Final musings on Berlin
Berlin has 180 museums.
We visited 1.
The modern art museum in the Hamburger Bahnhof. It was great.
To be fair, the best museums on Musee Insel are under reconstruction. In the grand 25 year plan. And the Bauhaus museum had been moved to a temporary location 1 1/2 hours walk away. Too far even for us.
To be honest, when you have a choice of 180 it can be a little overwhelming.
Most hilarious museums in name:
1. The German currywurst museum ( the curried sausage museum)
Are you kidding?
2. The Museum der Dinge ( the museum of things)
No kidding!
Berlin is under construction.
Not content to have the most spectacular old buildings and new buildings already, they are pressing on with extraordinary projects, all over the city. They have 25 year plans of building and restoration.
Auckland can't even build a few cycle ways and apartment blocks without crying buckets of tears. What is wrong with us?
Berliners are visionaries. We need them. Even just one of them. Berlin has 4 million people. That's not that many. Thousands of people cycle to work and play every day. Cars co exist with them and let pedestrians cross the roads. No one honks. Massive building complexes exist and more are springing up. And most have some beauty to them.
We only need a couple.
I can't speak German.
Never has a language been mangled so badly as German by me in the last few days. Words and phrases spring to mind and by the time they come out of my mouth they are truly horrid. I understand German, I can read German but I will never try to speak it again.
Berliners don't want you to try. They are too busy to try and interpret badly pronounced, inaccurate words. Speak English for goodness sake.
Funniest moment: Oscar trying to quickly translate a German menu with Google translate. Panic priority being which dish not to order: turned out to be calf liver. We eventually succumbed and asked for a menu in English. Hilarious.
Confusing moment: Germans have a friendly and casual phrase for goodbye "tchuss" which I know from my German friends. Berliners now say 'Ciao' which is of course Italian. So confusing.
On a final note with apologies and no respect to either the Catholic faith or the German language, Oscar found the following poster about Pope Francis very, very funny.
Back to London tomorrow, for a weekend of rest watching football...
We visited 1.
The modern art museum in the Hamburger Bahnhof. It was great.
To be fair, the best museums on Musee Insel are under reconstruction. In the grand 25 year plan. And the Bauhaus museum had been moved to a temporary location 1 1/2 hours walk away. Too far even for us.
To be honest, when you have a choice of 180 it can be a little overwhelming.
Most hilarious museums in name:
1. The German currywurst museum ( the curried sausage museum)
Are you kidding?
2. The Museum der Dinge ( the museum of things)
No kidding!
Berlin is under construction.
Not content to have the most spectacular old buildings and new buildings already, they are pressing on with extraordinary projects, all over the city. They have 25 year plans of building and restoration.
Auckland can't even build a few cycle ways and apartment blocks without crying buckets of tears. What is wrong with us?
Berliners are visionaries. We need them. Even just one of them. Berlin has 4 million people. That's not that many. Thousands of people cycle to work and play every day. Cars co exist with them and let pedestrians cross the roads. No one honks. Massive building complexes exist and more are springing up. And most have some beauty to them.
We only need a couple.
I can't speak German.
Never has a language been mangled so badly as German by me in the last few days. Words and phrases spring to mind and by the time they come out of my mouth they are truly horrid. I understand German, I can read German but I will never try to speak it again.
Berliners don't want you to try. They are too busy to try and interpret badly pronounced, inaccurate words. Speak English for goodness sake.
Funniest moment: Oscar trying to quickly translate a German menu with Google translate. Panic priority being which dish not to order: turned out to be calf liver. We eventually succumbed and asked for a menu in English. Hilarious.
Confusing moment: Germans have a friendly and casual phrase for goodbye "tchuss" which I know from my German friends. Berliners now say 'Ciao' which is of course Italian. So confusing.
On a final note with apologies and no respect to either the Catholic faith or the German language, Oscar found the following poster about Pope Francis very, very funny.
Back to London tomorrow, for a weekend of rest watching football...
I can't see the poster! I'll put it on a bigger screen.
ReplyDeleteWhen i first went to stay at Justina's parents home I couldn't even read German let alone speak it. I had a meltdown in their laundry because I couldn't read the outside of the packets to do my washing. So marginalising.
But Berlin is amazing