Athens

Athens is huge. It’s absolutely enormously huge. Okay, it’s probably not as big as Mexico City (land size) and it does only have a population of 3.7 million (Lonely Planet’s figure). From the plane it was gigantic. We flew over the city, passing it completely, then did a u-turn over the sea and spun back, landing 30 km away in the countryside. After getting off the plane, we took a bus into the center of the city and walked to our ho(s)tel. We booked the place online (on a hostel-booking website), but it’s nothing like the other hostels we’ve been staying at. When we arrived, the place was virtually deserted. We rang the bell and were buzzed in, but no one was in the common-room when we entered. Finally the people emerged. The owner is from Guam, and his English isn’t that great, but he laughs a lot. His “business partner” looks as though he hasn’t showered in year and tried to give us more change than he was supposed to. We corrected him and he put us in our own room for the night. It has two beds and a cot, so we might be getting a roommate for the evening. It’s got a kitchen (well fridge and hot plate), but no microwave, which is fine. We’re close enough to walk to the ruins and the airport bus, but we’re not in the super tourist section. The hostel is also on the 5^th floor of building and our window looks out to other apartments. Everyone has their windows wide open and laundry strung across the shutters (us included). It’s hot here. We have three fans in the room and no top-sheet or blankets. We don’t want them. As soon as we got here, we went to the grocery store to get stuff for dinner. On the way there we passed a Swedish family (mom, dad, two little kids – ages four and five maybe) who was just arriving. When we got back from the store a French couple (in their 20s) was cooking dinner. Everyone seemed kind of scared or had a look like, “where are we and what have we gotten ourselves into?” Thus far, the impression we have of our Greek neighbors is that they are loud. Music plays a lot and people have no qualms about screaming from one window to another across the airshaft in between the buildings. The hostel is fine. It’s clean enough and works for the price and location. We’re pretty pleased, and as Jess pointed out, “we HAD to stay somewhere like this in our travels.”….although I did just hear someone throw yet another plastic bottle out their window and onto the roof below us.

The rest of the trip will be written from Malta and posted starting 24 July (approx.).

Prague Summer (not Spring)

We arrived in Prague midday on Saturday. It’s a small city with a lot of historical buildings which are still in tact. The Jewish section is especially well preserved because it is rumored that Hitler wanted to maintain it as a “Museum to an Extinct Exotic Race.” This means the city suffered very little damage during either world war. It has been used as a movie set for scenes from old European cities (“Amadeus” was filmed there). Most of the streets are narrow and windy. The center is very touristy, as was the area near the castle, where I saw (horror of all horrors) an Ed Hardy store.

As soon as we arrived, I dumped my stuff at the hostel and went up to Prague Castle. The complex is from the 9-10^th Century and is still in use today as the official residence of the Czech president. As soon as I got there, I went inside St. Vitus Cathedral, a gothic structure with colorful stained- and painted-glass windows. Jess had told me to look for a stained-glass window by Czech illustrator Alfons Mucha. I had some trouble figuring out which one it was and, in the end, wound up taking pictures of most of the windows and having Jess ID it later. The church itself was probably one of the top-five nicest churches I’ve been to. The windows were brilliantly colored and it had a huge tomb in the back. I especially liked a spiral staircase leading up to the second level (above a side-chapel). It was carved with a vine over it.

As I was waiting to get into the church it was drizzling. That slowed down as I left the church and headed toward the Old Royal Palace where I entered at the Vladislav Hall, a large space with arched ceilings. The Palace itself wasn’t that interesting, as there wasn’t much to see inside. I could only visit a four rooms and a chapel. I did really like the Basilica of St. George. It was a small-ish church, connected to a cloisters that I could not visit. The church had some frescoes on the apse, but my favorite part was the stairs. The altar was raised above the crypt and on either side a large (for the space) staircase gave you the option of going up (to the altar) or down (to the crypt). It was like a staircase you wound find in an entrance foyer of a large house, but this one over-filled the space and was in a church.

The last place I visited inside the castle grounds was Golden Lane. In the 16^th century, tradesmen lived in tiny houses in the castle’s wall. Above the houses you can walk down a hallway the castle guards used as a lookout. The houses themselves are really tiny. I fit through all the doorways, but many people did not. The rooms inside were about the size of a Tufts single, some as large as a double. The houses are used as souvenir shops today; I browsed around, but nothing was worth buying.

Leaving the castle, I walked down and crossed the river to the Staromestske nam, the square in Prague’s old town. The square is bordered by buildings and churches, which are as old as the 14^th century. At one end is the Old Town Hall where an astronomical clock (it’s a partial replica) from 1410 stands. It’s large and chimes on the hour (apparently apostles parade out of the top of it, but I never saw it). In the center of the square sits a statue to Jan Hus, a religious reformer of the 15^th century.

Back at the hostel, I made rice and a mock red-curry for dinner (broccoli and carrots in tomato sauce with curry). Our hostel was one of the nicer ones we’ve encountered. Jess and I both got bottom bunks in a room overlooking a plaza. Our room had three (!!!) windows and, therefore, a cross-breeze. The hostel also had a full kitchen and wifi.

Sunday I woke up and took a free walking tour of Prague. (Jess had been to Prague before and didn’t really want/need to do the touristy stuff.) The tour guide was from Colorado and had only been living in Prague for two months. She’s there to teach English. We started in the old town square and moved on to see a church where an arm hangs. Legend has it that a man was trying to steel from the church. As punishment his arm was cut off and left hanging to remind others not to steel. Pretty much it looked like a brown dog bone 20 feet in the air hanging from a small chain.

Next we walked through the Jewish quarter and saw the cemetery from the outside. Then we walked across the Charles Bridge, which has statues lining the sides of it. These are all plaster casts because the originals won’t survive the elements. The statues are mostly of saints and the bridge was crowded with tourists and people selling things. On the other side of the bridge, we visited a small, man-made island. Prague floods every few years and some times this island is completely submerged. A restaurant marks the water level of the various floods. A few years ago, the entire first floor of every building was flooded. From here we saw a wall where people sprayed their opinions of communism and love on a wall. During the 80s, a Mexican university student painted “All we need is love” onto the wall and kept painting it after the police painted over the graffiti. The idea lasted (even though communism did not) and people still spray-paint messages of love onto this wall. The tour ended up at the castle.

I walked back down the hill and to the old part of the city where I went to the Jewish Museum, which is actually a series of buildings. The first one I entered was the Pinkas Synagogue from 1535. The walls have been painted with the names of 80,000 Jews from Moravia and Bohemia who died during the Holocaust. These names are arranged by location and are all over the main part and women’s gallery. Upstairs there was an exhibition of art work by children who lived in Terezín before being moved to the concentration camps. Their teacher, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, kept their work in a turn and it was discovered, preserved and donated to the museum. Next, I went through the Old Jewish Cemetery which was established in the 15^th century. It has almost 12,000 tombstones, but more people are buried there without markers. The stones are literally smashed up against one another. Because space was at a premium, and the Jews were not given many other areas, people were buried in layers. The ground at the cemetery is actually slightly higher than the streets around it. The oldest grave is from 1439, but it was really hard to even tell that the rock I saw was marking a grave. There were some tombs in the walls of the cemetery, but most of the people had been buried “underground.” After the cemetery, I went to the Ceremonial Hall, a building used by the Prague Burial Society. Inside I encountered an exhibition about death in the Jewish religion as well as objects used by the society, including tableware from their annual banquet. It was believed that their job was so depressing that they deserved a yearly break.

Next, I visited the Klausen Synagogue, which was the result of taking three smaller buildings and turning them into one larger space. The space was set up as museum on Jewish traditions and they had installed a bimah with a torah in a glass case to show how it would look during services. This synagogue was built in the 1600s and was the largest in the ghetto. The third synagogue I visited was the Maisel Synagogue. This one was dedicated to the history of Jews in Moravia and Bohemia. The building was built in 1590-2 and had three naves. It was much squarer than the previous two synagogues I had been inside. It too had the arc symbolically set up, but no bimah. I saved the Spanish Synagogue for last because I knew it was the most opulent of the four. It was in the baroque style and housed an exhibit on the history of Jews in Moravia and Bohemia from emancipation to the present. It also had a room full of torah-pointers and other old silver objects. I liked the set-up of the museum, that you had to walk between the spaces, but the actually cases were dark and there was tons of text in each. The Berlin museum was much better in that the exhibitions included hands-on elements and the lighting made it easy to see everything.

I walked through the newer part of Prague, up to Wenceslas Square, where I saw a statue of him on a horse. Wenceslas was known as the “good king” and he is well loved in Prague. I stopped at Tesco for some groceries and wanted to pay with my ATM card because I only had enough Czech crown/krona to get to the airport the next day. The card machines weren’t working and I asked if I could pay with euros. I only had a 20-euro note and was spending the Czech equivalent of one euro. While I was trying to explain to the woman that I could pay her with euro, but I wanted euro back as change the man behind me paid for my groceries. I was shocked and embarrassed but he said, “ah, no problem. You can pay next time.”

That evening, I went on a mini-excursion to DM (a combo CVS/health food store) for wheat-free pretzels. Jess had found the store and told me where to go. On the way, I got turned around in this gallery and wound up encountering a statue of Wenceslas on an upside horse which was suspended from the ceiling. I had known about the statue because it is by the same artist who put statues of babies on the TV tower in the city. From far away, they don’t really look like babies, but Jess had know about it and told me.

Going out in Berlin

Our final night in Berlin we decided to go out to the Tacheles. Jess had gone there when she spent a summer studying in Berlin. The building used to be a squatters’ building but it had become a space for a beer garden and artists, studios. The whole structure was covered in graffiti and stunk like a toilet. All along the street there were entrances to various bars/clubs that are part of the building. We went into one of them which had stairs leaving up to the artists’ studios and another bar at the top of the place. Some of the artists had really cool pieces for sale. One guy had done “sculpture/diorama scenes” of marshmallows and photographed them. (He had used Jet-Puffed, smart man.) He also had T-shirts he had painted. Other artists had paintings for sale. This was all on the second floor of the building. Upstairs was a spray-painted hallway which was covered in graffiti, but none of those artists were in their studios. On the top floor, we went into a bar to look down at the beer garden space (which had a cover charge). It looked like fun downstairs, but it wasn’t that packed and not worth paying to enter. When Jess lived in Berlin, there was no cover charge and the place was packed all the time. You don’t have to buy alcohol at the bars because Berlin doesn’t have an open-container law. I had purchased a gluten-free rice beer the previous day and we walked around sharing the half-liter bottle. We didn’t even drink half of it because it was pretty bad. Jess didn’t like it because it was bad beer and I didn’t like it because it still tasted very beer-like. It confirmed that I don’t like beer. Being allergic to beer is actually pretty easy for me because I think it’s pretty gross.

Last day in Berlin

Today was our last day in Berlin. We spent a fair amount of time running errands (laundry, printing confirmation pages and boarding passes), etc.

We also went to the Neue Synagogue, which was right around the corner from our hostel and has an amazing gold dome on top of it. The other day, we could see the dome from the top of the Reichstag. The building opened in the 1860s and was ransacked in 1938, then re-openned before it was hit by a bomb in 1943. In 1957 it had to be destroyed because the bomb's damage made it unsafe. Part of the building, including the dome, was re-constructed in 1989-90. The main prayer room was not part of the reconstruction because it was too badly damaged. Only the entrance foyers were rebuilt. The building was in the style of the Alhambra in Granada. It was also not built at a right angle to the street. The entrance is, but the main part of the building is on an angle because that made it easier to have the arc face Israel. Inside we walked through an exhibit about the history of the building and Jewish institutions around it (hospital, orphanage, stores, etc.). The exhibit included artwork by children who had seen Marc Chagall's "I and the Village." It was obvious which were painted by little girls (lots of pink and purple), but the more interesting one was painted by a boy who included Super Mario and Star Wars in his painting.

We walked around the back of the building where the main part of the synagogue used to be. Instead of rebuilding this part (they didn't have any remnants left over from the rubble), pillars were placed to show where the building used to be. The arc is represented by some columns across the grassy space. After seeing that space, we climbed up to the dome which had a pretty great view of the city. Unfortunately we could not take pictures from up there, or anywhere in the complex.

Afterwards we stopped in a park to eat some lunch. Then we walked through the trendy areas towards Jess's neighborhood (which was outside the city). In the trendy area we stopped into an alleyway. The building used to be owned by a man who hired Jews to work at his factory. He hired them to try to protect them from deportation. Now, it's a grafitti-covered area filled with cafes and an exhibition of Anne Frank.

Continuing along we walked through hipster neighborhoods filled with trendy cafes, stores and the like. We stopped at a cafe to wait for a quick rainstorm to end. Then we walked back stopping in deisgn stores and a clothing store where Jess bought a patch with the TV tower on it. The street we walked was the one Jess used to walk on her way home from classes and she enjoyed seeing how much it had changed in the two years since she had been there.

Museum days in Berlin

Wednesday morning we walked to the Hamburger Bahnhof Art Museum. It’s a contemporary art museum. I had never really been to a museum for contemporary art, I had seen some of it in galleries, but most museums (that I’d been to) don’t really go past modernism or post-modernism. This works in this museum were highly concept-driven. I’m still not sure I understood most of them. There was an entire wing of Joseph Beuys’s work. He is a German artist who worked internationally during the Cold War. Most of his works deal survival; some deal with education. Many of his pieces were installations or video performances. I was especially intrigued by a series of large sculptures made out of tallow, which is like lard and can be used for fuel. In another part of the museum, we saw some large-scale sculptures by Anselm Kiefer. There was a lead plane with books and rotten plants on top of it. These items were meant to weigh the plane down, but it’s made of lead and, therefore, cannot fly anyway. The museum was somewhat unsetting because I haven’t really come into contact with that many conceptual works in one place.

Next we headed toward Checkpoint Charlie passing through the high-end shopping area. Checkpoint Charlie was one of the main crossings through the Berlin Wall. It’s the one most diplomats used when visiting the city. Now, there is a replica guardhouse with two men dressed in uniform “guarding” it. You can pay to have a picture taken with them. You can also pay to have East German stamps in your passport. Large photos of soldiers are on display in the middle of the road. From one side you see a soldier from the Allied Forces. The other side shows a Russian soldier. Their photos are there to make you understand what you would have seen had you been at that spot between 1961 and 1989.

From Checkpoint Charlie, we walked to a place where a substantial amount of the wall still remains (actually most of these bits have been moved there). It’s also where the SS offices were. They’re building the museum, but an open-air exhibition called “Topography of Terror” gave a lot of historical information about the space and the city.

We ended our day by spending three and a half hours at the Berlin Jewish Museum. Jess hadn’t been there and I had learned about the building and wanted to see it in person. It’s insane. It’s one of the most complicated museums I’ve ever visited. It was designed by Daniel Libeskind who is an American architect of Polish-Jewish decent. He does a lot of Jewish/Holocaust museums and memorials and also did a building at Bar Ilan (I’ll update you on what it’s like). You start in the basement where there are three axis (aka hallways): the Axis of Exile which describes the flight of the Jews and ends in the Garden of Exile, the Axis of the Holocaust which introduces the visitor to victims of the Holocaust and ends at the Holocaust Tower, and the Axis of Continuation which takes the visitor to the rest of the permanent exhibition. The Garden of Exile is the only place in the museum that has right angles. It’s a grid of tall towers covered by Russian olive trees which form a canopy over the space. It’s meant to be disorientating: to show what exile and moving to a new place is like. The Holocaust Tower is an empty trapezoidal room, 42 meters high with the only light entering through a slit in the point. It’s not heated and doesn’t really have much of an explanation. The visitor is supposed to make his own interpretation (this is a common Libeskind theme). Also, these axis were not level; they sloped upward. We found upward sloping areas in other parts of the museum as well.

We went up the Axis of Continuation to a side gallery which had a photo display celebrating “100 Years of Tel Aviv.” The city had been founded in 1909 and this exhibit – put together by Magnum – included work by Robert Capa, Abbas, and other photographers. I really liked the Abbas photographs especially because he’s Iranian-French, yet spent time working in Israel. Photographs spanned from the creation of Israel up to present time.

At the end of the photograph exhibit, we found ourselves in the Memory Void – an indoor courtyard space where we encountered a pile of metal faces meant to represent victims of the Holocaust. We could see this space from the upper floors of the museum.

Upstairs the exhibit started with the history of Judaism. First we were introduced to three Jewish villages from the 10^th Century. Called Worms, Speyer, and Mainz, they are generally referred to by an acronym of the first letter of their names Shum which means garlic in Hebrew. We watched a 3-D video which was terrible. The information in German was really basic – “The town had a temple and a bathhouse; the Talmud was studied in the temple” – and even more abbreviated in the English subtitles. Continuing along the zig-zag hallway we learned about the Hebrew alphabet on computer screens which told you how to write your name in Hebrew. Throughout the museum, there were also three large black stones. You put on headphones and moved around the stone. As you moved around the stone you could hear different voices talking and music playing. It was like scanning the radio except you were moving.

After the stone, we came to an exhibit about Glikl bas Judah Leib (born Hamburg 1646) who wrote the oldest autobiography of a Jewish woman. She was a merchant and we learned all about her family and work. One of the hands-on sections had a computer game where you had to pack her bags for her trip to Amsterdam. You had to pack things like “kosher snacks” instead of a “bunny rabbit” and “cell phone.” In that area of the museum were three video monitors with animations about objects (host, cup, headscarf), locations (Lourdes, Garden of Eden, Niches) and actions (pilgrimage, wedding). These were written in simple language to teach children about Judaism, Islam and Christianity. The animations were brightly colored and used symbols to convey their messages. The one about niches talked about the mihrab, the arc and the apse as different variations of the same idea. It ended saying that “every religion has a niche.”

The rest of this level of the museum dealt with Jewish traditions: as merchants, philosophers like Moses Mendelssohn, and how celebrations have changed over time. There were more interactive games and hands-on sections for children and adults. We spent some time looking at information regarding the various holiday celebrations. They had a chuppa and you could play wedding music while standing underneath it.

Downstairs we walked through an exhibit on what it meant to be German and Jewish at the same time. We started getting tired, so we sped through the exhibits about modernity which presented Jews in the arts and sciences along with the building of modern synagogues. There was a section dedicated to the Jewish experience during the WWI and the Weimar Republic and then during the Holocaust. The museum ended with present time and computer monitors which asked questions like “Should Turkey be allowed into the EU?” We said yes, and learned that half the museum-goers also said yes, while 50 percent said no.

Throughout the zigzags you could look into “voids” – empty spaces like courtyards which could be seen from both levels of the museum. These were integral in Libeskind’s design and are meant to make the visitor think about the space between the lines. In the end we decided that the museum was probably the best value (it only cost 2.50 for students) of any of the museums we had had to pay for thus far in our trip. Like the museum in Glasgow we appreciated the desire to teach and the hands-on approach in many of the exhibitions. Each section had something for people of all ages: children could color and watch cartoons drawn by Jews, while adults could read and listen to traditional songs sung during services. The building itself was worth seeing and experiencing.

As if we hadn’t had enough museums on Wednesday, we decided to spend Thursday on Museum Island, a small piece of land in the middle of the Spree River. We started at the Pergamonmuseum, which contains the Collection of Classical Antiquities, the Museum of Islamic Art and the Museum of the Ancient Near East. Entering the building, I was immediately struck by the enormous size of the Pergamon altar. Pergamon was in Western Turkey. The altar is shaped like the Ara Pacis, but five or six times larger; it’s in the Hellenistic (late-Greek) style. It’s a huge marble staircase surrounded by a ten-foot high frieze of sculptures. You can climb up the altar and take pictures. They’re removed the side and rear sections of the frieze and put them up around the room so it’s easier to see. In the next room we found a façade called Market Gate which is also from the same region in Turkey. This façade was greatly intact and had Roman imperial (1^st/2^nd century AD) sculptures around it. Walking through the gate, we were met with another gate: the Ishtar Gate. This alone would have been enough to draw me to Berlin: not just to the museum, but also to Berlin. Constructed in the 6^th century BC with blue stones and covered with lions and other animals, the Ishtar Gate lead up to the palace in Babylon. All that remains is the lower gate, but even that was way to big to fit into the frame of my camera. The colors are bright and a large amount of the mosaics have been reconstructed. You can start at the far end of the gallery and pass the lions lining the hallway as you walk up to the gate. That part of the museum also contained reliefs, sculptures, and paintings of the areas done at the time of German excavation.

Upstairs was the Islamic art section which had calligraphy, carpets, parts of mosques and a small section with a Moroccan/Andalucian room. It also had a façade from a palace in Jordan which had been constructed in 743-4. Another small room called the Aleppo Room was covered in carvings and decorations. You could walk into it and get a 360 approach to the art. Basically, the Germans lifted entire sections of buildings and brought them to this museum.

The other half of the museum was the Greek section where we walked through an exhibit about Greek Gods. The pieces, which had not been displayed since 1939, were recently sent to Brazil for a big show there. They have since returned to Berlin and are back at this museum. This exhibit was good, but the pictures of the Brazilian version looked like it was much better organized.

Museum number two on Museum Island was Altes Museum which was largely under construction. We saw more Greek objects like vases, coins, helmets, jewelry, and statues. This museum houses Queen Nefertiti’s bust. She was the wife of Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten and lived from 1370 BC-1340 BC. She’s really beautiful, but I was surprised that she only had one eye painted on. People clustered around the case taking pictures like crazy (I was one of them).

Continuing along, we went to the Alte Nationalgalerie, another bizarrely laid out museum (this is becoming a theme here). This time, the actual museum was a rectangle (for the most part), but the galleries were difficult to navigate and dark. On the first floor we found one tiny room that was not renovated with the rest of the museum. It was meant to show how the museum used to look (which is better than it looks now). This floor was somewhat dull, with tons of dark pieces. I did like some of the works by Adolph Menzel, but nothing was that great. Upstairs we wandered through some more German art and some French paintings as well. On the upper floor we found Romanticism and the Dusseldorf School which turned out some pleasant paintings which I enjoyed. These focused on light and color and were mainly landscapes with a few cityscapes thrown into the mix.

Finally we went to the Bode-Museum which houses the Sculpture Collection, Museum of Byzantine Art, Numismatic Collection and Works from the Gemäldegaleria. The building was newly redone and probably the best space of all the museums. It had a room with a large dome and one with a small dome; these were connected by a room dubbed the “basilica.” Around the sides were wings with more galleries. I didn’t love the collection. It was mostly religious art: Baroque, Renaissance, Romanticism, and Byzantine. I did like how some of the altars were displayed – on metal stands about four feet in the air allowing the viewer to walk around them. They had a few other interesting pieces and the store was well stocked. There was also a coin collection in some of the upstairs galleries. Even though the building was newly redone, the floor plan was a bit confusing and it was difficult to walk around the museum without having to retrace your steps through certain rooms.

We were allowed to take pictures (without using a flash-light) in all of the museums. In the Pergamon, we could bring our bags in and no one said anything to us. At the Altes Museum we were allowed to bring bags in, but not water, and the bags had to be in front of us (not on my shoulder, but across my chest). As we were leaving, a girl was getting yelled at for trying to bring a tote on her shoulder. She then checked it, but brought her water bottle with her. The guard sent her back to the coat check once again. I should also point out that she spoke German and still wasn’t getting it….oye. In the Alte nationalgalerie we had to check everything and by the time we got to the Bode-Museum we decided to just check it and not bother with the crazies guarding the museum. At the Pergamon, we were stopped at the exit and asked to fill out a survey. The girl (about our age) asked questions in English about our experience at the museum and in Berlin. She typed the answers into a blackberry, which I thought was nifty.

Berlin

We arrived in Berlin Tuesday morning. Our bus came in near the Radio Tower. We took the subway to the center and went to the hostel. Jess spent six weeks here (two summers ago) on a study abroad program, so she knows the city really well and understands the language (I’m in “smile and nod” mode). We dumped our stuff at the craziest-decorated hostel I’ve ever seen. It’s called “Heart of Gold,” which refers to the spaceship in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Our room has diagonal orange and red strips and questions written all over the walls. The hostel has a great location and they don’t mind microwaving things (like rice for breakfast) for us.

Anyway, we walked to Alexanderplatz where we saw the TV tower. Inside the plaza, there was an exhibit set up about the 20th anniversary of the wall coming down and reunification. Panels explained the events leading up to 1989 and the early 1990s. It was entirely outdoors and free, so everyone could enjoy it and learn about it. Glass cases held objects from refuges of the time. One of these objects was a stuff animal I used to own (I called it Puffy). It was unnerving to see the same toy I had played with for most of my life sitting there in a glass case.

Also in Alexanderplatz we saw a huge clock which tells the time all over the world. It’s round and the hour moves around the various time zones. Leaving the plaza, we walked down Unter den Linden, a wide boulevard where many museums, memorials and university buildings are located. The burned books memorial is currently underneath Mercedes Benz Fashion Week. (I was not happy about this.) We passed the US Embassy, which is recently redone and right outside the Brandenburg Gate. The building is pretty ugly and doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the street. It does, however, have a great location, and overlooks the Tiergarten which is across the street).

Suddenly we were inside The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It’s a series of stelae (big rocks) which are arranged in a grid, but their number and measurements don’t have any meaning. The stones are also graffiti-proof. They were actually treated with chemicals produced by a company which produced chemicals used to kill Jews during the Holocaust. No one realized this until after the memorial was created. The designer was okay with this because it was like history coming full-circle and gaining closure. The stones are huge and it’s difficult to walk around without walking into people. Underneath the memorial there is an indoor museum space. The space housed a timeline of the Holocaust as well as rooms housing quotes from survivors and information about families. At the end there is a computer and a series of photos. You can look up the location of Holocaust memorials around the world.

We also walked to Potsdamerplatz where the world’s first traffic light was installed. The wall used to run right through the square and today there is a memorial set up here. The city is working on turning this neighborhood into a financial center. The Sony Center is here, along with many high-end hotels and restaurants. The Sony Center is actually an outdoor/indoor building. It’s covered, but the entrances are wide open and the buildings around the courtyard are full buildings with their own entrances. There is free wifi in the courtyard because they want to encourage people to use the space. There is also a fountain that can be covered with a stage. It’s in the center of a space and, therefore, people cannot walk up to it and touch actors or famous people on stage. This is also the place where movie premiere are held.

Walking toward the Reichstag, we passed through a bit of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s main central park. It was a forest before the war, and totally destroyed during WWII. In reconstructing Germany, the Allies donated trees to be planted here. It’s the only place in Europe where you can find Canadian maple. We didn’t go inside the park, but walked around it. At the Reichstag we went in and took the elevator up to the glass dome which was built in 1997. The original dome was destroyed in a fire one month after Hitler took power. This dome is awesome because you can go to the roof (it’s base) and walk around the inside. Then, there are ramps leading up to the very top. These ramps spiral around the dome. Everything is glass and the views of the city are pretty spectacular, especially because the whole thing is free. Jess has been inside the building and the main chamber (where the equivalent of the Senate meets) is right below the dome. Mirrors and windows allow light to enter, but the public can’t see down into that space.

Finally, we went to some Germany health-food stores and did some grocery shopping. There is so much food here that I can eat. It’s really quite amazing. There are three health-food stores with gluten free sections within five minutes of our hostel. I’ve found pretzels, American marshmallows, soymilk, rice, rice cakes, gluten-free beer, tons of cookies/crackers/cake mixes and other foods. The prices are reasonable and I’m able to eat really well. I can’t read the ingredients of most foods at the grocery store, but Jess can! So far, I’ve tried red cabbage and apple (frozen, prepared in our microwave here) and egg salad with mushrooms in it. She won’t let me buy the sweet-and-sour sauce because she can’t be sure there isn’t wheat or something hidden in it.

Beginnings of Amsterdam

The bus actually got to Amsterdam 45 minutes earlier than it was supposed to. We hung out in the bus station for a while, then took a city bus to our hostel. The man at the check-in desk told us that Michael Jackson had died. We thought he was kidding and chuckled. Then he told us he was serious and we were shocked. We dumped our stuff at the hostel and walked into the city (about 45 minutes from the hostel to the center) where we got coffee, breakfast (which was brunch by that point), and sat around using wifi for three hours. Then we walked around the city a bit getting information and planning what to do for the next few days. Throughout the city we could hear Michael Jackson’s music playing from bars and cafes. It was like a huge memorial to him. We could also hear people talking about it everywhere.

Amsterdam is small, and everyone rides a bike. I knew to expect that, but there are bikes everywhere. Cyclists have dedicated bike lanes on almost all roads. They don’t slow down for people; instead, they ring their bell. Crossing the street is complicated because, at some intersections, you have to cross the bike lane, then the car lane, then the tram tracks, then another car lane and the other bike lane. None of these lanes are particularly wide, but you have to be really careful and aware of your surroundings.

There are also canals and bridges throughout the city. We walked through the red-light district where we could see the girls behind glass doors. They stand around in their skimpy outfits hoping to attract attention from the passers-by. You’re not really allowed to take their photograph as you pass, but you are allowed to photograph the neighborhood during the daytime. On the way back to the hostel we stopped and got groceries, which was frustrating because the packaging is all in Dutch and I have no idea what’s in half the stuff the store, had. There were tons of prepackaged salads, but I couldn’t buy any of them because I couldn’t easily identify all of the ingredients. However, I did find a single serving of raw broccoli. I bought that, along with a cucumber and some fruit. Our hostel doesn’t have a kitchen, which is unfortunate. Otherwise, it’s a really nice place. It’s huge and used to be a school. Everything is new and shiny and there’s recycling!

Saturday I went around to museums while Jess hung out in the hostel. First, I went to the Anne Frank House. I got there at 9:15 (it opens at 9, but they hadn’t opened yet) and had to wait on a short line. Once inside, I began in the basement which was the storage facility for the jam company that her father ran. The museum had her quotes throughout it in both English and Dutch. On that level, I watched a short video about her life and the Jewish experience in the Netherlands during and preceding the Holocaust. On the first floor, I stood in the offices where Frank’s father worked and the “helpers” spent their days. These were the people who helped hide the family. On that level there was another short video, an interview with one of the helpers: the woman who rescued and safeguarded the diary. Passing through the bookcase/door I climbed the steep stairs up to the attic apartments. The stairs were so narrow that they were almost like a ladder. There was no furniture in the apartments. Actually, most of the museum was empty. There were some display cases and some quotes on the walls, but the focus was on the text and the space. Frank’s father did not want the apartment furnished because the original furnishings were taken when the Nazis ransacked the place just after taking the family. He did allow historians to furnish the place once and record a video of it. He also aided in the construction of scale models.

In 2009, I could see the rooms and there were some displays on the walls. These were of items the family used: Latin lessons, a Dickens book, a menu for a party. There were wall markings where the children’s height was recorded. Anne’s room had pictures up on the wall. There was also one place with a small map which Mr. Frank used to track the Allies as they moved through Normandy. It was a different perspective on something which I had just seen because I had just been in Normandy and stood in the places he had marked. The apartment was tiny, especially when you think of the eight people who had lived there. It was also dark: the museum-style lighting was bright enough, but the curtains were all drawn. This made it easy to see how claustrophobic the apartment must have been for the family. After going up through the space, visitors were guided into a new building where various versions of the diary are housed in display cases. They have copies of all the languages it’s been published in including Yiddish, Georgian, and Korean among others. They also have the actual red plaid diary that Anne used.

Exiting the museum, there was a new exhibit about Freedom. Two video screens were set up in a room which had theater-style seating. One screen was used for short videos, each ending in a question. For example: Should people be able to burn the flag as a means of protest? Should Holocaust-deniers be allowed to publish their thoughts on the web? Should the Spanish government shut down the Basque-language newspaper because it suspects possibly ties to ETA? Should headscarves be banned from French schools? (The video was a little outdated because Sarcozy just banned burkas from France.) After the videos the audience was supposed to vote (yes/no) for each question. The other screen had graphs showing the results of our voting and the results of everyone who had been to the exhibit. Because I had been there early in the morning, there were not many people in the room. After the French question, three girls got up and left. I knew that these girls were French because I stood behind them in the queue at the entrance. They didn’t even say anything to each other when leaving. They just shared a glance, stood up and walked out. I really liked the exhibit because it forced people to think. Most of the videos were about different countries, making it likely that a viewer would watch one about his or her country and, therefore, be forced to think about issues that are close to home.

The next museum I visited was the Rijksmuseum, dedicated to the 17^th Century “Golden Age” in the Netherlands. I must have missed that bit of European history when I was supposed to learn about the Spanish, French and English fighting over Dutch territory. Apparently that was the case until the Dutch finally overthrew the Spanish after the 80s years war (1568-1648). Anyway, they established a republic, got some ships, started sailing around the world and became quite powerful. The lower floor of the museum focused on their wealth and acquisition of goods. My favorite room was dedicated to doll houses that rich women would maintain as a status symbol. These were elaborate and could cost as much as a modest (life-sized) canal house. The doll houses had several floors and miniature furniture much like the ones I played with as a child. These however were made of much more elaborate materials. The other interesting room on this floor was one which housed delftware. This is the name for blue-and-white pottery made in Delft to replace pottery of the same style that the Dutch imported from China. They started making their own version when they could no longer import because of a Chinese civil war in 1657. My mother later informed me that we have a piece of Delftware at house: a plate.

Upstairs was dedicated to Dutch art, which is one of my favorite collections in most museums. Because the Netherlands was predominatntly Protestant, there was little religious art. In most other countries, the Catholic Church commissioned most of the artwork, especially large scale works. In the Netherlands, artists produced small paintings and preferred landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. I wish they had more portraits by Frans Hals because I like his lose “rough” style. His subjects always seem happy because he gives them life instead of painting stiff, traditional portraits. The museum had landscapes by Jacob van Ruisdael and his uncle S. J. van Ruysdael. Jacob is the better-known painter, but I like the uncle’s work better: he keeps the horizon line low and paints lots of sky. Even more than their works, I discovered that I really like the riverscapes because they remind me of Cape Cod. I saw many more at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The museum had a bunch of Rembrandt’s paintings including “Nightwatch,” his largest painting and the first painting of a militia company in motion. It’s a huge painting that was actually cut down from its original size because it was moved to a smaller space. In it, Rembrandt depicts all the wealthy men in one militia company that defended the city. Some still life paintings I really liked were those by Adrian Corte whose small paintings were of a few fruits or vegetables rather than an entire table-full.

Then there were the Vermeer paintings. The museum only had three because one was on loan. The first one I encountered was “The Little Street” (1658). This painting is what it sounds like, a picture of a little street in Delft. In it, he depicts the buildings rather than people (his norm). He applied the paint thick in some places, and thin in others. He also used smooth brush strokes in some parts of the painting and rough ones in other parts, like the bricks, for example. It’s a peaceful street scene, but not as great as some of his other works. I prefer his intimate depictions of women placed in a white-walled room with the light entering from the left. “The Kitchen Maid” (1658) is one of those paintings. In it, he used dots (kind of a mini pointillism) to show the reflection in the bread and the woman’s skirt. You can only see the dots if you look really closely at the painting. Vermeer was a genius with light. His third painting at the museum was “Woman Reading a Letter” (1663), another intimate scene, though not quite as iconic of his work.

Behind the Rijksmuseum was the Van Gogh Museum. I had purchased a museum pass (it’s actually an annual student membership to many Dutch museums; it was only 22 euro and it more than paid for itself). One floor of the museum was dedicated to Van Gogh’s work and life. The other two were used for another exhibit and another wing was loaned to the Stedelijk Museum (modern art) which is closed due to remodeling. I had not realized Van Gogh only painted for ten years. When he was 28, he decided to become a painter. He basically dropped everything and started painting constantly. His first five years as an artist were spent in the Netherlands where he painted dark, realistic, “pleasant” paintings. He then moved to Paris where his brother worked as an art dealer. He spent the next five years of his life (these were also the last five years of his life) in France, where he painted the works which made him famous. The museum had some of them, including “The Bedroom” (1888), which was a really interesting painting: very flat and planar with each plain representing “sleep” and “rest.” The colors were brighter than his Dutch paintings and, therefore, this painting was given a much lighter tone. Van Gogh was crazy. He cut off his own ear, then spent time in a mental institution, took himself out and shot himself. The museum had one of the last paintings he made: “Wheatfield with crows” (1890). This painting is more typical of the works he is famous for: it’s brightly colored and the brush strokes are flowy and loose. People think the crows represent “death” and that this painting was meant to foreshadow his death.

The special exhibit wasn’t great, but the modern art museum’s exhibit was nice. It wasn’t fantastic or large, rather one room dedicated to artists in the 1920s and another dedicated to the 1960s. In the 1920s section, there were works by Dutch De Stijl artists. These included “Contra Composition V” (1924) by Theo Van Doesburg. He used primary colors like Mondrian, but his lines are diagonal to show “restless dynamism.” I also liked a painting by George Geosz called “The Rabble Rouser” (1928) because it was somewhat dada – about a nightmare – but there were cartoon heads that had political meanings and the colors were muted. The works were around a curved wall. The artist’s name along with the city and year the piece was created were painted in black letters below each piece. The exhibit focused more on European artists for the 1960s section which I was glad about because I’m so used to seeing only American artists in that category. Instead, I learned about Yves Klein whose gilded panel called “Resonance MG16” (1960, Paris) was a large gold-leaf panel covering concave recesses. The best piece on the floor was the precursor to a piece we saw at the Tate Modern in London. It was a video called “Neo-Classic” (1971) by Robert Morris, an American. He filmed an exhibit he put on at the Tate (then London’s Tate Gallery) where he had three actors give a performance with his wooden objects. These “objects” were the same things we got to experience in the Tate turbine room: a large hamster wheel and the same slides and things to climb on. It was strange to see an almost 40-year-old representation of something I got to see in reality a few weeks ago. Especially considering that I thought it was new because it was in the Tate turbine room which is a large, open space used for special exhibitions only.

Wandering back through the city, I went next to Rembrandt’s House. He lived there when he was at the height of his career, from 1639 until he had to sell everything in 1656 because he went bankrupt. He wrote a list of everything he owned, so historians were able to recreate the rooms. You enter the museum through the basement where you see the kitchen, which was large. Then I went upstairs to the entrance room and his bedroom. At Rembrandt’s time, people slept in box beds – a kind of armoire with a short bed. They actually slept sitting up because they were afraid they would stop breathing if they lay down. The upper floors of the house were Rembrandt’s studios. Here, I watched a demonstration of how paint was mixed during the time period. I also saw his engravings which were incredible. The amount of attention he paid to the details and the care he took in creating the plates is evident in the prints. Unfortunately there weren’t many on display because most of the museum was showing his friend’s work. Jan Lievens was considered a “child prodigy.” He and Rembrandt did work together – in one series of prints, Rembrandt uses a figure from Lievens and adds to it.

That evening, Jess came to town and we met up and grabbed some groceries for dinner. While sitting on a bench, we discovered that pigeons really do eat just about anything. We got one to eat raisins with egg salad on them. Then we walked to the red light district, went to a bar and had beers/cider and fries. We sat on the sidewalk watching people go by. The bar we had picked had hilarious rules. People were allowed to smoke outside, but not inside. You could drink inside or outside, but only if you had a table outside. People were getting yelled at for taking their drinks outside with them while they smoked. There was a doorway next to the bar that had to remain unblocked, but a table could be placed within three feet (not too close, but it still blocked the residents from entering their building). The fries were good and the cider too; it was a really nice night and we enjoyed being outside.

Then we walked the red light district at night time and looked at the girls as we passed by their doors. Each girl stands behind a glass door which is lit with a red fluorescent bulb above it; most have black light inside or next to the door. Some of the girls are pretty and have nice bodies, while others are more full-figured. A few didn’t bother wearing skimpy clothing, but most had on thongs or short, tight skirts. People wave to them as they pass and we did see at least one guy going into a room. Some girls had their curtains closed to show they were “busy.”

Sunday we took the train to The Hague where we visited the Mauritshuis. I had always wanted to go there, but didn’t understand where it was when I first started studying art history. I was confused as to how there could be a town called “The Hague.” I didn’t understand the way a town could have “the” in its name. The Mauritshuis is an old palace, so the collection is shown in small, intimate rooms and the building itself is also on display.

Five years after my introduction to Vermeer’s work, I was finally seeing the town where his best-known painting hangs. “Girl With a Pearl Earring” (1665) is located here. It’s not actually a portrait, but rather an example of a Dutch tronie, a painting based off of a model but designed to show an expression or style rather than an exact portrait. The reflection off of her earring is enough to make the painting “a great.” In 1881, the painting sold for the equivalent of one euro. It would go for tons more if sold today.

The museum had only two more works by Vermeer. One was “Diana and Her Nymphs” (1653-4). One of Vermeer’s first works, this painting is large and shows five females in a woods scene. They’re outdoors, which is strange for Vermeer. After his lifetime, someone painted the dark, tree-filled background with a bright blue sky. In 1999 historians discovered that Vermeer intended the background to be brown and they, realizing it could not be restored correctly, painted the background black. I was pretty put-off by this because ethically I don’t think the work should have been changed. If it could have been restored, that would have been best, but changing it in this way was not appropriate. The third painting of Vermeer’s was “View of Delft” (1660-1). It’s his other townscape (see Rijksmuseum) and again he used pointillism ot show reflections in the water and on the ship. Vermeer had a short life: he died at 43 and really only painted two works a year. There are only 37 paintings attributed to him. During his life, anyone in town could own one of his paintings, including the baker of Delft. He was basically forgotten in the 18^th century, but rediscovered in the 1850s when people began painting reproductions of his works.

The Mauritshuis had some other paintings which were interesting. These included a series by Cornelis Troost. Calle NELRI (1739-1740), he was an actor who did five paintings that are like a play showing the effects of drinking too much. I also found more riverscapes I liked, including those by Aert van der Neer (1650s). Apparently Cynthia Nixon (Miranda from Sex and the City) was at the museum when we were there. I didn’t see her, but Jess did.

After the museum, we wandered around The Hague a bit. There was an Iran-related demonstration in a plaza. We couldn’t understand any of the languages being spoken and there weren’t that many people there. The only police presence was a bike cop and a security guard from a nearby building. We walked around the pedestrianized streets browsing at the stores there and having a really hard time finding the train station. This was because all the signs led us to the same place. Finally we asked, went there and hopped a train to Delft.

Delft is where Vermeer was born, lived and painted. We found information kiosks where we could print out maps of the city. We walked through the downtown which is full of canals and pedestrian-zones to the Vermeercentrum, a museum on his life and work. First we watched a video about him, then we saw reproductions of all of his works (none of the originals are in Delft anymore). Upstairs the museum had recreated his studio and we could pretend we were in one of his works. Then we read about his techniques and his use of light before going upstairs again to an exhibit on symbols of love in his paintings. The museum was closing shortly after we got there. We managed to see the bulk of the space, but didn’t get to spend much time in the hands-on section in the basement. It taught about his friends and Delft during his lifetime. We bought a map that took us on a Vermeer walking tour. We saw the church where he and his mother were buried as well as the house he grew up in, the house his father grew up in and the house he and his wife bought. Throughout the town there were cubes with information about his paintings and his life. The panel about “Girl With a Pearl Earring” inaccurately attributed the role of the girl to Colin Firth instead of Scarlet Johansson (Colin plays Vermeer). We had a good laugh reading that.

We then used one of our printed maps to take a Dutch East India Company (VOC) walking tour of Delft. We saw some buildings where VOC administrators lived as well as the main warehouse and office building. Delft, with is canals, was a really important city in its height. Today, it’s really charming and a great place to walk around. We wished we had come here earlier in the day, or at least that we had more energy, because it really was a tranquil, pretty place. People were sitting outside at plazas, relaxing and enjoying the day. It was a nice side trip outside Amsterdam.

Monday we woke up and took the tram to the Jordaan district, which was the poorer part of the city in the 1800s. Now, it’s full of galleries and fits in with the rest of hipster Amsterdam. We peaked into windows and walked through a flea market. We wandered around the canals trying to see into as many houseboats (really more like floating houses) as possible. Some were quite posh and really nicely decorated. Passing more trendy cafés, stores and galleries, we crossed the city and wound up in another flea market where we spent a few hours looking at old postcards trying to find places we’d been to or knew well. Then we sat at a café for a while. We found an awesome place serving bagels, coffee and fresh juices. I had a soy latte, while listening to John Mayer and Jack Johnson and using the internet….so homey.