up space for all the music. Total: 23.99 GB of music. OO! And I actually have 165.7 MB of space left on Paris! Go me!

…maybe that wasn’t such a hot idea…ok…maybe I will just keep Anne’s music on the iPod to save space…

Tomorrow we will go to Halle to visit Handel’s home and then onto Weimar to visit Goethe, Liszt, Nietzsche and others. Then to Leipzig. And then back to Berlin to catch at night train to Paris on Saturday evening. Oh! And ya know how my reservation from Paris to Berlin was 27 euros? Well, I had hoped that it would be cheaper to get the reservation for my return trip in Berlin and I was right! 7 euroes!