I did a terrible job of photographing Berlin. I have no idea why, but I came back with 10 photos of brunches and train stations. What an oversight! We stayed in hip Friedrichshain, and spent our days in Mitte at The Barn Coffee Roasters and the cute little bakeries of the area, went to a German beer stock exchange (where the price of each beer is changeable, stock market style), ate Brandenburg duck with red cabbage, went to my high school friend Schayenne’s birthday at her flat in Prenzlauer Berg, wandered through night time christmas markets, spent our evenings in tiny dark cocktail bars owned by a tattooed man and his dog, where he mixed us carrot and jasmine tea cocktails until 3am on a wednesday. Cool.
Maybe it was these guys, posing in an oh so pleased way whenever I got out the camera.
Nah. I’ve had years of their disdain of my photography (I even know Husni secretly loves it – maybe not the above one though). I’m going to blame it in the exceptional amounts of beer we drank. I had the camera the whole time. Photographs just did not seem to happen.
However, we went to the same brunch place three times – Silo (Gabriel-Max-Straße 4, 10245 Berlin). Then we found it was run by Aussies, no wonder we loved it. We do do the best brunch! It was so good. Beans and corn fritters with poached eggs and herb sauce. I still crave it. Awesome wooden interior, that I somehow didn’t photograph? Again, blame the hangover.
We found another super cool, German rustic place called Bastard, that served brunch plates that looked too pretty to be eaten. Jams and curds and cheeses and fruits and bread baskets – set me up for the day.
We visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a disturbing and odd place. We couldn’t quite interpret it, which seems to have been the architects intention:
Since “the enormity and scale of the horror of the Holocaust is such that any attempt to repre- sent it by traditional means is inevitably inadequate,” Eisenman deliberately broke from established concepts of memorialization and adopted a radical approach of avoiding all symbolism (Japan Times 2005).
We hit up a coffee roasters in a graveyard (Cafe Strauss – go to the website, if only to laugh at the fact that one out of the three lines of text is the web address. Of the website you are already on. Even better? It’s hyperlinked. The only link on the page. A link to itself.)
We visited Checkpoint Charlie, old war bunkers.
And, seemingly, spent way too much time on the train.
I’ll do better next time. Sorry guys.