"i thought it was some dialect of spanish, like portuguese"

oh lonergans, you keep me young.

so i have free internets here in yoho (a pirate's life for me) hostel in salzburg, so i guess i can upload the few pictures i actually have on my hard drive.

amsterdam was cute. not my favorite city in the world, but quaintly dutch. this is what a canal in amsterdam looks like when i'm standing in front of it:

on friday we went to the van gogh museum in the morning, which also had an exhibit of max beckman’s work surrounding wwii. i don’t know much about art, especially art past the renaissance because we didn’t get that far in the one semester of art history that i took, but i know that i really enjoy vincent van gogh’s work, as well as josh groban’s rendition of the song regarding it. i’m easily drawn in by the thick, bold lines of non-linear color. he didn’t really like pointilism, because he didn’t believe it was “spontaneous” enough. so inspired and stuff, man.

later in the day we went to the anne frank museum. they’ve actually restored the entire annex where she lived, so we walked up the steep narrow stairs and climbed up the ledge behind the bookcase. while it was slightly larger than i would have imagined, it was almost inconceivable to imagine that they couldn’t leave, ever. there were a few videos playing in various rooms. one of them was anne’s next door neighbor, who was jewish but a citizen of paraguay (i think), so she was put in a special camp next to anne’s, and tried to sneak her food, but anne had pretty much given up hope.

one of her original diaries was also on display. it was so weird, it was just a little girl’s journal with awkwardly slanted writing and odd spacing and clearly very passionate. as if it weren’t real already.

at the end of the museum there was this interactive video setup that showed clips of what were deemed to be human rights issues followed by questions that everyone in the room could answer to, “yes” or “no.” then it would tally up the percentage of votes for this room, and the average for every time the test was given. occasionally in between clips, though, there would be screens that said things like, “freedom of the press is a fundamental right.” there was a cartoon guiding the clips wearing a harvard hat, which i found interesting, because the whole thing was so incredibly liberally biased. as if the “fundamental right” weren’t bad enough, the questions were completely slanted. following a clip about a man who is advertising that the holocaust wasn’t nearly as massive as historians claim, the “question” to answer was: we should never deny that the holocaust happened. not that i think the guy is in the right, but that’s clearly not what was happening there. it got worse, but that was the first to come to mind.

moving on to something lighter: outside the museum there was some installment of aminal photographs talking about the world ending or something. but whatevz LOOK HOW CUDDLY:

and yes, potential future employer, if you are reading this, i did smoke the cannabis, and it was legal and there is nooooothing you can do about it. LOL!

i liked berlin considerably more - the city just has so much more history. we stayed in this really sweet hostel in mitte in east berlin, so it had a very eastern bloc feel to it, deconstructed and such. every room was decorated differently; ours was the "silhouette room," covered in silhouettes of people made out of multi-lingual newspapers. it was pretty sweet looking:

... even if at night the shapes haunted me like mole people.

we went to museum inseln, where we went to a museum with a bunch of really good byzantine art, and then the pergamon museum! i found this gem of a translation:

plz tell me you're all as amused as i am.

as for the actual pergamon wall, i love seeing things i've seen in textbooks in real life. it was even bigger than i'd imagined, and with so much emotion and power. i particularly liked this construction of eros:


these carvings are larger than life-sized, to give an idea of how big the entire wall was - it wrapped around a massive room and around an equally massive staircase. oh, ancient world and your marble.

we also went on a bike tour, and saw a "controversial" holocaust memorial dedicated to jews exclusively. it's made up of equally-sized blocks of stone, all different heights to give the illusion of a maze but in a perfect grid. i tried discussing it with a scotchman and his son afterwards, but found that i couldn't really put my appreciation into words - it just made so much sense.



oh yeah apparently michael jackson hung his baby out a window in this hotel PUT BERLIN ON THE MAP. seriously our tour guide mentioned it. the scotchman suggested that michael jackson run for president of the us under the slogan "he can do no more harm."

we also went on this really sweet pub crawl that had a stop in this building, which is a combination bar/art house/cinema. it was so arty and deconstructed and european. i bought a shirt that said "kultur kann mann nicht kaufen." such a paradox, right? I'M SO ARTY.

then the pub crawl abandoned us in a train station several miles from home and we found these three boys escorting a VERY drunk friend named kyle home from the same crawl, and spent about two hours trying to get the train system to work in our favor. incidentally, i ran into kyle today on my way out of our hostel in munich - somehow he remembered who i was, despite his pretty intense level of intoxication. it was le lol.

also went to a photography museum that's in the old central post office of berlin - this is a picture of the girls' bathroom, but i just loved the architecture and the doors and ... stuff.

later went to the dome at the top of the reichtag, which offered a fantastic view of the city as well as this really sweet metal and mirror design, which i have artfully and abstractly captured here:



"get one of me with berlin!"

CHEERS