Berlin - Sonnenschein, eine Giraffe und ein Zirkus

In answer to Thursday's question, it turns out that a girl needs quite a lot of photos of shadows and graffiti and bare branches and paley, pinky, primrosy, prettyanduglyatonce buildings. If you don't like any of these things, look away now because they are about to come atcha in bulk.

Berlin is a great place. It is what it is. It gets on with it and expects you to do your own thing. We did.

We trawled flea markets and drank coffee in the sunshine. One of us ate smoked fish at brunch while the other one made yuck faces. We took photos of pigeons underneath bridges and stumbled upon a deserted circus at sunset. A castle was shut on a Tuesday but Berlin offered us a zoo instead - giraffes are so much friendlier than dead royalty anyway. We talked about graffiti and whether it was beautiful. We travelled the right way on the S Bahn every time except once. I wished for a bungalow in Hansaviertal. We spent hours photographing the mirrors in the Reichstag dome and a couple of minutes striking silly poses at the Brandenburg Gate. We ate Vietnamese soup and shrimp paper rolls. We got tipsy and gossipy on prosecco and giggled a lot. We made plans and then did something else. We had a lovely time.

Berlin, wir lieben Sie.

The beautiful, brutal Boros bunker

In January, I read Emma's post about a German couple who had built a penthouse on top of a WW2 bunker. Intrigued, I did a little research and discovered that it was possible to visit the couple's collection of contemporary art. I booked a place on a Saturday afternoon tour of the Boros Collection. 


In a concrete monster which started life as a public bomb shelter in the war and then served as a banana warehouse before reinventing itself as the toughest club in the world in the 90s, Mr and Mrs Boros have curated an unexpectedly playful and intimate window into their personal art collection. 


We were guided round the exhibition by a charming student who explained the building's history and the stories of each piece in the collection. We were invited to dance in front of light sculptures, duck through rooms of velcro lights and cluster in a tiny room which had once provided shelter for more than a hundred frightened Berliners during an air raid. We were encouraged to look behind sculptures to see how they worked, to clamber through installations, to pause on a flight of stairs, grasp the simple wooden banister and ponder the other hands that might have passed across the same piece of wood. 


It felt as though we'd been let into a secret, right there in the middle of Berlin. 

Berlin Lite

Mum and I have just returned from a fabulous trip to Berlin. While I muster my editorial wits (how many photos of pastel coloured buildings and funny shadows does one girl need?), I thought I'd start by posting a homage to a city that knows a thing or two about good looking lighting...