Oh, woe is me, so busy having fun in Berlin that I have trouble remembering everything to blog about.

Woke up, groggily and slowly got out of bed, breakfast, class for a bit, off to an exhibit of art from artists who traveled to South and Central America after Humboldt's expeditions. Some great paintings and drawings of rainforests, local peoples, an especially impressive one of a volcano. After that we tried to go to the Egypt museum but that failed again, so we got some food. They have these guys who carry around a bratwurst stand, there's an elaborate system of straps around the back and waist and a little grill right in front of their torso. So we picked up that, sat a bit, and then went to the natural history museum here. It's... wow.

Not as much in English as I might have hoped, but still a fair bit. But wow, is it a great museum. The dinosaur hall has some really big dinosaurs, of course, with these cool little videos for most of them where you stand in front of a screen that covers your eyes like binoculars and swivel it around to see the different videos. There's some great stuff on evolution, most of which I couldn't read, but fantastic specimens. Fantastic specimens was just true all around, nothing was fading, nothing looked beat up, everything they had on display was BEAUTIFULLY prepared, from the birds to the mammals to the fossils to the insects.

I really just wanted to take one of their insect boxes home with me. One of the cooler moments of the day, for me personally, was when I recognized a species of long-horned beetle from my mentorship at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, there's a little grey and black one really common in this area that we had specimens of there, and here's two boxes full of them in Berlin.

A nice trippy room on the solar system where you can lie on your back and look up into a show of the history of the universe, a minerals room which to me is always just “pretty rocks,” but they were pretty, a good room on human evolution, a FANTASTIC exhibit of local wildlife, especially birds, that sadly had almost no English, and a really cool hallway that explained the process of preparing exhibits, something you don't often see in museums. I picked up a t-shirt in the store, was amused by them selling Measuring the World, one of the books we're reading for our classes, and then headed out.

I opted not to join the group going to the Berlin Philharmonic, ultimately probably a mistake, but that's life. Anh, Nikki, Jake, Vince and I ended up walking around, we visited the KaDeWe, this absolutely enormous department store, and grabbed gyros at a place nearby. I had souvlaki, it was quite good. I came back to the hotel, talked a little bit to the people from the other group staying here (I was locked out of my room which helped). We might be going out later tonight, so I gathered up a bunch of fliers and went to Starbucks to try to research the clubs. Sadly, none of their websites had any English, but I'm still hoping to get to one tonight. The good news is that my orange juice, though expensive, was delicious. We'll see what happens.

Friday, March 19th, roughly 9:50-10 PM local time