berlin berlin

wow! what a fantastic city... my brief visit to Berlin resulted in this general comment, identical to my earlier and even shorter visit two years ago. The ground I covered is very small, as the Berlin Conference on Social dimensions of environmental change and governance took most of our time. Among other things, we discussed how it is impossible to save Rio+/-20 Summit from absolute failure. It was a symbolic reflection of the general frustration about the state of the world, which made the conference fertile soil to deconstruct the concept of sustainable development, which was my presentation was about.

So other than the Turkey-Germany game taking place then and there, other than the curry sausage (yumm) and several types of game meat and "pils", here is the only museum I visited in Berlin (it was too good weather, too great a city not to want to be in the streets!): Alte Nationalgalerie, a shrine of romanticism (and realism).

Although, I should be honest: Berlin whispered to me that I will have to take at least a month to go through the basics of its art and culture archive, leave aside what's happenning then and there! Ah, it keeps calling me back. :)
Only some cities can do that, you know... The whole point of those list of cities one comes across under brandnames ("New York, London, Paris, Istanbul...") is that some cities are just great with no simple explanation. You can't just go there and see some and feel that you've been there, they always make you feel there is more. For me those cities are (other than the aforementioned four) Rome, Berlin, perhaps Barcelona and Kyoto. Not Athens, or Stockholm, or Oslo, or Boston. Can't figure what gives these cities that dynamism and spirit (soul?)... ideas are welcome.