Being the brave souls (Parisian souls?) that we are, we got out the umbrellas and carried on with our plan of walking around. We visited the memorial to murdered European Jews, a maze of rectangular concrete blocks of varying heights. Walking into the memorial, you quickly become disoriented in the forest of stark grey columns. We continued walking past the memorial to the famous Brandenburg Gates. We continued on, becoming wetter by the second, admiring the architecture around Pariser Platz, and in the area of Unter den Linden behind the gates.
By this point our feet (ok, my feet) were so cold and wet I could hardly feel them. We decided it was time for some indoors culture, and got on the subway to go back to Potsdamer Platz to visit the Nue National Gallerie, which houses a collection of 20th century European artists. And that’s when things started to go wrong. The Nue Gallerie is part of what is called the Kulturforum, an area consisting of three or four galleries that you can access with one ticket. Once we bought our tickets, we encountered the first problem: how to get into the gallery? We wandered around the main building before finally finding the entrance. Once we got into the gallery, we couldn’t find the paintings we were hoping to see. We were in a football field sized space housing an impressive collection of 15th century art, not exactly what we had been hoping for, and not exactly what we were in the mood for. We realize the gallery we want is in another building, and set off across the street only to discover that the permanent collection of the Nue Gallerie is closed for renovation. Ok, the guide book said there was a design exhibit back at the Kulturforum that sounded interesting, so back we go, only to discover that due to the delicate nature of the mainly pencil on paper collection, it isn’t on permanent display, and is therefore also closed.
We decided that we were clearly not destined to become cultured souls that afternoon, and settled ourselves comfortably in a brewery for lunch. Once we had warmed up, we set off for Tacheles. Tacheles is a vacant building completely covered in graffiti that has been taken over by artists. It is a building that I would never have entered normally, but I guess we were feeling particularly brave that afternoon, and we walked in and made it up the third floor to visit the artist’s studios (luckily we weren’t the only tourists there!). It was an interesting place, and the surrounding neighbourhood was really neat. We stopped into a bar carrying 100 different kinds of beer (don’t worry, we only tried two) before going back downtown.
Our next stop was the Philharmonie, where we got tickets for that evening’s concert. The cheapest tickets were actually on the stage, right behind the orchestra, and it was really neat to have a close up view of the musicians while they were playing, as well as being able to see the conductor’s face. It was an impressive show (concert?), the highlight being an amazing violin solo. Dinner afterwards was back at another location of Lutter & Wegner, this time I had sauerbraten, and Erik black pudding with apple strudel for dessert.
It was a great weekend, and we were sorry to say goodbye to Berlin the next day.
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