Last Night on the Continent

DUNKIN DONUTS, BERLIN: My last blog entry on the continent. Would you believe it friends, six countries in eight weeks (not exactly a Contiki tour), has finally rolled to an end. After a week in Berlin I'm almost looking forward to getting back to London where good friends and soft beds no doubt await me.

The last couple of days in Berlin have been fantastic but we're absolutely exhausted after just being so go go go for a week and doing superhuman amounts of walking. Today we basically unwound by visiting a couple of museums. We started this morning at the Hampburger Bahnhof which is a modern art gallery in a converted train station. They have a fantastic collection with plenty of gems by Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Twombly and Beuys which was fun. They also had a full scale minimalist exhibition, parts of it exhibited in the cavernous area underneath the old train station, that included works by John Cage, Sol LeWitt and others. Anyone familiar with contemporary art knows minimalism can be a hard sell but I thoroughly enjoyed it. In particular I fell in love with a concrete radio, basically a lump of concrete plugged into a wall. Another highlight was the work of Anselm Keifer who does some incredible sculptures with lead.

After lunch we visited the new Jewish Museum, the glorious product of the imagination of architectural wunderkid Daniel Libeskind, the visionary charged with revitalising the former World Trade Centre precinct. Designed to resemble a fallen Star of David the museum takes you undergound through a series of passages displaying various objects given to non-Jews for safekeeping during the Holocaust. There is also an eerily beautiful tower, complete blacked out save for an arc of light at the top. The building uses light exceptionally well and while you stroll around it your attention is often arrested by starkly symmetrical beams of light that seem to shine through from nowhere. (Kind of like the beam of light that's supposed to illuminate the hiding spot of the arc of the covenant in Raiders of the Lost Arc.) Another part featured an installation by an Israeli artist. A collection of iron faces, the explanation implored people to walk across it, and when you did you not only got the sensation of walking on the innumerable skulls of genocide but the acoustics to the tall room also meant that all the clacking generated the most beautiful cacophony. Unfortunately we were too tired to really enjoy the rest of the exhibits.

Yesterday was supposed to be our cruisy day so we started by visiting the longest remaining section of the wall. It has been turned into an outdoor art gallery called the East Side Gallery unfortunately all the art seems to have fallen into total disrepair and is completely covered by a million different versions of "Kilroy Was Here". Then we visited Kreuzberg for some lazy window shopping in second hand clothing stores, record stores and that sort of thing. In the afternoon we took a lightning quick trip out to the Olympic Stadium to catch a premonition of the World Cup final (Bresciano to Cahill, Cahill props, shoots, Australian hoist the Cup aloft... I think I'm getting ahead of myself.) We did see the stadium from the distance but it doesn't look like they've done too much to it. And the train station certainly hasn't been renovated since Owens disgraced Hitler.

When we got back to the hostel it was all set up for a teenage living room party. Depeche Mode where in town. Our hostel is launching a revamped version of its sister hostel so to help promote it they decided to throw an after party. They moved amay the internet pc's, pushed the tables to the edges of the room and set up a projector screen for big screen versions of nu-Romantic filmclips. So after we got home from a rather disappointing night of barhopping we got to sip cold ones and watch a dancefloor full of pseudo-goths swaying to "The Forest" by The Cure. A definite, without a shimmer of sarcasm, party starter.

Anyway my friends this will be my last dispatch from the continent. So I'd like to leave you with one final musing that hit me in the cab (Berlin Funk Cabs!)last night. This city is more scarred by its former Communist path than any of the other major capitals we've been to. It's a curious mix of the rebuilt, the death zone that stood between the two walls is a major site for commercial development, and the absolutely decrepit. What seems strangest to this humble blogger is that this city was half capitalist.

Anyway I'll bring you more musings and adventures from Mother England!