Another weekend passed

This was the first I spent here not being completely on my own, as one of my colleagues stayed too. So after a shared dinner we decided to check out some bars or pubs on Friday, and this time we at least knew where to start looking for one. So we headed to the Hackesche Markt, an U-Bahn station which is supposedly surrounded by all the places young people visit on a typical Friday night. Well, it was not really like that, they were again those restaurant-like places, but we managed to find some nice bar with live jazz music and a nice atmosphere. It was decorated with memorabilia from the German Democratic Republic, as Eastern Germany was called when the country was still separated. So we had a Berlin beer under a Russian flag and pictures of Lenin, Marx and Fidel :) It was good, though the music turned out to be just too loud for that small place, and the crowd a lot less crowd-like than we expected. But anyhow, at least I know of some place which at least resembles what I would be looking for.

Saturday was planned to be a day spent in museums, at the Rembrandt-exhibition, which I was really looking forward to see. The morning stared slow as usual, and my colleague was even slower than me...so I had to do the shopping for our dinner which we planned to cook together. Well, at least it got done in time. So we checked out the exhibition, which had paintings, drawings and prints by Rembrandt and his pupils. It was just as I expected, the man's portraits are just great, and I also like the way he plays with light and darkness. I've already seen some of his paintings in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam earlier this year, and I'm glad I was able to check out some more. For example, there was a smaller copy of the original version of the “Night watch”, which is interesting, as about half a meter was cut off from the original picture to make it fit some room of one of the previous owners. So the “original” can only be seen on a copy made by one of the master's students. Funny. There were also some copies by students, sometimes next to the originals, so one could see how they tried to redo Rembrandt's paintings and how they failed at it :) They were not that bad, though. Of course it was not allowed to make photos, so you just have to believe what I say about this :) The museum which has the exhibition is the Kulturforum, which has a huge collection of renaissance paintings, and surely more of different eras too, but it was just too much of it after the Rembrandt exhibition, so we just left without seeing about half of what the building had to offer. For dinner I planned to fry turkey and some French fries, and I also bought some spices to make it at least taste like something. The preparations and the cooking went fine, and the result was not that much less pleasing compared to what I wanted to make :) Of course, I did the cooking all by myself, especially because that colleague guy is quite slow on doing things, and he did not seem really be able to do things on his own – and I'm not that much of a cook that I could say what someone else should do, I'm happy enough knowing what's going on in my own hands. Anyhow, the dinner was good, and I left the dishes to him :)

After that, we watched the movie “Crash” at the apartment, and I must say, I was quite disappointed by that flick. All I knew about the film was that it depicts the racial tension in the United States, which of course I can't really imagine. But the movie turned just plain stupid in the end, it had such a happy end which did not really suit the neither the topic, nor the first 80 minutes of the movie. I t was not that bad, it's just that they did not manage to come up with a proper ending. Well, at least now I know what movie I was putting off for a few months now :)

Today was a very ugly rainy day, but luckily not from the beginning. We wanted to check out the free (with a Berlin travel pass) sightseeing bus and some fountain in the eastern part of the city. Well, before we got on the bus we checked out the liquid clock in the Europa Center again and we did quite well in figuring out how it works – and we even got to see the biggest “show” of it, at 1pm, when all of it's parts are animated. The same happens also at 1am of course, and it might look even better if it's well lit, but this was enough for now. So, during the bus ride the rain started pouring and the wind also turned quite strong, so my colleague decided to go home and I started for the Museum of Natural Science. The museum was quite good, though I guess this is about as much stuffed animals I can take in a day. There were some panels about how this stuffing process is and was, it was quite interesting. There is also a mineral collection, which holds some very nice pieces, but, as always, it was just too much in the end. And that with a third of the museum closed for renovation... But it was a good choice nevertheless.

For dinner tonight we're going to visit the cheap pizzeria nearby, it's called Don Corleone. I hope we will get along well with the local Mafia :)

G'night,
M.