sunday was a great day. i slept till two and was finally awoken but a gorgeous blue sky and brightly shining sun. geoff, rachel and i took full advantage of the day by playing frisbee in the park. and we all wore shorts! it was amazing. my legs had not seen the light of day in many months.
figures that just as we are about to leave the weather gets better.
this has been one of the first weekends we have had off. we are nearing this mad dash to the finish but this was a pleasant break.
we originally wanted to use this day to make a pilgrimage to our mecca: the haribo factory/museum in bonn. however, it apparently doesn’t exist, or at least it is not open to the public. sad day.
instead, we decided to go to dortmund, a city northeast of düsseldorf which happens to be within our transit-pass limit, and therefore free. we rode an RE train from hbf, and after an hour-long riveting and slightly heated conversation on urban vs. suburban development & architecture, we arrived.
the city is a lot like düsseldorf, but there were a few cool things to see. there was an interesting opera house, a nice pedestrian/shopping plaza, and a sea-full of bumblebees, that is, fans of the dortmund soccer team who felt it necessary to sport massive amounts of yellow and black and be merry
similar to the berlin bears and kemah (texas) pelicans, dortmund is apparently quite a horny city. of rhinos that is.
spring is in the aire.
we walked around the shopping area and were guided by jazz music to a café. there was a live jazz band playing and we sat for some tea and apple strudel. good times.
later we stopped at the bookstore that had a nice of international (aka. english) and graphics design selection.
day 01
we left düsseldorf via ICE with lars from AIB around 9:00am on monday, april 14th. fortunately it was a 4 hour train ride, meaning us scandinavian kids could catch up on sleep. in berlin, we arrived at the brand new main station. deutschebahn has outdown themselves. it was a huge 5 level space, 4 of which included transit tracks. so IC and RE trains would be zooming by below while S-bahn were above. We grabbed lunch there and headed outside for a 3-hour guided bus tour of the city.
berlin hauptbahnhof
typically we scoff at the people on bus tours in other places we have been, however, for such a big city as it was, berlin was great to see through the window of a bus. we learned a lot too. it really is a beautiful city. there is an enormous park in the middle and, as the city was practically destroyed after the war, there are all sorts of new construction and modern building programs taking place. we also got to see the remains of the berlin wall. we had watched a film about it and it coming down a few days earlier and to actually see it was very moving. where the wall is not in tact, there is a line of cobble stone in its place. so moving through the city, you can see this line crossing streets and sidewalks, as a constant reminder.
at one of our stops on the tour, we visited the brandenburg gate where around it are all the embassy buildings. i have to say that the US embassy, which is currently under construction, is the least exciting of all the countries. pretty boring.
but i suppose, when next to this frank gehry building, most others would be relatively less-than exciting.
bank by frank gehry
brandenburg gate
after the tour, we checked into our hotel near the freidrichstraße station (basically the center of the city), hotel amelie, and then met for dinner.
we stopped first at this really sweet gallery. there were independent artists set up in different rooms working. the also were selling their work and i bought a ‘berlin’ screen-printed t-shirt. the entire building’s interior was covered in graffiti – so many emotions screaming out in color. it was really impressive.
dinner was fun. it was a bit chilly outside but we commandeered a few space heaters and we were golden.
rachel and gavin.
evan and alan.
laaaarrs!
savannah and tim.
me and sierra.
later that night we stopped at a cool irish pub under the friedrichstraße station. every 5 seconds you could feel the trains go over, but it was a neat environment. there was also a live band.
day 02
tuesday we started by a company visit to ‘trick film lounge’. they are a small-scale film/graphics/music-video studio. it was founded in 2005 by kathi käppel and stini sebald as a sister company of ‘filmlounge’. their work is very simple but effective, like a collage of different media on the screen. i really liked it.
their site. under “kurzfilme”, the short, “mitte juli” is quite funny.
afterwards, geoff and i went to an exhibit on “hitler’s germania” which presented all the ideas hitler and his master architect, speer had in mind for berlin. it was very impressive what they had planned. from huge highways and transit thoroughfares to a massive axis of governmental buildings, leading up to a mammoth-sized dome assembly building. it was to hold 180,000 people inside, and was large enough to house the great pyriamid of khufu. it was to have had a copper roof and would have been like a giant green mountain in the city. i had read about the exhibit a few weeks before on TIME.com and was glad to visit it.
photo credit: mark simon
later that evening, we all went to the 1936 olympic stadium for the berlin-hamburg soccer game. the stadium itself was large and gave an ominous feeling. there were these dark towers in the distance and you could just imagine being there 70 years ago. but the game was fun! it was unfortunately a tie 0-0 but we lars taught us a few chants and curses to yell at the opposing team.
day 03
wednesday we me up to tour daniel libeskind’s jewish museum in southern berlin. i really liked the building itself. from a bird’s eye view, its a jagged line of a plan, supposedly an unfolded star of david. you begin from an older building to the north, and go underground into the new museum. there, you are guided down three different axes. one leads you outside to a slanted garden, similar to peter eisenman’s holocaust memorial in central berlin.
another leads you to this solitary tower, completely dark inside except for a small slit near the top. very impacting.
the final axis leads you up into the museum exhibits. i personally didn’t really like the design of it. there was a lot of imformation shown, but it seemed crammed in. there was too much color, and it seemed to appeal more to a younger generation. it took away from libeskind’s design.
one part was neat – you sat and listened to different jewish perspectives and accounts after the fact.
afterwards we took a short look at the famous, american checkpoint charlie.
barrett, gavin, and i went to grab some lunch around potsdamer platz – once a deadzone created by the berlin wall, but now a bustling site of modern architecture, restaurants, and businesses. we didn’t think about the fact that german’s typically don’t call their restaurants “diners” but were so hungry, we went inside anyway. it felt like we were in new york or on a american highway stop. there was an enormous american flag on the ceiling, typical ‘diner-esque’ waitress, english music and menus, and espn on the tube. but also like an american diner, we ate greasy good food.
the berlin philharmonic by hans scharoun.
then we went to the neue national gallery by mies van der rohe. it was a nice exhibit inside and underground with works by salvador dalí, pablo picasso, oscar schlemmer, otto dix, and max ernst. and, i got to sit in a barcelona chair. i think it actually suited me quite well.
later, we met up with the rest of the group for another company visit, this time to radon labs. they are a video gaming studio, focusing on a few large scale, but mostly smaller rpg titles. it was interesting to see how their company worked, hearing from their marketing director, and seeing how their employees worked.
before turning in for the night, geoff, gavin, barrett, rachel and i found a jazz venue at a bar. we got there around 9:30pm for the jazz at 10 and sat downstairs, mosty playing the game: 20 questions (one of our favorites). it was a lot of fun and the live jazz was pretty fantastic.
day 04
one of my highlights of the trip was visiting and touring the dutch embassy. designed by rem koolhaas, from the OMA studio, this is one cool building. there is different colored glass everywhere, overhanging walkways and a conference room, sleek and beautiful materials and furniture inside, and a friendly, engligh-speaking dutch staff. we weren’t allowed to take pictures but you can watch this youtube video to get a better idea.
next we traveled to the berlin gallery for modern art, photography and architecture.
it was an interesting collection. nearly the entire first floor was an exhibit on emilio vedova.
our tour guide and us.
a snippit of one of my favorite works, by fred thieler.
later that evening, we all got dressed up for our farewell to berlin dinner at “kartoffelkeller” – a restaurant where just about every dish includes potatoes (kartoffel). it was probably one of the best meals i have had here in germany.
we had a lot of fun and ended the evening with a friendly game of poker 
day 05
on our last day, we rode the s-bahn (the city and regional trains) to oranienburg, a town on the periphery of berlin. there we got off and walked a few kilometers to the concentration camp, sachsenhausen. you can prepare mentally for what you think and have heard concentration camps are like, but it is nothing until you actually walk the ground and experience these dark spots of the world. while this camp was not nearly as known for its brutality as auschwitz, it included nevertheless, everything you would expect. i walked alone through as much as i could. one of the most disturbing things was that it was a stone’s throw away from town. when your view wasn’t blocked by the immense stone wall, you could see the tops of neighboring houses, as if nothing horrible was going on. they had a small exhibit in one of the guard towers about how the people of the city became aware and adapted to their proximity of sachsenhausen. most of them were told and believed that the train-car loads of unfortunates that were taken there were murders of germans, or extreme wrong-doers. it still makes you wonder.
it took me a while to recover mentally but with the long ride back and my ipod, i came to.
back at the hotel, we gathered our luggage and headed for hauptbahnhof were we ate lunch and boarded our train to düsseldorf. geoff, rachel, sierra and i sat together and had a lot of fun on the ride back.
