England Exchange: Wednesday 27th: Seeing a few museums

[ pictures from today: https://picasaweb.google.com/110144623598348247797/20110427?authkey=Gv1sRgCNDch6PF7oPdQQ# ]

I've heard that Berlin has some really great museums so I decided to go and see some of them today.

I had a great breakfast of muesli that I bought at the supermarket yesterday evening. I probably also had some yoghurt since I found some really great yoghurt here for just 50cents. Food in Europe seems to be very cheap. Although vegetables and fruit in England don't seem that great to me.

Then I headed out towards the museums.

I accidentally went into the wrong museum. I just guessed that this would be the right one since the map vaguely suggested it was here. This was supposed to be Pargamon Museum, but instead it's Bode Museum. But it was pretty good. So I had a look around.

"Man smashing another man's head, with a club".

"Man smashing a centaur's head, with a club".

This lion is eating this horse.

I bet the owner of this head wasn't too happy.

I finished up at this museum and then headed out to find the Pergamon.

At first I wasn't sure if I'd go in. The line looked quite long. So I sat down for a while to have a little rest while I considered things. When I'd finished sitting and considering, the line was a little shorter, so I tested it out to see how fast it was moving. But that meant I was invested in the line now. I couldn't abandon the line after having spent some of my time in it. So I then had to see it through. Luckily it wasn't moving so slow. At one point, a man said "hey come this way please". Then he led some others and myself to a second register, which meant that we skipped a whole lot of places. Hooray.

At a lot of museums in Berlin, you seem to get a free audio guide, included in the price of the ticket. When I was at the Bode museum I didn't realise this. I thought they would be extra. But here I became aware of it, so I picked up some headphones and the electronic device for playing the commentary. It was really good I think. Lots of the things have a number attached to them indicating that there is some audio to be heard. They give you a lot of background depth to what you are looking at.

The Pergamon Museum is named after this thing, I'm fairly sure. It is a greek temple discovered at a town called Pargamon. I think I heard that at some point it was divided into lots of different pieces and scattered about the town. Archaeologists discovered this and then began piecing it together again.

It's in amazing condition I think. The audio guide gives great depth in areas like this. It tells you to start at a particular side. Then it describes the story that they believe is being told by this artwork. Without this I probably would have just thought it looked very nice. It added a lot to be able to look at these scenes and understand the story that is going on.

The big entranceway to a market square from a roman town.

The Ishtar Gate. The eighth gate to the inner city of Babylon, no less. Quite amazing. Constructed in 575BC. The faded tiles are original. The newer looking tiles are newer.

I remember seeing these, then looking at the date, and realising they are ridiculously old. I've forgotten the date.

The British Museum in London has the originals of these. These are plaster casts. I remember seeing the originals.

I went up to the second floor where they had some islamic art. This is a perfectly restored room decorated in this style. It's very valuable to them so you look at this room from behind a glass cage.

This thing was found in the desert. It's part of some kind of old temple.

There was a German archaeologist who collected a lot of the types of things found in this museum. Unfortunately, they were too heavy to move during world war two. The building got bombed and something caught on fire. The building burnt quite fiercely.

The sculptures were very damaged due to the high heat of the fire. But they are trying to reconstruct them here, to perhaps show what was lost, and give them some kind of respect.

I left the museum because it was closing. They have another of these parks where the trees are lined up very straight and the ground is gravel. It seems strange to me, but it also is a nice effect.