Today was our first day in Berlin. I love Germany! So far it has very much agreed with me. I woke up a bit late because Margarita apparently didn’t realize that you’re supposed to make sure your roommate gets up for breakfast. I made it down anyway and we had coffee. After everyone was ready we set out to brave the German mass transit system for the first time. It was a touch colder outside than we had thought it would be. And by that I mean it was absolutely freezing. The German trains are really complicated– but highly awesome. The first one we got on was like the trains in Chicago (or the monorail at Disney, take your pick) which was perfect because it gave us a chance to really see the city as we zoomed through it. Our first stop for the day was Frank Gehry’s DZ Bank building. Its the one with the huge horsehead-shaped auditorium suspended in the atrium. I was more okay with it than your average Gehry building just because all the super nonsense parts were pushed to the interior and treated as sculptural elements. There was a beautiful glass piece in the atrium that resembled a fish just brushing the surface of a lake. The detailing and jointwork still fell short– typical. Margarita had arranged a tour, so a nice German man took us around the bank and told us all sorts of fun facts. The tour ended at the back of the Bank– directly across the street from Eisenmann’s Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I was beyond excited. Margarita let us wander around it for a while. The sound of my footsteps on the ground was exactly like the ones Eisenmann made in the film we watched on the monument. Surreal. The stellae were beautiful. So smooth, and some sloping at slightly different angles. I didn’t sketch it because I wanted to just experience it fully on this first visit since we’re definitely going back. From the Monument we walked down the street a little way to see the remains of the Berlin wall. It was sort of a powerful moment– standing next to the shattered remnants of the structure that once divided this huge city. We went inside the Kapelle der Versohnung– it was a small church that got trapped between the two layers of the wall so nobody could get to it. It fell into disrepair, and so when the wall came down they built this chapel out of rammed earth mixed with the rubble of the original church and wrapped it in a wood slat enclosure. It was really beautiful. I think it also bears some association with the little cemetery right next to the wall. Next we headed down the street to find the White Trash Fast Food Restaurant for lunch. It was awesome. I had a sandwich with red pepper, guacamole, and sprouts on it. Almost everyone else had burgers and fries. It was perfect. We set back out into the cold with full bellies and made a pitstop inside the lobby of the I.M. Pei art gallery. It had beautiful white board formed concrete, but also a rather obtrusive looking glass structure tacked onto the front. Afterward we hit up the Chipperfield museum, which had a lot of Egyptian and Prehistoric-Bronze Age artwork– including the bust of Nefertiti! The real one! Courtney and I walked into a room not even realizing the bust was in the museum, and there it was. Crazy. After that we wandered around the city and stopped in two different pharmacies searching for Rachen Drachen before finally finding Remy’s Dutch Embassy. We couldn’t get inside, and it started hailing, so we kept walking. We stopped inside the University library, which was gorgeous. Clay and I wandered around it for ages. The study rooms were terraces that opened into a large wooden box at the heart of the library– think really intense reverse Panopticon. The stacks surrounded that volume and set up a rhythm that became the ordering system for the whole building. Lovely. We got incredibly lost on the way back to the hostel, but we finally made it and then headed back down the street to grab some quick dinner. The others got kebab, so I went next door and grabbed some bread and delicious tomato-red pepper soup. Excellent choice.