jjjrtw: On our way to schnitzel

Graffiti is all over Berlin. Most of it is just sloppy ground floor tags, but on our way to find out what-the-hell a schnitzel actually is we stumbled across a bunch of good (or at least interesting) street art. The first one we saw (and the one that made me squeeeeaal and do a pathetic little hop) was by one of my favorite artists, an Italian dude named Blu. Here it is:

For being a anonymous street artist, Blu is pretty well known and has made amazing art all over the world. But some of his most famous works were left in Berlin 8 years ago. This one showing two nearly identically creatures trying to pull masks off each other, one flashing west side the other east side, became particular iconic for the city of Berlin and we even saw a ton of postcards of it all over the city.

And this one was on the same street:

Blu and JR (a French artist who also worked on it with him) had a local group secretly paint over these with black paint as a statement against the city's housing policy and the resulting rapid gentrification of the area. They didn't like how the mural became a symbol of this new neighborhood and wanted to reclaim the art from the neighborhood. So I didn't think I'd get to see any of his works, which almost justifies my squeal. But what a badass thing to do. When destroying your art makes as strong as a statement as the making of the art then you're doing pretty well as an artist. But seriously check Blu out. I think his stuff is pretty incredible. Here's his website, and a couple collections of his: [link] [link]

So after all that excitement we needed to schnitzel. And it turns out a schnitzel is pretty much chicken fried steak. Pretty good though. But right across the street from our schnitzel we see a huge stretch of the Berlin Wall. It turns out this is called the East Side Gallery and is the longest remaining section of the Berlin Wall. The east side of the wall faces a street and the west side the river, so the west side of it is just covered in a lot of really bad tags, but the east side has been commissioned to have a variety of murals covering the remaining wall. Some of them were great, others were not, but collectively it was an awesome experience to come across this and was definitely a highlight for me from our week in Berlin. Here are a bunch of pictures of this stretch of the wall, including one of a shirtless jackass wearing a horse head and playing a George Michael song.