My week so far...

FRIDAY
Seeing as the weather was so lovely on Friday *cough* NOT *cough*,
I took my bike down to Warschauer Bridge to check out the newly revamped East Side Gallery.

Which, if you haven't heard of it already, has nothing to do with geopolitical hip hop rivalry.

Instead, it's a stretch of the Berlin Wall that was maintained in all its graffitied (not an adjective, spellcheck??) glory after the wall officially came down. It's open air, of course, and showcases some really famous images that are political, subversive, and really just fun to look at. And it's just been repainted!

I'm sure you've seen some of these before...enjoy!
First, some views from the bridge:


And here, the wall begins:

Questionable syntax, but interesting nonetheless:

Oooh, controversial:



TRUE. LOVE. FOREVER AND ALWAYS:



Peeking behind the Iron Curtain (har har):

Berlin imagined as a metropolitan nexus in a globalized world:

Now, for some of my favourites:
Brilliant.
(Translation: Thank you, Andrei Sacharov - Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate)








Heh. Heh.

Requisite head-scratchy picture by a Canadian artist:

Any favourites?

Also, there's currently a big debate on whether universities in Berlin should introduce tuition (as far as I know, the only provinces in Germany where you don't have to pay tuition right now are Berlin, Hesse and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.) Understandably, students are none too happy about the prospect of having to shell out the big Euros (the current tuition proposal is something like 500€/semester), so last Friday, they organized a massive sit in at my university. The Free University, (which, I imagine, has its name to defend), experienced an even more massive student reaction.
Some pictures: