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She still didn't finish writing about Hamburg.

Let's get right on that.

Day Two.
Deciding to get a bit of culture, we headed to the art museum.


The building itself was quite artsy, in an almost interpretative way that made it impossible to find the actual entrance.
(This is not it:)


You know what a snap-happy thing I am. I took quite a lot of photos of the art, but I'll just show you a few.



We were a little silly and posed with the art, which became creepy when I was posing as the girl in the painting above and sticking my bum out, and an old man wanted me to pose again so he could take a photo.

We ran away.

I think this is Rodin.




Toulouse-Lautrec.

These below are by Cezanne and Armand Guillaumin. The second copied by the first, and displayed side by side in the museum. 

Spot the difference:






The owl. A.K.A. the only cool piece of art that Picasso ever made.


Ok, I only took a photo of this guy because he looks like he belongs in some sort of BBC period drama. I can totally envision him in uniform staring angstily across the room at his soon-to-be lady love but currently-'it's complicated' relationship. And I can totally envision Ashlee, Ella, Claire and I drooling over him in this role.


And this family just looks bad-ass. Also the father looks a bit like Hugh Laurie, which is always a bonus.

The next floor contained more modern art, one section of which contained rather beautiful maps of, for examples, rivers flowing into the Amazon:

But it also contained art that was just lists of words- from what we understood the artist would go on long walks (the art was usually captioned with 1450 km, 17 days or something), and write down his keyword thoughts on the way.

Which was a bit boring. You can probably skip this part unless you're really into trying to find meaning when there isn't any. Or maybe I didn't try hard enough.

When we got to the end of the exhibition, there was a woman from the museum who kept saying Karte, which means ticket, but also, rather confusingly, map. Naturally, I thought she wanted to see our tickets, and it took several minutes before we all understood that she was excited by how much Andy's T-Shirt looked like one of the maps. 

So she took us back to the map, and we posed, and then she asked why we were visiting and we just said we wanted to see the art and that seemed to be the wrong answer and then there was more confusion and we all smiled rather awkwardly at eachother.



We went down the stairs with anti-police propaganda flying over our heads, and into the land of modern video art.

Which contained one of the most horrific, grating pieces of art you can see. You went into a closed room, and were surrounded on all walls by the spinning head of a man, which was also seen of the many TVs placed in the room. The man was screaming 'feed/eat me/Anthropology' or 'Help me/hurt me/Sociology', all overlapping so you couldn't really make it out.

If you want to experience this for yourself, go here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyiZD4Q3Mdk&hd=1
but don't forget to turn up your volume to max before you click the link for the full horrific experience.

A lot of the other video art felt kind of unoriginal to me, and seemed to be trying too hard to be deep: a grown woman telling of how she discovered her sexuality too young (and with older men), and then dancing around her living room for 5 minutes to show them that she is beautiful; a woman who test-filmed an alcoholic for a documentary only to have her die, and then to show the 1 minute of test film in slow-mo while the alcoholic's sister talked of her life.

There was however, one film which showed a whole set of chain reactions- mostly involving fire or soap and liquid and ice- the sort of thing you try to do with dominos as a kid, but so much better and so much more explosive. Andy and I watched it for at least 10 minutes, and I'm pretty sure Andy would have stayed all day if allowed. It also reminded us of one of our pyromaniac friends: we're pretty sure Owen would have loved it (although maybe more 'doing it' than just 'watching it').






After some well-deserved food, and a quick check-in with the triathlon that was going on that weekend, we headed to the botanical gardens.






One of these amazing flowers that only comes out every 10 years or something ridiculous.




Andy humoured me by being a dinosaur.













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