(oh, will you forget me? Was I ever really here?)
Hey everyone!
Berlin is shaping up- we've had two really incredible days here since I last wrote. Yesterdaz we saw the Berlin Philharmonic!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Please multiply number of exclamation points by a much larger number.) They were PHENOMENAL. We went to see if we could get rush tickets, and they were sold out so we waited around for cancellations and got incredibly lucky with tickets for only 20 euros each. Plus, I ended up in the front row of the lowest tier of side balconies, in the seat closest to the orchestra, meaning I could literally (and did, a bit) read the music Brahm's 1st Symphony over the shoulders of the 2nd violins- I was about five feet from them. I think the only seat in the entire house that might have been better than mine was the one exactly on the opposite side of the room where the guy sitting there could read over the shoulders of the 1st violins. But then, I think the bases may have given him a less clear view of the oboists. Soo...yeah. Wow. There aren't really any words, but watching them is like this amazing sea of motion; even the wind players are incredibly physically expressive with their instruments. The string players breathed as if they were wind players themselves and at the end of really intense phrases I could hear them all breathe in at the same time. So. Crazy.
Otherwise...today we went to the Bahnhof Zoo. They have a baby polar bear there, Knut, who's literally a celebrity here in Berlin and he's in all the newspapers and people line up to have pictures taken with him, so we went to see him and he wasn't there today! It was very sad. But we saw lots of monkeys and penguins.
We also went to a church called Kaiser-Wilhein-Gedächtniskirche (nope, no clue how to pronounce it) which was bombed during World War II and left that way to show the effects of bombing. I had a hard time wrapping my mind around it, I think partially because we hadn't planned on going, we just ended up finding it and having lunch on the steps.
This evening we went to the East Side Gallery, which is basically the longest still-standing section of the Berlin Wall, covered in murals which are now becoming covered by grafitti. We walked along the entire thing ( 1.3 km) at sunset. The artwork was so moving and had all sorts of things about peace and freedom. One of my favorites was a black and white painting with two hands pushing up a foot, lifting someone else over the wall.
Tomorrow is our last day here, and then we catch a night train to Krakow, Poland, where I hear the hostel has free internet! Hooray!
Until next time,
Sara
No comments:
Post a Comment