Nothing's quite right today. I woke up with a headache. It started before I went to bed last night, there was no place I could go to to buy some paracetamol. Or maybe I just didn't know where, but sure enough I asked several places. I went out after shower, hungry for breakfast, determined to go to the first place I see that serves anything digestible. The sky's gray. My only full day here in Berlin and the sun decided to play hide and seek. Bleh.
First thing I saw was KaDeWe. Sure, those Dior clothes look yummy, but not in a nourishing way, the opposite actually, it made me want to not eat ever again so I'll fit in them. I'm sure though that if the store was already open I'd have gotten in and procastinated on getting headache relief. Thankfully, the KaDeWe apotheke around the corner was already open, so I got myself some painkillers.
I wasn't so lucky food-wise. The first place I saw was McDonald's. I had mcMuffins. It did the job. It didn't stop me though from stopping at several wurst vending places while walking and talking pictures all day.
These are all taken with a digital camera, the one I got as a present on my birthday. As you can see, in all the pictures, the sky is consistently gray.
First two pictures, left and above, are of the same building, in the Museum island, something something dome, my map said. The first one was taken while I was walking along the river bank, just before it rained. I let the rain pass while having espresso in a sand bank (made to look like a beach) cafe, then continued on to the island itself, the next picture.
I went around the island, until I got to where I started, the east tip of it, and took this picture (left), which I'm sure so many others have taken before, a visual gag trying to make the TV tower look like it's on top of the dome of another museum. I think this is going to be the theme for today: taking cliche' pictures. Only doing worse version... one with gray sky on every picture. Hmmm... come to think of it, this had always been the theme of all my pictures. Oh well...
The digital camera actually adjusts the brightness, so that instead of dark gray which I see in reality, the images have a very bright gray sky.
It's all museums basically, this area, so I decided to go somewhere else, and headed towards the Reichtag (left). Last time I was here in Berlin was 1999, and the only two places I remember from then is Liebskind's Jewish Museum and this, the Reichtag. The rest are all a jumble of cranes. This city was full of promise. And if anyone's to gauge its fulfillment, now's the best time.
The next few pictures were taken in the same area. Except for the last one and the one before that, taken in Mitte, and the third one from the last picture, taken in Galleries Lafayette (designed by Jean Nouvel), close to Unter den Linden, where I bought a couple of socks.
XXX
2006.12.01
As you may well know by now, i've reformatted my blog, and some pictures are too big (and I now deem unnecessary) to put here, so if the text refers to a picture that isn't shown here, that's because I've taken it off.
XXX
