For a while, Pergamon Museum – one of Berlin’s greatest assets – has been offering guided tours of five highlights and I took one with a couple of InterNations members.

Unfortunately, they have only been doing this on weekends. I can’t really stand museum on weekends, crammed full of hordes of people in picnic mode, with strollers with loudmouthed children that are sometimes let loose to run wild, and that was also the case here.

Nevertheless, the tour was interesting and the guide excellent, and of course the museum is very impressive.

Unfortunately, the museum has to close soon, one part for at least four years, for some general maintenance, and the main part – the one with e.g. the Ishtar Gate – for at least fourteen years (!) in order to fix a geological problem stemming back from the ice ages. Apparently, the whole building is resting on a giant “pocket” full of mud, and needs to be stabilised. To me that sounds like a hairraisingly daunting task, and it has to be performed by humans. What could possibly go wrong. (Seeing as it was also humans who had the bright idea of placing all those gigantic museum buildings on a tiny island surrounded by water and …. swamp in the first place).

Afterwards, in true Indian summer weather, I went to “Vegan Sundays”, this week in the new recreational area in Spreepark, “Zum Eierhäuschen”, for a little bit to eat and to play around with manual exposure and double exposure.