From Bangkok to Berlin

As you can see, I'm having a bit of wanderlust lately. Maybe it's because I've seen off a few friends lately on round the world trips and I want to get in on the action or maybe Tommy-boy and I were a little over zealous with the credit card this winter when the dark, dreary Irish winter was making us want to run in any direction as long as it was away from TV watching and stodgy-food and routine... Long story short, here I am, one week after returning from Thailand, in scenic Berlin. To be honest, when we had to get up at 4am the other morning to catch the flight, the thought of going anywhere other than my bed was pretty exhausting, but now that we're here, we're having a really good time. As soon as we arrived and saw the amazing architecture, street upon street of trendy cafes and boutique shops and incredible museums, I immediately got my second wind. We went to a really interesting exhibition yesterday called 'art and propoganda' which explored the way that Germany, Italy, The Soviet Union, and the US used visual mediums to promote their agendas in the 1930s and 1940s. Incredible stuff. There was everything from the WPA photographers (Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans etc...) and Norman Rockwell illustrations to Italian futurist portraits of Mussolini and El Lissitzky Russian Constructivist Posters... and of course plenty of disturbing Nazi propaganda. The whole exhibition was housed in an I.M Pei building (very modern, lots of geometry and glass) which is connected to the German History museum next door which is housed in a baroque German building with a central coutryard full of artists and designers peddling their wares. So far, Berlin has been full of great art, architecture and design interspersed with kick-ass cafe culture and a damn good pint o' German beer now and again. Not bad at all.