Yesterday we took the train out of the city to the Wannsee lake
May 22, 2013: Christoph Neimann and a Pub Crawl
I didn’t bring my camera with me but it was a very interesting day. The group met with Christoph Neimann, an illustrator who has done a lot of covers for the New Yorker magazine. He was very inspiring and said a few things that I think will stick with me long after this trip. One of which is that to be a good writer you have to be a good reader, and to be a good advertiser you have to be a good consumer. This is an interesting concept because a lot of times people get caught up in trying to displaying their own talents when this profession is really about communicating an idea.
Then we ate at Delores, a California-style burrito joint near Neimann’s office. Afterwards a group of about six of us decided to try a pub crawl where we paid 12 euro to tour Berlin’s pubs and clubs. We met all types of interesting people from Denmark, Australia, America, Canada, Great Britain and more. It was an awesome experience and it was nice to be shown where the good local spots are without having to search for them. We ended the night at a massive nightclub called Matrix. This trip is changing my life, and especially my perspective on the world around me. It’s very interesting to hear other people’s ideas of American culture. One guy we met thought that all Americans own guns, and that everyone in the South is a bigot. It makes me think twice about generalizing a group of people based only on what I’ve heard.
May 20-21: Exploring west Berlin and visiting Urban Spree again
Yesterday me and a few others decided to take an exploratory trip around west Berlin. We got off at a random stop off of the U-bahn where we happened to run into the Istanbul-Berlin festival. We also walked through Tiergarten and the Sony Center.
Marble painting at the Istanbul-Berlin Festival.
Pieces of the Berlin wall in west Berlin.
Giant rock in Tiergarten with the TV tower in the background.
Depressing dead lion statue in Tiergarten.
JR’s artwork on the side of a building at a train station.
More street art at Urban Spree gallery.
A very photogenic husky.
More art at Urban Spree.
A very jovial accordion player on the street.
Beautiful trees in Tiergarten.
There are dandelions everywhere here, I wonder if Germans make wishes on them like we do.
May 19: Walking tour and carnival of culture
Today we walked around Berlin and toured a lot of historic landmarks and memorials. Then we went to a carnival of culture in the streets.
I want to wake up in this new Bugotti. The most expensive car in the world.
The abstract Holocaust memorial
Original remains of the Berlin wall
Carnival of culture:
May 18: Bike Tour
Today we went on an 8-mile bike ride around Berlin with our British tour guide Sofia. We explored East Berlin and crossed the bridge into West Berlin. Berlin is really rough around the edges and artistic. It’s beautiful in a non-conventional sense, and street art masks a lot of the buildings. It’s unique because there is a sense of artistic and personal freedom to create and destroy as you wish. Here are my favorites from the day.
Following Sofia on bike behind the tram.
Passing the 5-story Alexa shopping center.
TV tower in the distance.
Two elderly Berliners conversing from balcony to balcony.
This place looks like a dump, but it’s actually been repeatedly ranked the top nightclub in the world: Berghain.
Street art on the side of Berghain.
These next couple pictures are from my favorite place from the day and probably of all time. An artistic wasteland.
May 16-17: Arriving
May 16: Leaving the United States.
Departed Orlando at 11 a.m., changed flights in Atlanta and headed towards Amsterdam and then Berlin. Pretty painless for the amount of time I was travelling, I didn’t lose my baggage or anything stressful. The 8-hour flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam was relaxing; I watched Life of Pi and Silver Linings Playbook and napped briefly.
May 17: Arrival
I arrived in Amsterdam around 5:45 a.m., although in my Eastern time-zone brain it still felt like 11:45 p.m. I got my passport stamped for the first time ever as it slowly set in that I was in a different continent. My layover was just an hour so I only had time to buy some Haribo gummy bears before getting on my final flight to Berlin. I sat with a lively group of Dutch people who made me feel stupid because they could speak my language but I couldn’t speak theirs. I arrived in Berlin around 8 a.m. local time and enjoyed my first legal beer at Tegelbar while I waited for my professor to arrive. I was pretty much lost until I ran into Megan, another UF student in my photojournalism class. We drank and waited until we realized that we were paying too much for beer and our professor’s flight had been delayed. We decided to try to take public transit and find the hotel ourselves. The lack of sleep and hygiene had begun to set in as we tried to navigate unfamiliar territory. We eventually found our hotel and were relieved to finally put away our luggage when we met up with two more students who refused to let us nap. We walked around and stumbled upon a quaint cemetery filled with war heroes and mausoleums. We returned to the hotel around 3:30 p.m. to relax before our official activities began at 5 p.m. This was a mistake. My roommate had not arrived yet so I was alone in my room and I could no longer fight the lack of sleep. I woke up at 7:45 p.m. and began to freak out. I knew the group went to Prater Biergarten and with the help of the man at the front desk I found it. Luckily I found the group just as they were leaving to get ice cream, an excellent first impression. We went back to the hotel as we all began to get to know each other better. As we faced the fact that it was still the afternoon in our heads, we decided to go out and get a few drinks at a local restaurant. My roommate Edmund arrived just in time to join us at about 11 p.m. We returned around 1 a.m. and I finally went to sleep.
Photojournalism in Berlin 2013 