Movie and Masterpieces and Monuments, Oh MY!

A week ago the crew (same kids with whom I went to Karlovy Vary) went to BERLIN!
I had no idea what to expect--it turned out to be a lot of things at once. Very modern and clean, and yet parts are very old and not so pretty. Well, I don't know what I was picturing, but the wall is just a wall. It's quite beat up and parts just simply look like they were destroyed 17 years ago and never cleaned up. It's a surreal sort of atmosphere with very cool art on a section of it called the East Gallery, which we saw on Friday after we arrived.

We had a big day on Saturday, starting by picking up our tickets to movie at the Berlinale International Film Festival. Then we went to waste time before the movie-- first we walked too long in the cold (the city is bigger than it looks on the map) to get to the Guggenheim exhibit space in Berlin, which is housed in a big Deutchebank building. We saw this exhibit Divisionists and Neo-Impressionists... basically the point is lots of pointillism, along with some similar themes and symbols between the two. It was quite pretty! This (above) is just a cool piece in which the artist painted on his frame, which i love about Howard Hodgkin (right), whom I got to learn about when I saw his exhibit in Spain at the Reina Sofia.

Then, we went and walked around Alexanderplatz which is just a very touristy area where many important buidlings are.



Then we went to the film festival! It was soooo cool-- a very cool scene with very cool people and tons of very cool movies. We saw a.k.a. Niki S. Lee, which I thought was great! Might not be worth your time, but if you like to see any kind of documentry, I thought it was a very unique one.