Later in the afternoon we had a lecture with one of the directors from the community center for Poles in Belrin. He was a little hard to understand and follow, but his story was interesting. He inspired me to expand my vocabulary by learning 5 new words a day, which is how he says he learned German. I need to do the same for English, instead of using hackneyed words like "amazing" "incredible" and "interesting" to describe all of my experiences here.
After the lecture I took the U-Bahn to the East Side Gallery, a 1.5 km stretch of the Berlin wall that has been left intact as an outdoor art project, full of spray painted murals that unfortunately have been marked up by graffitists. At first I was irked, but then I realized that their "work" does give the wall a certain gritty edge. Besides, if they had a guard outside the wall making sure no one defaced it, wouldn't that be kind of ironic? The gallery is supposed to be a reminder that wall is a part of Germany and Berlin's past, but it still plays a role in its present. The graffiti sort of says "This happens when the state lets go of its iron grip on the people, and we shouldn't try to hide it." If people believe they have no way to make themselves heard except by vandalism, that says something about the society, and that's something to be addressed, not covered up. The voices of the vandals mingle with those of the artists- that's democracy I suppose.
