Back from Berlin

Finally my Berlin post! I got home on Sunday, but I was just too tired from having a four hour train delay and Christmas dinner that night. Yesterday night was spent watching Dr. Who and finishing Twin Peaks, which was totally worth not writing a post (especially the Dr. Who Christmas special, it was amazing!) I was not sure what to write about my trip, because it wasn’t very fashionable or innovating. We did nice touristy things like visiting the East Side Gallery, Checkpoint Charlie and Weihnachtsmärkte. Germany apparently really loves Christmas, because there were so many markets and lights everywhere that even I kind of got enough of the holiday. But besides all this, I had a lot of fun and saw some cool things! We went to a place called Hackesche Höfe which was originally a Jewish part of town. In the second World War the entire area was damaged. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall the building was returned to its rightful owners, who turned it into a cultural community. Now it’s a marketplace for designers, artists and other creative people. There are restaurants, movie theaters and concert halls. Right now it is one of the most expensive places in Berlin, because of its booming culture and influence on the city, which I thought was pretty cool! They had some nice stores, but I mostly liked the aesthetic of the place. It’s divided in small ‘hofjes’ (there isn’t really a great English translation, but you could call it a sort of patio) surrounded by trees and nice front walls. I took most of my pictures with Lotte’s analogue camera, so I don’t have that much to show yet, but just to give you an impression:

Near to this was the magazinestore I posted about earlier Do you read me?! and all I can say was that it was great! There were so many magazines and the owner had a really cute dog! I decided to buy some German magazines, because they were the cheapest and I can’t get them at home. I bought Sleek, Zoo Magazine and Indie. They are all partly in German, which is sort of a problem. I only know a small bit of German, so I might just skip over those parts and look at all the pretty pictures. 

One of the funniest things we did was look for the grave of Hegel, a philosopher I just don’t seem to get (I had to retake a test on his book Elements of the Philosophy of Right 5 times). He was buried on a small cemetery near the magazine shop. It was a very snowy place and we looked all over for the grave but couldn’t find it! When we finally looked at the map, counted the graves and finally found him, we took so many pictures of us next to his stone, it got kind of hilarious and creepy at the same time.

I love taking pictures of cemeteries!

We also saw the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin play at the Philharmonie. It was my first classical performance and I was really impressed. They played an amazing organ symphony by Camille Saint-Saëns with this tiny Asian girl on a double bass and another small girl on the organ. I was surprised the organ was played by someone so small and adorable, because it produced a wall of sound.

I also found a new cute cultural thing called Unser Sandmännchen. It’s an East German children’s series, with the cutest main character! They had a set of small magnets with images from the show, but I didn’t buy it which I now regret. Next time I’m back in Berlin, I’ll buy them for sure!

I hope everyone had a very nice Christmas, I had a great time. If you haven’t seen Dr. Who or don’t even know it, I strongly urge you to start watching. I’ll soon post something about bowties and unlikely style icons and this last episode of Dr. Who made me love them even more. Ok,  I’ll stop praising the show now… but it’s just so good! Go watch it!

Is he dreamy with that bowtie or what?