Tuesday, July 12, 2011

If IKEA made vlogs

I was all ready to give you a super cool sped-up video of walking through the Turkish market in Kreuzberg, but my camera, iMovie, and iPhoto are either non-existent or non-cooperative right now. I am beginning to think my laptop is allergic to video-editing software, but have yet to confirm my suspicions.

So, in the absence of a video, please listen to this song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcawnRIyeok

while slowly looking through the pictures below, and pretend it's a sweet slideshow on Youtube. Imagine the captions as cool super-imposed text, and imagine the in between pictures and at the bottom as on its own slides according to the line breaks. Enjoy.


In our first week in Berlin we quickly discovered the city's different uses of space, from metropolitan centers to urban green spaces to places of public art.
Our new Galata Tower.
Urban farm in Mitte. Can you guess which "former" Berlin we're in, East or West?
Went to the river...
...and found another reminder of home! This was built by the same artist who made the hammering man outside of SAM.
At times Berlin had us convinced that it had never been divided. In our own neighborhood, we walked across what was previously the Berlin Wall "dead zone" without even knowing it until Tobi and Manuela pointed it out a few days into our time here. At other times, though, symbols of the city's torn and confusing past were startlingly clear.

Approaching the Soviet War Memorial with Tobi.
In addition to being a war memorial, it's also a mass grave: 2,500 anonymous Soviet soldiers are buried at this site.
An old Berlin Wall guard tower, at the entrance to the same park that holds the Soviet War Memorial.
"This was basically the Soviets saving the Nazis from the Nazis...history makes everything complicated," Tobi said.
Symbols of the city's future was equally clear at the Reichstag, where art displays and architecture paid homage to Germany's past while also highlighting its place as a key player in the political project that is the European Union.


Each boat represents a different part of the world, and together this represents their relations to each other. Throughout the year the boats are lowered, moved around, and sometimes even crash into the ground.
A new view of Berlin...
...from above.
More than sightseeing and touring, however, a typical day in the life of a UW Honors kid in Berlin sheds light on the city's past, how it does or does not remain on display, and how we negotiate and make sense of its symbols with our own Gramscian "inventories of traces" from home.

On any given day we'll go through Alexanderplatz...
...to Humboldt...
...and eventually back to our neighborhood of Mitte and Kreuzberg--which is almost like going back, even further, to Istanbul.

The new symbols and landmarks we associate with coming, going, home, and place mix among images of Seattle, Istanbul, and Berlin, until each new image seems to find a root in another that came before it.

Galata Tower is the Space Needle, or the TV tower at Alexanderplatz.

Kreuzberg is the I-90 bridge.

The stained glass at Humboldt is Red Square.

The apartments in Mitte are the World House Hostel. Oranienstrasse is the "walking street."

Some images, however, stand alone. The Soviet War Memorial, the Hagia Sophia, the Berlin Wall are all singularly there.

And us? We are here.






And there you go--rapid overview of Week 1 in Berlin. Cheers!

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