Just before that whole virus thing got
out of hand, Insa and I went to Hamburger Bahnhof. It is
a building located in Berlin and used to be the terminal station
for the Berlin-Hamburg railway, but these days, it houses a
contemporary art museum because there is no reason for anybody to
go to Hamburg.
As far as I am concerned, contemporary art exhibitions are always
a hit or miss thing, and this time it
was no different. There were a couple of works that I thoroughly
enjoyed
(101
portraits of people aged 0 to
100; models
of people’s mouths next to cynical descriptions of their death
circumstances) and some that I really didn’t
(stones?).
Halfway through I noticed quite an
appetite emerging in my stomach, so we went to the next
restaurant that seemed ok. In
Mitte, this task is synonymous to “locating the least
soulless hipster shoebox,” and I had almost settled on “let's just
starve to death” out of sheer principle.
The
burger restaurant we chose was just as expected: prices were
expensive and the burgers were amazingly dry. Waiter service was
fine.
We went back to the museum and spent some more time in there,
then bought a couple of edgy postcards, then went to Insa’s place
and wrote a postcard to David, a
mutual friend of ours.
At home, I tried to use the remaining postcards to enhance the
common bathroom.
Moments after I was done putting them on the wall, my flatmate
came in. First, she shuddered. After a while, she looked slightly
amazed and said something like “oh wow, that’s disgusting”, and
started to laugh.
Then, she made a shrieking noise.
“Is that a child??”
“I, uhh, I don't know”, I retorted, and she followed up: “I've had
this kind of underwear when I was young!”
OK, it might have been a bit tasteless. But just when I started to feel bad
about this delicate situation, she calmed down
and came to the conclusion that it's art after all — and
therefore acceptable.
Later, they decided to refurbish the room and took down my
enhancements. Which was probably what they wanted to do since I
put them up. Sighsighsigh.