Fri 30/07/10 01:20
My last full day in Berlin was more of a catch-up day than anything else. The first thing on my list was ensure that I had some place to go to after I checked out of the hostel here. I wasn’t really sure where I wanted to go, except that there were two places that I was interested in seeing. The first was Dresden, mostly because of its history during WWII. From what I remember, Dresden was leveled by allied bombings, and when I say leveled I mean flattened. That’s assuming that I remember correctly. The other place was Hamburg… and to be honest, I don’t really know why I want to see that. Maybe I thought I could score the best hamburger and fries there. Whatever the reason, I was leaning towards Dresden, and when I was ordering my ticket the first thing out of my mouth was Dresden. So tomorrow at 11:15 I head to Dresden for two nights.
Anyway, back to the subject at hand, what I did today. I am not really a museum or church/temple kind of guy. Museums can be boring sometimes and if they happen to be popular museums then you have to deal with a huge amount of people, and I don’t think I have to say this to anyone, I don’t like crowds. So museums usually take second or third in my list of must do things when I’m visiting a city. Today with time to kill, I decided to head to one of the big museums here, the Neues Museum. It probably could be called a museum of natural history for the amount of exhibits that chronicled mankind from 600,000BC to 1700AD. I spent about 2 hours walking through the exhibits and to be honest they were very interesting.
I left the Neues Museum and headed for the Alte Nationalgalerie, or what I call it, the National Art Gallery. They had work from Rodin, Cezanne, Manet, and many others on exhibit. I don’t really get into paintings unless I’m seeing it in real life. What I mean is through all my art history classes, I don’t that there were more than 5 or 6 paintings that I liked, but when I see the work in person, it always floors me. Some of them I could spend hours just trying to figure out how a painter could do something like that. Some of the work is huge, maybe larger than most people’s living rooms, and other work so realistic that it looks like a photograph.
After a couple of hours at the Alte Nationalgalerie and with legs that were turning to rubber, about to give out I found a beautiful shaded spot in the museum courtyard and soaked up some of the Berlin ambiance. There was a singer off in the distance singing what sounded like opera, tour boats cruising the canal behind me, and to be honest it was one of the most simply perfect 30 minutes that I’ve had in a while. I don’t know what’s happening to me, but some of the things I hated when I was young, like classical music, opera, and violins can at times seem so perfect.
