In the evening, after visiting the concentration camp, Predro and Carol (From Brazil) and I walked back towards my hostel by way of the East Side Gallery. The East Side Gallery is an old chunk of the Berlin Wall that has become a graffiti gallery by local artists.
Pink Floyd – The Wall
Propaganda for peace – Shows the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and the East Germany President Erich Honecker sharing a kiss. This painting is actually based on a real photo of this kiss taking place. The quote along the bottom states “God help me to servive this deadly love affair”.
At the end of the wall we found ourselves near my hostel and also in fact in the slums of Berlin. Not a place to wonder alone, but very cool to explore none the less. It’s the home of many eccentric and eclectic characters. There are numerous musicians performing under and around the bridge, a few more unique contemporary art galleries, cheaper food then in the city centre, and a series of beer gardens and night clubs.
The night clubs in Berlin are very well known but also very exclusive, so I didn’t even try to get in. But we did find a nice alternative beer garden down beside the bridge below street level.
On my final day in Berlin, Pedro and I checked out a couple of the exhibits at museums and memorials around Berlin. We went to the German National Museum and rather then visiting the permanent exhibits we visited two short term exhibits. The first took a look at the events that took place in the aftermath of World War II in 8 different European countries greatly effected by the war. The second was actually about Homosexuality. It covered everything from coming out stories, to homo paraphernalia, to the AIDS epidemic, to the rise of Homosexual culture in Berlin/the world, to stories of homosexuals who were imprisonned in concentration camps, to world maps showing levels of acceptance per country/region. It was very cool, and an exhibit I can’t picture seeing in a national museum in North America anytime soon.
We also visited the holocaust exhibit underneath the holocaust memorial. It’s was very powerful and focused on being about the people. There were personal and family stories, a room where a recorded voice lists names of victims as well as a little about the person (something that done this way would take 6 years, 7 months, and 27 days to list everyone), access to an online name database of the victims, and video achieves ‘Voices of survival’.
That night I actually went down and visit with people staying in my own hostel. Ironically that’s where I met two fellow Edmontonians!
And a slew of other people. I think that night we maxed out at 15 people from all over. I think we had France, England, Australia, New York, Ontario, BC, China, Turkey, and one guy from France living in Quebec.