Ballet and more!!!

     Yesterday was a day full of museums and the Berlin staatsballet! In the morning we went to the Pergamon museum, which had some really awesome ancient artifacts. Also the sun was finally out! It was really beautiful and I definitely want to come back to Berlin someday, this place is awesome. In the Pergamon we saw Nebuchadnezzar's gates to Babylon!!! They were super cool and huge and I can't imagine the whole city walled off with lapis-painted and decorated with gigantic lions and dragons.

    Last night we saw the Berlin staatsballet and oh my gosh the ballet was soooooo good!!! I definitely want to go see more ballets now because they were just so good-- I didn't know it was humanly possible to be so graceful and tell a story so powerfully with just dancing. It seriously looked like the ballerinas were flying through the air when they were lifted. And it wasn't just the dancers who were awesome!!! The orchestra was PHENOMENAL!!! They played together very well and the way that the musicians worked together with the dancers was really cool. There was a point in the ballet where Onegin (the main character) challenges his friend Lensky to a duel by throwing down his glove-- it was so dramatic and well-orchestrated that it looked like the dancers really were as angry at each other as they would be outside the context of a ballet. At the end of the ballet the whole orchestra was just on fire and it was awesome. They took about 7 curtain calls at the end, the audience loved it so much.

This morning we went to church in the Berliner Dom and it was really interesting. It's a Protestant church, and I recognized some of the melodies used in the call and response part of the service. It was fun to try to sing the hymns in German!

This is the view of the Berliner Dom yesterday in the sun! So pretty!

Up next: Berlin philharmonic playing Bruckner 9 and Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children!!!!