Party like its 1932.

Good morning. It is 11:30 AM and I just woke up.. I had quite the day yesterday. First I walked around the 'Mitte' which is the centre of East Berlin. It is very very funky, hip and trendy in a sort of urban industrial cyber kind of way. Actually, it reminds me a lot of the esthetic Vancouver is aspiring to. There are literally thousands of interesting shops, nightclubs and restaurants. But, they have managed to preserve the achitecture and feel of the city, so each building, while rather nondescript, is home to many hidden treasures.
I took a bus all the way from the very East to the very West, just to see the difference between the areas of the city. The suburbs of East Berlin might as well still be in Soviet times. It was very eery....concrete block buildings and not much else, and the streets had names like 'Michelangelostrasse' which is kind of ridiculous, considering the surroundings. West Berlin, in contrast, is very nice and built on a much more human scale... apparently the architects wanted to distance themselves from the monumentalism of the Nazi period. After this, I went to the Jewish museum, which is designed by Daniel Liebeskind. It was a fascinating place and I spent almost the entire day there. The museum deals with 2000 years of Jewish history in Germany, from Roman times to the Present day, and is a multimedia extravaganza. The architecture is very unique too, but the signs leave a lot to be desired, consequently I missed most of the monuments.... Perhaps the most interesting thing was an interview done with ordinary German people by German TV on the street in the 1950s. The interviewer would ask 'did you know that Jews were being killed' and they would always answer 'of course'... Well, one could infer a great deal from that. All the interviewees I have seen when interviewed by Western media deny ever knowing.
After that, I went on an orgy of ticket buying. Berlin is really the world's best place to see Classical music. In fact, I am going to 3 concerts at the Philharmonie in 2 days... Bach's St Matthew Passion and St John Passion, as well as the Cherubini Requiem (one of my favourite composers, and not often performed)... Tonight, I have the choice of seeing 3 operas. Aida, Macbeth or Xerxes (by Handel)... Berlin has 3 fully functioning opera companies. Amazing. Waning to avoid the hell that would be Karaoke at my youth hostel (It is stupid... people go to hostels and they hang out there, and they meet people from every country of the world, except the country they are visiting)....I decided to check out Berlin's famous nightlife... Berlin has something like 40,000 bars and clubs. First I went to a Gay bar. This is dfferent than a club, where thousands of people jostle in the darkness without speaking to one another. A gay BAR is a much more precious and rare thing... where people can sit and while the hours away and watch the Lesbians next door having a political meeting. It was very nice, and I then decided to go and check out a 'warm up' party for Brokeback Mountain, which is opening in Germany tomorrow, but on the way, I got very lost.
Apparently, this is the best way to meet Berliners, because they always offer to help you. I met a PhD student named André this way, and he had a theory about this: Germans cannot stand when things are out of order. Seeing someone who is lost is almost unbearable to them, and they feel the need to set things straight, because perhaps there is something wrong witht the map and they need to notify the proper authorities. He invited me for a beer, saying 'you are travelling alone in Berlin and not drinking beer? That is not right! So, we went to a bar and drank black beer, which is a Berlin specialty (Germany has over 30 kinds of Beer), and talked about a great many things, few of which I remember. He had a theory about why Germans are so punctual, which I found amusing. He has a Polish girlfriend, who was 10 minutes late once, and he was almost beside himself, because he had 10 unstructured minutes of his day, and of course he got to thinking:
Minute 1 - The state of the German economy
Minute 2 - The future of Germany within the context of a united Europe
Minute 3 - living under communism
Minute 4 - The fall of the Berlin wall
Minute 5 - World War 2
Minute 6 - The Holocaust
Minute 7 - Oh my God, I have a Polish Girlfriend... what will my parents do?
Minute 8 - Turkey joining the EU
Minute 9 - See minute 7
Minute 10 - See minute 7

He said that by the time he arrived, he was beside himself. Maybe he is just high strung, but it was very funny. One of his friends in university is Sudanese and a devout Muslim. I think we are going out for a beer on the weekend.... how crazy is that? Now I am going to the Checkpoint Charlie museum, and then to the Pergamon museum, arguably the best collection of Ancient Greek art in the world. Very cool. Berlin has possibly some of the most beautiful classical architecture in the world. Frederick the Great kind of went on a building rampage, which was a good thing. More soon.