There's so much stuff happening all the time in Berlin.. you just have to have access to someone in the know.

And so, a couple of weekends ago, Andy and I hurried to the edge of Berlin (really the edge: as in, train, s-bahn, tram, walk sort of edge) to check out the Schoeneweide Art Festival.




Apparently they're very.. uh.. 'patriotic' in that part of town...



The festival basically involves all the artists in the area opening their doors for a few days, so that the rest of us can thrust our sticky little beaks into their (beautiful) business.

Our first, of course, was sehen und ernten, a small company founded by Doro and fellow students as a mechanism to turn their university studies into real-life experience.



You should probably check out some of the work they did on an old, decaying student college- the site is in german, but there are lovely photos, and googletranslate can always be your friend.


We headed towards the art!




One of the first stops we made was into this darkened building with a few glowing points of interest....


Don't Look! said the guy, it's now working right now.

It was ok, something in the corner had already caught our eye....

The earphones were voice alteration aids, which could be changed to different channels- some scrambled the syllables of your words, some introduced a 1/2 second delay, some echoed.
My favourite, by far, was the one that made my voice all deep and manly.

Due (mostly) to the rampant sexism present in the world of science (and at our large national company, where only eleven percent of the top positions are occupied by women) I have continued for months a long and annoying commentary that revolves around the semi-joking concept that my Alpha Male attitude would be much more successful in a body with actual male parts.

So it was great fun to spend a small amount of time pretending to have the booming voice of our boss.

Alas, it couldn't last forever- the other eventually dragged me away.




We were incredibly lucky- in this Berlin summer of raindrop roulette- to receive a perfectly sunny not-too-hot not-too-muggy day.

And to be honest, at least half of the fun lay not only in the art, but in roaming around Schoeneweide and traipsing in and out of crazy old warehouses....






Look- it's Joram and I down by the water!
And Andy, from his elevated viewpoint:





There was some very literal art (those are phones in the web)...

...And the kind of art that went perfectly with my outfit:
(This might also be from Joram)




This lady was explaining the controller to her kid, who was absolutely fascinated by it, and totally eager to ignore the 'don't touch it though..' that her mother ordered.





Some kind of beanstalk:








More matching art....




There was a crazy hanger where a train was sleeping....




And for some reason Andy felt the need to do this:

I tried to one-up him but only came up with this:





And there was a nice man taking his pig for a walk. Which is probably pretty par for the course in germany right?




All in all it was a pretty great day- especially because we managed to get the good weather of the week.

I'll try to remind y'all the next time it comes around...