Berlin and pictures

Today, I realized I left out a big city we visited the last month...Berlin!

Berlin was definitely different for a lot of reasons.  It felt a lot like Chicago and there were several reasons for it.

You need to know Berlin's recent political history to understand why things are the way they are.  WWII happened, as all know, and Berlin had the famous Berlin wall.  What I did not know was that Berlin was actually fully within Eastern side of the Iron Curtain, but the Allies didn't want one side to own all of Berlin.  So half of Berlin proper was owned by the "West" and the other half was owned by the Russians.  People were leaving in droves to the Western side because many did not take well to the Communist way of things in East Berlin.  Frustrated with literally losing 30% of their population in a little over a decade, Russia seriously stepped up their border patrol which only increased frustrations with the locals.  In the 1960's, tensions got high to the point where two rows of tanks were facing each other only tens of meters apart.  Then, literally overnight, Russia built the Berlin Wall.  Time pretty much stood still for another 25 years or so until the wall went down.  However, it wasn't until around the 1990's that the governments were unified.

No major public work funding could be approved until the government was unified, so no new buildings to arise above the ashes in the heart of Berlin could be built until this point.  Only as of the early 2000's have new building been rebuilt.  Also, all of the major sights of Berlin were actually within the Eastern side of Berlin, so by the time we visited, the main road through Berlin was under complete construction, all of the embassy building were less than 10 years old, all the subways looked quite new, and everything felt more updated than any other European city we had ever visited.  The opera house was only partially rebuilt by the Russians, so the Germans are currently taking down the initial rebuild and building it back to their own liking.  In short, the entire city is practically under construction.

The Brandenburg Gate, where lots of people dressed at bears, Soviet soldiers, American soldiers, and other crazy things stand holding flags for tour groups.

The Reichstag, or Parliament, building.  Sadly, we never got inside the glass dome where it's supposed to have a really cool view of the city.

Somehow, much of the very well stocked Art Galleries are still in fantastic condition.  The Greek, Babylonian, and Roman architecture...yes, actual architecture taken from Rome, Greece, and Babylon and rebuilt in Berlin...was the literally the grandest sight I have ever seen in a museum.  The Greek and Roman sculptures and paintings were equally impressive.  Yes, I also know how they came by this, but it is still very impressive to see in person.  They also had a lot of valuable Egyptian art as well.

This is part of one of the indoor building reconstructions in the Pantheon Museum.  Most of these stones are original from Rome.

Here's a better view of it.

They also had a lot of salvaged tiled floor murals from the Greek and Roman times...

High five for Berlin museums!

This was my favorite.  They took part of a Greek altar for a god that I cannot remember and have been painstakingly trying to rebuild the surrounding sculpture that literally goes on for hundreds of feet!  It wrapped around the entire room which was bigger than a basketball court in circumference.  You can see some of it on the far left of this picture.  It was essentially all of the gods at war with some army of serpents.

This was J's favorite.  It was a floor tile mural of a parrot with brilliant greens and oranges and set in a black background, which was unusual.  It was repaired in the spots that are dull, like the lower right corner and at the front of the block the parrot is standing on.

I thought this was way cool...a reconstructed Babylonian gate.  This thing existed very similar to this several thousands of years ago!  The animal figures are almost all original as is most of the corner and border pieces.  Much of the solid blue brick was added as most were missing at the time of excavation.

This is a largely original Assyrian palace wall that originally surrounded a palace garden.  The decoration is supposedly not common for the period, which is why they struggled to get it.

This was Berlin's major Greek and Roman museum, complete with an entire room surrounded by sculptures of the gods and a large tiled floor mural. 

Don't be alarmed.  It's just a guy rodeo grappling a minotaur.

This was the most fascinating art find for me.  All the way through ancient Egyptian times, it was customary for the wealthy at burial to have their portraits made on thin wooden slats which were buried with them.  What blew me away was that the quality of these works were better than much of what one sees in medieval paintings, roughly 1000 years later!  It reminded me of the find around 8 years ago that x-ray imaging indicates that the white sculptures of the Roman and Greek periods were likely elaborately painted, making them very lifelike.  It just brings to the forefront the concept that humanity, in terms of intellectual and artistic ability, has been pretty much the same for thousands of years and really has only been limited by technology and its ability to utilize whatever is available.

Another very wonderfully colored tile mural.

BELOW IS GRAPHIC CONTENT LIKELY NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN, BUT TOO HUMOROUS TO NOT INCLUDE.

Several years ago, my friend K came back from his trip to Maccu Piccu and found lots of quite sexual artwork from the period to the point of humorous.  This museum had an entire room dedicated to such Greek works including pottery with a lot of homosexual erotic imagery.  This above is a medallion that it is believed that a child may have worn for the hope of sexual success in adulthood.  Because of the extreme prominence of such artwork from the period, there has been a lot of speculation that sexual expression and freedom was on a whole different level of acceptance and possibly practice.  I admit that even I had difficulty imagining a culture with that level of "in-your-face-ok-ness" when compared to present day views on sexuality.

We also managed to visit the very large flea market they have in Berlin every Saturday.  It was indeed a VERY big flea market where you could buy almost anything except for a pet, a major appliance, or a vehicle.  We finally made the effort to visit Alexanderplatz, in honor of my Aunt and Uncle who've become major fans of the German tv series by the same name.

 

The Fernseherturm, or directly translated, the Television Tower.

We loved visiting Berlin, but we doubt we would go back.  Perhaps in 20 more years, when more is rebuilt, it will be a better place to visit for us.

I managed to find more pictures.  Please let me know if there is a particular place from where you want to see more pictures.

Craziness and new things

Wow!  So much has happened since I last posted.

First, I apologize for the large time since my last post.  I had difficulties first with getting pictures put together for posts...THEN my computer completely crashed and I lost almost everything.  I then waited nearly 6 weeks to get a recovery disk for my computer.

Once I got my computer up and running, several new things happened.  I finally got volunteering and a mentor set up for me.  These will help me with medical school immensely.  The volunteering I've done thus far have been absolutely awesome and only further my desire to go into medicine.  My mentor is great for me in that her background is very similar to what mine is right now.  Things keep looking better.

Now for the travel...

After Halloween, we visited our friends in Ulm again.  While learning more German with the little ones than I had in a while, we visited LegoLand...which was AWESOME!  The rides were not bad, and the lego sets built there, miniature european cities and both miniature and full size models of star wars sets and characters, were quite impressive.  I caved and bought myself a quite sizeable Technic set which I spent three days over Christmas building.  I forgot how much I LOVE Legos.  Yes, I saw the movie.  More on that later.

We took more day trips during December and January.  One of them was to Speyer where they have a pretty cool Cathedral and crypt.  The elaborate stone work and size of it was spectacular, especially considering it was almost a complete rebuild from after the last war.

The next place we went to was Ludwigsberg, not terribly far away from Heidelberg.  There were a very large gardens, a sizeable building (422+ rooms in size including a theater and two chapels), and even a very large aviary which completely took me by surprize.  It's completely worth visiting if you want a bird's eye view into how things worked for the upper class during the Baroque period.

Just a few weeks ago, we visited London and saw all the major sights: the London Tower, the National Gallery, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, London Bridge, Tower Bridge, the outside of Westminster Abbey, and the Natural History Museum.  It was good we spent most of the weekend there indoors as it rained for about half of the time from the hurricane-level storm on the opposite side of the island at the time.  We used the tube for the majority of our travels which was always super bustling!  It was like being in the Matrix with literally stories upon stories of train tunnels...it was like a whole other city underground.

In short, London was incredible and we both would completely visit it again.  The quality of the museums was fantastic and mostly free!  Everyone...EVERYONE...was very polite and very helpful...such a switch from many other cities we've visited.  The only downside to the visit was that it was definitely on the expensive side of things...three and a half days on the cheap ran us far more than we hoped it would.  It was also a nice change of pace to visit a place where there was not a language barrier.

A little special trip we took while visiting London was to see the Lego Movie.  I LOVED IT!!  It was so much like what I imagined when I was little playing with the tons of Legos I had at home...minus the super city that took up an entire room.  It was also nice in that we got to experience a different part of London away from the "City."  It was surprisingly like the States...more so than any other European city we've visited thus far.

Finally, I'm still practicing and playing soccer with the local team I am a part of.  I played in my first indoor soccer tournament in Europe.  There were roughly 12 teams in our competitive bracket, and we played about 5 or 6 10min. games.  The skill levels of the teams were all over the map: some very young, quick, and aggressive, and others older, slower, and more tactical.  My team was smack in the middle.  One game we saw resulted in bench clearing as one of the goalies had a beef with an opposing team member.  That tournament made me proud to be part of my team.  We did average with a surprise upset on our last game.  We never lost our cool, we always had fun, we were always supportive, and we were probably the most strategic team.  I'm very much looking forward to our game in early March.

This should bring you all up to date on things.  I will absolutely try to get more pictures as soon as I can.  I know a picture speaks volumes more than a simple story sometimes.

Special shout-out to K!  I'll be better about making more posts.  :)