berlin

last week was spring break, so my friend rebecca and i took a small tour of eastern europe: berlin, prague vienna. in berlin we stayed with my friend gina who's studying there this semester and she was a lovely hostess and tour guide for the weekend.

we saw parts of the wall. 

and we went to the deutschoper to see the premier of a new production of wagner's tristan & isolde.  apparently germans are quite serious about their opera.  we arrived only 2 minutes late but the opera had already started and we were the only late arrivals.  the orchestra and the singers were excellent but i didn't really like the staging. it was a modern reinterpretations with confusing visual metaphors that completely eluded me and which i thought were distracting (at one point a naked man was digging a grave while the title characters sang a duet).  the other audience members were equally unenthusiastic about the staging - they even booed the director when he came out for his bow!

we also went to the history museum which was very interesting. we learned all about the history of germany before world war i. it had lots of fun artifacts including the incredibly gory crucifix above and the contraption below which was supposed to protect one from the plague (way more legit than those surgical masks people wore for bird flu).

we also just wandered around and saw monuments like the brandenburg gate and the reichstag.

i definitely want to go back to berlin someday. there are so many art museums there that we didn't have time for.