Saturday, 22 September 2012

Berlin Day 2


So I had a bit of a lie-in the morning before going to get blue man group tickets for the 9pm show for Kat and I. On the way to get tickets I found these guys:


Kinda funny cos they were dressed up as American soldiers but still looked so damn German for some reason. After I had bought tickets I went to have a look around the Pergamon museum. On the way I found this:


Its just lying! I don't think "Posh" and "Aussie" should be used in the same sentence, let alone as a describing word for the Aussies themselves. Hilarious. I was pretty apprehensive about going to a museum as I seen quite a lot and they are not really my thing but something in my head told me I should go and learn some stuff. I had heard that there was a freize of the gods doing battle and that sounded pretty sweet. I bought the "special exhibition" ticket combo so I could see the Pergamon panorama. I walked up a bunch of stairs to get to a viewing platform thing that you walk around to look at the panorama. When I walked in it was pretty dark and there were some crickets chirping away somewhere. It was pretty massive, and it was drawn to look 3D when you look down on it from the viewing platform. It was OK, nothing really to write home about, it was really too dark to appreciate. Just as I was about to leave the sun came up. The lighting was one of the best parts really, they did a pretty good job of getting the lighting colours right for just before dawn (light blue colouring) and then a brilliant orange glow for dawn before fading to a bright white light. Now It was pretty cool. Now I could see the detail too. I waited until sunset before leaving to go and look at the main museum. The first room I walked into was the freize-battle room. It was incredible:


It took me a minute to understand that this was actually a real thing, created hundreds of years ago. The givaway was the large sections that were missing that made it all the more amazing that they had pieced together so much of it. It was basically a giant jigsaw puzzle. Then I walked into the next room and there was a gigantic gate:


Largest reconstructed gate in the world or some shit. Then the room after that was another gate with a corridor of glazed bricks with lions on them that would run alongside the main entrance path to the gate. They really did pull out all their trump cards first though. They had some good stuff after the first few rooms but it was mostly museum stuff. As far as museums go it was a good one. I also found some interesting looking lions:


Don't know why I took a photo, they just look kinda funny. Apparently they were built to look intimidating but that effect was lost on me. I rushed through another special exhibition (I had been there two hours) but I did take this shot a room with a mirror ceiling that had the Greek gods family tree on it:


I went back to the hostel to meet Kat to go and check out the wall documentation center and memorial:

There we got a better idea of the size of the multiple-wall construction and where the death zone was. There was also a wall with the portraits of all of the people that died trying to get through. We just sat there struggling to come to terms with the fact that this happened in our life times. Even moreso for her at it was happening about 1000km from her house. Crazy shit. But then again I guess there is stuff going on today that is just as bad.

We went back to the hostel to chill out for a bit before going to see the Blue Man Group. I hope Kat wasn't just being polite when she said she enjoyed it, but I thought it was awesome. It was an "international show" so there was English text as well as German. (Lucky, as I remember Rowan saying he wanted to see the Lion King in Germany but it was all in German, which is silly because Lions can't speak German, I'd imagine that they have to learn English at school but I just can't see German as their 3rd language). Heaps of wacky humour and awesome percussion, what more could you want. Quite a lot of audience interaction as well (interactive clowns, interactive clowns) which was cool. A couple of times they got people up on stage and Kat and I were struggling to figure out if they were actors or not. One guy must have been because he had a helmet put on him, covered in blue paint and then swung into a piece of canvas to create art. I don't know who would be keen though to let that happen to them. But another girl had a weird dinner with the blue men where they got up to all sorts of shenanigans. Hard to pick. At one point they got the whole audience up to dance and stuff and we were laughing at the possibility that the entire audience apart from us were actors. I don't think that it would be a plausible business model. The finale was pretty amazing where we passed giant toilet roll paper (unused) from the back of the audience to the stage while there was flashing lights and ultraviolet stuff happening. The curtain call was weird though, I'm not sure if the audience was just a bit shit or they hadn't planned it well enough but it just kinda ended abruptly and the lights came up. Sooooo good though.

We went back to the hostel for a quick drink before getting a relatively early night at 1am. Thanks for hanging out Kat!

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