Blitz

Well hello all! I hope you are having a glorious Sunday as I am. On top of that, I hope you all had an excellent Saturday evening like I did- I met a group of English girls down at the hostel bar and had a very nice time talking with them about everything from Brad and Angelina (they brought that up) to terrorism in the world (I brought that up). It was one of their first nights ever in a hostel, and I got some satisfaction out of their newness to the system. I guess I consider myself a hostel veteran, for better or for worse. You get that distinction once you've stayed in hostels with cockroaches, I believe (see my Jerusalem hostel for background info). The bar in the hostel is nice, but only for one reason- they have a bunch of pictures of David Hasselhoff and they were showing old episodes of Knight Rider on the TV- awesome. Haha

This morning was the beginning of one long day of museums. In all, I visited 4, and they ranged from Ancient Egyptian art to Pop art a la Andy Warhol. I was under the impression originally that all the state museums were free on the first Sundays of the month, but apparently they stopped doing that 4 years ago. Luckily, I managed to get a student ticket that worked in most of the museums.

I started off with the ancient Egyptian museum, which housed a bunch of sculptures ranging throughout the Egyptian eras. This was refreshing because usually in Egyptian museums all they display are mummies, which get tiring. One of the more interesting tidbits about the sculptures was that they were often re-worked to resemble other people. I guess this must have been one of the first types of recycling!

Up next was the national German gallery of Berlin, which housed European paintings and some sculptures from the 17 to the 20th century. Despite the many (and I mean many) museums I have seen in the past two months, this one had a lot of new art, and the free audioguide made some of the paintings come alive for me. I especially enjoyed some of the marble sculptures and the French Impressionist paintings, which have grown on me.

Next up on my tour was an archaeological museum with a huge exhibit on ancient Babylon- Fact and Fiction. I had never really learned very much about this old Mesopotamia-centered culture, and the exhibit with audioguide was really informative. Although their art did not rival Egypt's, their governmental systems were complex on their own, and the Hamurabi's code that they had on display was really interesting.

I then set off on a 40 minute walk to find the German modern art museum, located in an old train station called the Hamburg Hoptbahnhof. Most of the stuff was great, like all the Andy Warhol paintings, including his famous Mao and Elvis pictures. Also, there were some more cubist paintings and modern sculptures. After that, it took the typical modern art turn and became really creepy and ambiguous.

After returning to the hostel, I began my weekly adventure of doing laundry, this time at a local laundromat. Luckily, the owner was really helpful and got me going. However, he definitely did not appreciate it when I put my clothes in the spin dryer the wrong way, which made it make a horrible screeching sound.. oh well.

Now, I am waiting until midnight, when my overnight train to Amsterdam leaves. I will arrive there at about 10AM, when I will start my touring of Amsterdam and commemorate having only 4 more days in Europe. Until then, onwards and upwards!