Melbourne - ACMI and Berlin Bar

G’Day mates,

On Saturday I slept in and only got up in time for lunch. Ahh, that’s good. After lunch I walked to Federation Square and into the Australia Center for the Moving Image (ACMI). The entry is FREE and although it is not allowed to take pictures in there lots of people did and so did I.

It is all about movies, TV shows, video games and other forms of bringing pictures into a moving motion. I thought it was quite a great display, especially as you can do a lot of things yourself, so interactive and you can even play some video games. But just on your own it is a bit boring after a short while. So at 5pm I wandered around the city in the FREE city circle before I got some dinner in Chinatown. At 8:35pm I met with Christine and we headed for the Berlin Bar!

We rang the Green Button and a waiter who was clearly French (what?) opened the door for us without asking through the slid if we wanted to go to West or East Berlin. Hmm, this is not what was supposed to happen, so I didn’t like that very much. Our French waiter showed us the two rooms and then we decided to stay in East first. But what do you think of that?

Except for the barbed wire it didn’t really had a lot of East Berlin, don’t you think? We ordered our cocktails: Love Parade for Christine and Munich 75 for me. There were more on the list like Bundespresident and Angela Merkel and Die Ziege (why?). My cocktail looked good but tasted very sour and lame whereas Christine’s didn’t look special but tasted ok. For 20 AUD for each cocktail it should have been better really.

After a few sips we walked over to West Berlin without any problems (shouldn’t anybody like fake-control the border?). I liked West much better but still there should have been more to underline the whole catching idea of this bar about the separated Berlin.

While we took in the surroundings and criticized more about it we also talked about Christine’s Au Pair job and my next plans and how we liked each other’s blogs (her blog is in my blog list but beware it is in German: Christine in Australien ). Before we left the bar we visited the toilets and saw the biggest disappointment of the Berlin Bar: the wallpaper showed Schloss Neuschwanstein… Honestly, that is nowhere near Berlin, so what does it have to do with the separation between East and West Berlin? They should have the Brandenburger Tor instead.
Anyway, as we left at 10:15pm there was a long queue waiting to get into the bar. We said Good-Bye to each other in front of the Young & Jackson bar as Christine wanted to stay a little bit longer in the city whereas I had to go back to Carly’s.

Stay tuned for my next stop the next day: a wine tasting tour to the Yarra Valley!

Yours Berlin-Bar-criticizing Stefanie