After bacon, eggs, a plum and coffee we went to the Gallery Goff+Rosenthal, on Brunnenstrasse to see an exhibition of American artists, ‘From Our Living Room to Yours', full of funky art objects. Sitting round a table talking to the extremely pleasant and friendly gallery director with one of the art pieces in the centre was somewhat disconcerting as it looked exactly like a big layer cake with icing that one would like to scoop out and lick a finger full, but it is made all the way through of solid oil paint. From there we did a bit of shopping. My friend, a textile designer and screen printer is also a magnificent cook and wanted to buy a German cherry stoner. This quest we pursued from one store to another without success. The reason given being that ‘cherries are not in season now.' But stainless steel does not have to be fresh we moaned fruitlessly. (Sorry). So a plum pitter was purchased instead. Plums are in season, as we knew from eating them. (But probably in Bolivia or somewhere, Peruvian plums anybody?). There was just time to fit in a museum as we had booked a dinner reservation for the restaurant on the top of the Reichstag, to circumvent the invariable long waiting queue to get in. Unfortunately, getting on the (wrong) train, meant we spent the time going back to where we had started, but taking photographs of the seat cover patterns. East Berlin is completely covered, smothered, in graffiti. Public transport circumvents any more, or is just responding to prevailing tastes, by using graffiti inspired motifs on the seat covers. Even chunks of graffiti are framed to decorate an S-Bahn station.
The Reichstag. What a tremendous experience. The restaurant reservation certainly made it a privileged breeze to get in and through the security checks. What a view at the top and the buzz of Norman Fosters glass dome. The restaurant, elegant, is not cheap, yet considering the wonder of it all, not as expensive as it might possibly be. But I should tell you that my friend said that the meal was on her and it did cost a bomb, one hundred euros for us both. Fabulous, memorable, a complete treat. Seeing Berlin lit up and laid out before us in the night as we walked outside on the roof, then climbed the winding ramp to the top, looking down at the violet seats of the parliament, everyone excited and thrilled to be there, the Reichstag open to visitors until midnight is a glorious glamorous experience. Who would have thought it? Something I didn't know is that my friend suffers from vertigo, but she was very brave.
Since we were interacting with the evening, I took her to see the Sony Centre at Potsdamer Platz for all that Hollywood razamatazz, and then we walked to the Modern Art Museum so that she could at least see the Mies van der Rohe building. Approaching, the building seemed to be shooting orange sparks. The whole ceiling was covered with moving orange rays of words pulsating towards us in parallel strips. It was a Jenny Holzer electronic text piece. The word ‘scorn' was constantly repeated along with phrases such as, "while you spend I save," scorn, "while you play I work," scorn. This went on for some minutes while one tried to follow the running words, to see what the pattern might be from one row to the next but it was relentlessly fast like a blitz, then Bang the words receded, then went dark, until Bang they started again, but this time in German. Midnight and no one else there and this wonderful art piece giving its all.
