When in Berlin, consider the Ethnological Museum

Last summer I went to Berlin for a couple of days with a friend. Her mother and her sister had been to the Ethnological Museum a couple of days before, and they told us about a vodoo exhibition. As a generel rule I like museums that are all about showing the visitors old crap, and I really wasn't disapointed! The vodoo exhibition pretty much consisted of religious objects, mainly made out of skulls and mirror and colorful fabrics.


Comme ca...
It was quite amazing and I think you had to be 12 or 16 or some-amount-I-can't-remember years old to go in. Probably because the skulls were real and the lightning was kept at a minimum and it did have a certain touch of magic to it.
Anyways, judging on the webside (http://www.smb.museum/smb/sammlungen/details.php?objID=56 - absolutely horrible, by the way), this exhibition is looong gone, and I obviously can't tell you anything about the current exhibition, since I haven't seen it. The museum itself was okay. Not amazing (here I think about a very large room filled with small chipped statues dating back to when zzzzzzzzzzzzzz...), but some of it was quite nice. At €8, however, it is sort of pricey and I really think that you ought check if you care to see the special exhibition before going there. It's a bit out of the city centre, sort of in a living area, you can go there by U- or S-Bahn. I think it's in zone B, although the map in the Moleskine city notebook says C.

I'll be going back to Berlin at the end of July. Right now I'm studying for an exam (last of this semester) and it's killing me. Hence "all" the post. When I can't travel, I dream about travelling, and I might as well write down my travelling dreams in order for someone to maybe read them and get something out of it :)

When in Berlin, visit the DDR musem

When it comes to museums I'm like a 5-year-old. I like to touch and open and discover. And this is exactly what the DDR museum is all about!
It's basically a collection of things from when Germany was divided into East and West and the East part was Communist and called DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik). I'm not going to try to explain anything about what it was like (because, to be honest, I don't think I'm in any way qualified to do so), but I'm pretty sure that this museum is spot on. If you know next to nothing about the DDR I would recommend that you check out the movies Goodbye Lenin and The lives of others. That should give you an idea of what to expect.
But back to the museum! Even though it's fairly new, it's by no means high tech or overwhelmingly fancy. The first thing to catch the eye is an old Trabant. An old Trabi that you get to touch and open and sit in. Afterwards you walk around and open closets and drawers and take out books and toys and clothes. There's an area showing what apartments used to look like. There are TVs showing TV shows from back then and ear phones playing the smash hits.
And my favourite part?


Learn how to dance the DDR way!

All in all I think this is a nice museum, suitable for almost all ages and it shows a very important part of the German history in an easily comprehensible way.

http://www.ddr-museum.de/en/