Fish!! and other stuff.

Our host, Pierre, is the most easygoing guy in the world, and true to the french steriotype, plays a pretty awesome accordion. He's been great showing us the city and finding us cheap beer.

 

Burble and I decided to visit Museum Island, an island in the river downtown where there are a bunch of museums and even more tourists.  There a terrifying German woman who spoke 6 different languages told us we should buy the Museum Pass, which is 9 euros and gets you free into 15 different museums. It's only for students and I didn't bring my student ID. In America they would have just let me get one anyway, we are obviously college age but here in Germany they do everything by the letter of the law. They don't even jay-walk here. So the lady told us there was no way, no one would EVER sell me a pass and I had to leave NOW and there was nothing anyone in the world could do to get me a pass etc. So we bought one with Burble's student ID and then went to the next museum and bought another one with Burble's student ID. I thought of going back and kindly showing the lady that we had cheated the system but Burble and I agreed her head might explode and then she would send us to jail.

Our (apparently subversive) passes got us into the Egyptian Museum where they have the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti. I couldn't take pictures but I was VERY excited. It was awesome and had it's own special room. Apparently she just walked into an artist's shop one day and asked him to make a statue of her. He must have been so nervous. If he messed up they would have fed him the the crocodiles of something. You can see the individual brush strokes and it made me feel very small and insignifigant. This lady thought she was the chosen one of the gods and the most important person in the world. And now all that is left is a plaster statue. So many people have lived and died without making the slightest impact on their world. These Egyptian Pharos spent their whole lives prepairing for death and making sure they were remembered and most of them we know nothing about. Makes something like paramedic school seem not so important. After this Museum I decided to travel my whole life and see all the interesting things and meet all the interesting people who will never be remembered a few years from now.

Stuff here is OLD. In California people say, "my house is hella old bro, it was built in the 1920s...".

Here the buildings were build hundreds of years ago. 

After the Egypt museum we went to visit the Holocaust memorial. There's a museum under it called the Memorial Museum of the Murdered Jew. It also talks about the Jews who were killed as well as the gay people and the gypsies who were taken to the camps but who people don't talk about as much as the Jews.
It's a really beautiful monument and a well organized museum. The monument is rectangular stones of different hights like graves. There is not a single piece of graffitti or a single sticker or piece of trash on any of the stones. In this city where street artists make a point of leaving no surface untouched I was amazed by the respect given to this place. The Museum was horrible, they had 6 portraits of people who died in the camps to represent the 6 million people who died. They also had a lot of letters sent in the camps, mothers to daughters, husbands to wives, etc, then they told you what happened to the writers. Most of them were never heard from again.
I was overwhelmed by the messages of hope and love sent from people knowing they were going to their deaths. I wouldn't have survived, I don't know how they maintained their sanity. It is incredible to think about Hitler just deciding that he was going to eliminate an entire race of people from the earth. The hatred that those nazis must have felt is inconceivable to me. What makes someone look at another human being and decide they have no right to exist? How did they square with shooting those women and children in the heads? I know how PTSS in war times makes soldiers crazy and sometimes they go insane and shoot a bunch of villagers somewhere. That's bad enough, but these people weren't fighting a war. They were far away from the front lines, and they just decided to kill their neighbors. What went wrong in their heads? 

 After the Museum it was getting dark but we decided to walk back to the Ubahn station to clear our heads and try to feel better after reading about all those innocent people who were tortured and murdered.

The downtown here is amazing with lots of very imposing architecture and lots of naked statues. The Germans as a culture seem so stiff and serious, yet they have all these naked people all over their cities. The statues all have very small penises and these tortures expressions on their faces, possibly because of their small penises. As I tried to appreciate the art I couldn't help wondering if the artists made the penises so small to feel better about themselves. There are lots of churches too though so maybe they just didn't want to offend the stogy Greman priests. Or maybe German models were all grow-ers' and not 'show-ers'.

I had nightmares all night about Greg and my brother getting sent to consentration camps so in the morning I did what I always do when I'm sad or traumatized by my dreams. I found an aquarium and spent the day looking at interesting fishes. It made me feel worlds better. There is very little in this world that makes everything ok, but fish are one those rare things. People just don't understand how cool they are. They can breath underwater. Seriously. You can't breath underwater. Or make yourself look like a plant. Or make guys give birth to your baby.

They didn't have any captions in English but nerd that I am I was able to recignize most of the species by their scientific name. It's hard to beat the Aquarium in Monterey, but the Berlin Aquarium had several species that I had never seen like sea snakes and lots of species of cichlid. One friendly boxfish-like creature attached itself to me and followed me as I walked along the glass. I sat down next to the aquarium and talked to it for a little while until I looked up and found that mothers were cautiously hurrying their children past the crazy blue-haired girl talking to the fish in English. The fish was from South America and way more likely to understand English than German. I am so misunderstood.

In one tank they had dozens of Electric Yellow cichlids from Malawi, which is the kind of fish I have at home. The issue I had was that there were TONS of them. All together. Getting along peacefully. Look at how peacefull they are.

What. The. Fuck.

My Electric Yellow cichlid from Malawi HATES every other living thing in the world. You can't put anything in there with him. He even hates plants. It's like his neverending vendetta against all life that tries to enter his tank. I was told that that was what cichlids are like and to just keep him alone. But now I know the truth. His species CAN live communally. It's not his species. It's him. Fucking bastard had me fooled but as soon as I get back to the states he is going to learn to live with others.
I was realing from the relization that I had been tricked all this time by a fish. But as I continued through the aquarium I met lots of other interesting creatures to distract me.
One of them swims by rippling a long fin on his stomach.
And the German Plecos are spotty and much prettier than American Plecos. I have to get one. 

They even have Glass Catfish, which are really nice because they are totally transparent and you can see their bones.

I also learned  some interesting shark stuff. Did you know that sharks that are viviparous (give birth to live babies) have lot of babies in them. The strongest of the babies attack and eat their siblings in the mother's uterus, until there is only one left and that's the one that's born. It's called interuterine cannibalism. Learn something new every day. 

After the aquarium I was sure that I wanted to go back to my dream of studying Marine Biology. Fish are way cooler than humans.

The next day the Burble and I took four trains to a specific store that sells a specific kind of pants that are apparently only available at this store in this city. There is a reason for this.

I have a certain housemate who will not be named (Andrew) who has sent me a mission. He NEEDS (not wants) this particular pair of pants. He sent me a three page message detailing the size he needs, the color, the material, the list of kinds he needs in order of how much he wants them. He even included helpful images of what they look like. 

What I didn't realize though was that it's Easter and the store was closed. It will be until Tuesday so we're staying an extra day in Berlin so Andrew can get his pants. His message was so excited that I can't let him down. He also said this is guaranteed to get him laid but he already has a hot girlfriend so it doesn't seem to be a problem in the first place. It turned out to be quite an adventure given that fact that it was poring rain and about 1°C.

After the failed pants mission we headed out to the Natural History Museum so the Burble could sketch dead animals. They have a world record collection of pickled things in jars that the museum is very proud of. I know that these specimens have been essential to study certain species and further conservation but it just made me sad. Humans just kill everything all the time. This bothers me? Lets kill it. I want to know what this thing looks like inside? Lets kill it and take it apart. It's so stupid.

 

After the Natural History Museum we headed for the Museum of  Charitee. It's a medical history museum that was completely facinating. The building it's in is an old hospital that was the hospital for the poor people. Here though the doctors actually cared about their patients and made huge discoveries in medicine, especially in ocular diseases. 

They had a huge collection of skulls and bones that showed healed fractures and congenital defects. It was amazing to see these things that I've encountered at work but never gotten to see the actual impact to the bones. They had all sorts of body parts in jars that showed problems and diseases. They also had a great exhibit on the important advances in health care like Pennicillin and Polio vaccines. Not so long ago they would put a leach on you and send you home. They were feeling in the dark and had no idea whatsoever what caused anything. Suddenly someone discovered bacteria and everyone was blown away. The museum even had lots of aborted fetuses with crazy birth defects like lungs ouside their bodies or two heads or six eyes. After this museum I am sure I want to go to Paramedic school and possibly Med school.

After the Medical Museum we headed to one more museum that boasted that it had "sculptures, painting, multi media, drawings, sketches, new art, old art" etc. It turned out to be the strangest place ever and I really didn't understand anything in it. They had a room with lots of rolled up rugs in it and a piano and a board. This piece is meant to describe a thalitimide baby. Then they had a large model of a plane filled with poppy seeds. And a TV showing a loop of vidio of a guy drawing imaginary pictures with a dead rabbit.

One room was all white with black canvasses in it and a speaker playing this horrible whine. This one didn't even say what it was supposed to mean because I guess it's obvious. It means something. 

One room had lots of rocks in it. You are not allowed to climb on them. They are Art. I tried to tell the guard that art is better when you climb on it but he suddenly ceased to understand English. He understood perfectly when he yelled at me in the first place.

One room was lit by neon tubes. The artist is apparently facinated by light and different colors of light in cities. I want to bring him to Burning Man where he will freak out. Hopefully he would think it was cool and not cut his ear off like Van Gogh. Artists are tempermental. I know this because I am travelling with one. The only thing crazier than an artist is a hormonal 21 year old artist.
Despite being difficult, the Burble is proving to be very talented with my camera and taking lots of great photos on his night walks around the city. These were fortunately taken before it started to snow. In April. We almost had a white Easter this year.

 

 I like his pictures because he is able to take the darker grittier side of the city.

Last night we went to a bar and saw a couple of strange bands. One of them was some guys who re-wrote the Ramones song "Beat on the Brat" and changed it to "Beat on the Nazi". It was entertaining. Then an English band that sang a song about the first Emperor of China who spent his life afraid he was being hunted by fish. They were also very strange. They got better the more German beer I drank, and even better when Pierre showed us that you could return bottles to the bar and get money back for your next beer. I was drunk enough to attract the attention of three insane lesbians how were completly wasted and appeared to be trying to have sex on the dance floor. They were too drunk for my liking (wow do I still have morals?) and were behaving like imbiciles. After we left the bar I lamented the whole way home how I missed my chance with the hot German babes. When I woke up this morning I was incredibly glad I did NOT go home with slutty Greman skanks. Go Liz for making a good decision while drunk.

This morning the Burble looked sadly at me and said, "did I really tell the singer of that band that she was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen?" Yes, Burble. Yes you did.