There are a lot of pictures I’ve earmarked for blog posts that just don’t have enough meat to stand on their own. Here’s a photo dump of quirky things we’ve seen across our trip.
I could have used one of these on my last trip when the bridges were washed out from the floods
Pretty sure a strong wind would blow this thing on its side. It looks amazing though. (more…)
Bryk is the last bar we’ll be covering in Berlin. We were a little skeptical heading in, from the outside it has a touch of that “ultralounge” vibe that defines the eurotrash experience. Thankfully the drinks were on point, though they often veered into molecular gastronomy territory.
I keep wanting to call this place Beckett’s Kampf. Kampf means “struggle” (as made memorable by a certain infamous book). Kopf, on the other hand, means “head.” Here is the sign from Beckett’s Kopf. Maybe it will help me remember the distinction:
In my defense, Beckett looks like he’s been through a lot
Lost in Grub Street is a weird bar with a weird name in Berlin’s business district. It was literally empty when we got there at 8PM on a Saturday; the bartender had to follow us in (he was sitting outside). He blamed “weekends in the summer,” which to me seem like good times to be in the bar business, but maybe things are different in Berlin (?)
The theme of the bar is “big bowls and short drinks.” Being as how there are only two of us, we skipped the punch bowls.
Bonus points for the double-wide cocktail napkin to accommodate the palate cleansing water.
Tiara and I love Bosch; he’s some weird psychedelic dutch guy from the 1400s that was making paintings of lizardmen and fish knights when everyone else was drawing nobles in furs or windmills. Dali definitely owes a debt to Bosch, as do other recent surrealist things (e.g. the Codex Seraphinianus).
We were lucky that the Gemäldegalerie had two of his 30 odd works while we were in Berlin. Here are a couple close-ups from St. John the Evangelist and The Temptation of Saint Anthony:
Maybe not your typical transit, but it beats sitting in traffic
Berlin was great for murals and graffiti. Kind of a ton of stuff actually. I made some more arbitrary groupings, but this is pretty much just a photo dump. Enjoy.
Take a byte out of capitalism
At the end of WWII, Russia quickly threw up some monuments. Tiergarten got the first one, literally months after Berlin was captured. Here’s Tiara and our college friend/Berlin expert John:
I kid you not, this is the “small” soviet memorial in Berlin
While in Berlin we visited the must-see museums (Pergamon, Neues Museum, and the surprisingly unpopular Gemäldegalerie), but one of the strangest and most interesting museums we visited was the Design Panoptikum. The Panoptikum is a private museum operated and curated by the surrealist artist Vlad Korneev. Vlad is a primarily a photographer, and one part of the museum displayed some of his works:
One thing we loved about Berlin was the range of affordable and delicious international food available. While we’ve clearly been eating well, we have missed our favorite Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Chinese dishes. Berlin had good restaurants specializing in all these cuisines. One favorite was Yumcha Heroes in Mitte, which served a wide variety of Chinese dumplings.
I don’t want to grow up, ’cause if I did, I couldn’t be a bolshevik kid
