Berlin Trip
May. 25th, 2008 08:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishTuesday: Getting to the airport with this group was... interesting. Despite the fact that we were all coming for the same flight, we didn't team up to get to the airport. This led to me and A getting there about two hours early, C about one hour early, and N got turned around while trying to take a new route to the airport, and got to the plane after everyone else was already loaded.
Herr Nolden was there to meet us at the airport and took us to our hotel in Prenzlauer Berg. Alex Hotel was fantastic, by the way, and I would heartily recommend it to anyone traveling in Berlin. Once we gotten settled a little, we ate lunch (Yay for not having to pay for it myself!) and then got on a bus tour around the sites of Berlin, just to get our footing. Apparently, anything old, official, or just famous in Berlin has a silly architecturally based nickname: The Washing Machine (The Chancellor's Offices), the Pregnant Oyster (the House of the Cultures of the World, incidentally a gift from the US to West Germany), etc, etc, etc. All of these were mentioned multiple times of separate tours, so I consider them to be roughly factual and in common use.
Pretty much directly after the tour, Prof. N left us with some money to buy dinner, and we went back to the region of the hotel. I, C and A went a wandering about and found a grocery store and a little bit of a park.
Wednesday: The Bike Tour. God. Ok, just let me say that I have not ridden a bike in a long damned time, the rental I got (a loud pink banana-seat girly bike) was too tall for me, and it had the kiddie back-pedal breaks that make it so you can't arrange the pedals to suit your needs without actually moving the bike along a path. This lead to some issues stopping and starting with traffic in Berlin. At no time did I fall from the bicycle. The bike fell on it's own, and I was not on it. Riding into the pole, that was all me. (It was in front of the Brandenburger Tor, the path was narrow and there were tourists closing in on both sides. I had no bell on my bike, and I had a choice of running down small old people in front of the new US embassy or of letting the handlebars of the bike hit the pole at a low speed. )
Other than that, the tour was quite nice. We covered a number of the same sites as the day before on the bus, including the Reichstag Gebäude, the Siegsäule, etc, etc. It was as a nice tour, in general, and the bikes really were necessary to get around. It took about six hours total, stopping and starting and breaking for lunch and a coffee break, but I was still rather tired.
That night, we saw some really great theater at the Berlin Ensemble: Der aufhaltsam Aufstieg des Arturo UI (English: The resistable rise of Arturo Ui), by Berthold Brecht. It's a parable about the rise of Hitler, written in 1941 , using the Chicago cauliflower market as the setting. It was amazingly funny- the actor playing Ui was incredibly brilliant at mocking Hitler's mannerisms. This included a highly exaggerated version of Hitler's voice, rendering most of his dialogue pretty much unintelligible. However, I still want to read the play, because it looks absolutely brilliant, and there were a huge number of Shakespeare references that I did catch.
EDIT: This song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-L0NpaErkk) was sort of the theme to Arturo Ui, and was edited so that the phrase 'the night Chicago died' was the last phrase before every new scene opened up. Highly effective, stayed in my head for days afterwards. I share it now with you.
Herr Nolden was there to meet us at the airport and took us to our hotel in Prenzlauer Berg. Alex Hotel was fantastic, by the way, and I would heartily recommend it to anyone traveling in Berlin. Once we gotten settled a little, we ate lunch (Yay for not having to pay for it myself!) and then got on a bus tour around the sites of Berlin, just to get our footing. Apparently, anything old, official, or just famous in Berlin has a silly architecturally based nickname: The Washing Machine (The Chancellor's Offices), the Pregnant Oyster (the House of the Cultures of the World, incidentally a gift from the US to West Germany), etc, etc, etc. All of these were mentioned multiple times of separate tours, so I consider them to be roughly factual and in common use.
Pretty much directly after the tour, Prof. N left us with some money to buy dinner, and we went back to the region of the hotel. I, C and A went a wandering about and found a grocery store and a little bit of a park.
Wednesday: The Bike Tour. God. Ok, just let me say that I have not ridden a bike in a long damned time, the rental I got (a loud pink banana-seat girly bike) was too tall for me, and it had the kiddie back-pedal breaks that make it so you can't arrange the pedals to suit your needs without actually moving the bike along a path. This lead to some issues stopping and starting with traffic in Berlin. At no time did I fall from the bicycle. The bike fell on it's own, and I was not on it. Riding into the pole, that was all me. (It was in front of the Brandenburger Tor, the path was narrow and there were tourists closing in on both sides. I had no bell on my bike, and I had a choice of running down small old people in front of the new US embassy or of letting the handlebars of the bike hit the pole at a low speed. )
Other than that, the tour was quite nice. We covered a number of the same sites as the day before on the bus, including the Reichstag Gebäude, the Siegsäule, etc, etc. It was as a nice tour, in general, and the bikes really were necessary to get around. It took about six hours total, stopping and starting and breaking for lunch and a coffee break, but I was still rather tired.
That night, we saw some really great theater at the Berlin Ensemble: Der aufhaltsam Aufstieg des Arturo UI (English: The resistable rise of Arturo Ui), by Berthold Brecht. It's a parable about the rise of Hitler, written in 1941 , using the Chicago cauliflower market as the setting. It was amazingly funny- the actor playing Ui was incredibly brilliant at mocking Hitler's mannerisms. This included a highly exaggerated version of Hitler's voice, rendering most of his dialogue pretty much unintelligible. However, I still want to read the play, because it looks absolutely brilliant, and there were a huge number of Shakespeare references that I did catch.
EDIT: This song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-L0NpaErkk) was sort of the theme to Arturo Ui, and was edited so that the phrase 'the night Chicago died' was the last phrase before every new scene opened up. Highly effective, stayed in my head for days afterwards. I share it now with you.
