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    Guten Tag: what to do in Berlin after a month there

    It’s the 5th august and I’m still in Berlin, this awesome city, the past 4 weeks have flown over so fast and I’m happy to have met so many awesome people from around the world on my language course. We were all studying at the Goethe institute for 4 weeks and what a fun time was had. Based on some of the things we did heres some recommendations on what to to in Berlin.

    Hello!

    Visit the Grunewald forest – Drachenberg – Teufelsberg
    This is a large forest area just outside of Berlin, and really easy to get to on the train. If you take the S7 train to Wannsee you need to get off at Grunewald and from there you have several options. First it’s a really nice area just to have a walk around during the day, there are lots of tracks and if you cache Google maps on your phone you wont get lost.

    About a 30minute walk from Grunewald there is Drachenberg, a huge plateau area where people go to walk and gives brilliant 360 degree views across Berlin. 

    Finally there is Teufelsberg, I visited this abandoned cold war listening station in 2012 when you were able to find a hole in the fence and investigate but not the place is sewn up and people offer commercial guided tours. My housemate Ben went on the guided tour recently and he said it was interesting.
    http://berliner-teufelsberg.com/web/ 

    Treptower park & Soviet Memorial
    Treptower park is generally just a nice area but make a trip to the Soviet memorial which is quite impressive, one of a few memorials to Russia in Berlin. Further into, east there is an abandoned fairground which I am yet to visit, there used to be places where you could jump over the fence and have a look in but it think that its all secure now and you have to pay someone cash to get in. I may have a look this week

    Hire a boat
    Go to this address which will take you to a petrol station
    Aral Tankstelle Yvonne Hoffmann
    Vor dem Schlesischen Tor 2
    10997 BerlinGermany
    By the side of the fuel station there is a path where you can go down to and there are some bars and food places, when you get to the end there is an area which you have to pay to get in, tell the person on the door that you want to hire a boat and they will tell you to walk right trough to the end, go through another door and follow the path until you come to a small jetty where you should hopefully find a nice gentleman willing to here you a manual or electric boat for a very reasonable price for an hour.

    Go to Badeschiff
    This is a great area and has an out door pool which floats on the spree and many deck chairs to pass the day lying in the sun. There’s many food places and bars around this area, If you want a deckchair get there early as it becomes quite busy after 12:00/13:00, good way to spend the day.
    Badeschiff 

    Hang out in Warschauerstraße
    This is a pretty mad area, there’s always something happening day and night, places to eat during the day or go rock climbing then platy of clubs on an evening to visit. During the day there is Emma Pea, a fantastic little vegetarian restaurant based in a tiny disused rail station building. Even if you’re not a vegetarian the food is ace and the people are nice!
    As it gets later, Bar zum schmutzigen Hobby (My dirty hobby) just around the corner is a fun place. Completely camp and from what I’ve been told owned by a famous drag queen. Its completely silly, non pretentions. Then when it gets later around 02:00 its generally a good time to go to suicide circus, this si a great club with and indoor and outdoor area, sometimes the music isn’t for everyone so check the website to see who is DJ’ing.

    Avoid Checkpoint Charlie
    I’ve never been but everyone I’ve spoke to who has was disappointed, to quote people ive spoke to “it’s a replica of an old building in the street akin to a shed”

    Check out wansee beach
    Around 30 minutes outside berlin easily accessible by the s-bahn, take the S7 to Nikolassee and then from there is a bus, which will take you the 500m to the beach entrance. I think we paid €3.50 entrance and when we got through the gates I wasn’t expecting an actual beach. It was a great way to spend the day and my first time swimming in a lake.
    http://www.visitberlin.de/en/spot/strandbad-wannsee

    Play beach volleyball
    Beach volleyball is big in Berlin and never realized how much until Yaman organized us to play Beach volleyball one day at the courts in Mitte. I was pretty atrocious and my serves didn’t make it very the net very often but it was great fun and many thanks to Yaman for the coaching ?
    http://www.beachberlin.de/beachmitte.html

    Do a loop on the circle line
    This is a great way to get a very basic bearing of Berlin and to see how the place changes as you travel a complete loop around Berlin from east to west. Catch either the S41 or S42 one goes clockwise and the other goes, well you can work it out. It takes around 50minutes but means if there is something you see which finds interesting you can take a note and go visit it later.
    http://www.fahrinfo-berlin.de/Fahrinfo/bin/

    Visit Tempelhoff airfield, have a picnic play Frisbee or just relax.
    Tempelhof, Berlins old airport is now an amazing open space right n the middle of the city, perfect for running walking cycling or just hanging out. Theres is enough space to have 100’s of people there and still have loads of space. A few of us went there for a picknic one day and it was a perfect way just to eat drink play Frisbee and chill out.
    http://www.tempelhoferfreiheit.de

    Have a walk down Richardstraße
    Doro, our language teacher recommended this when I asked here for places to visit, which weren’t touristy. Based in Neukölln this is what I can only really describe as an incredibly picturesque English village in the middle of Berlin with some little houses and picket fences
    Richardstraße

    Alternative ZOO
    In Volkspark Hasenheide on the Hasenheid road side. There is a petting zoo with camels donkeys and cow. Its such a funnly little “zoo” abd worth popping by if your in the park. Its quite strange to see a highland cow in the middle of Berlin
    http://www.visitberlin.de/en/spot/playground-in-the-volkspark-hasenheide 

    Visit the old Olympic stadium
    This is another short journey outside of berlin, maybe 20 minted on the U2 to the station Olympia Stadion. Its a good way to spend an afternoon seeing all the old architecture.

    This is non no way what you should do if you visit Berlin, but a few ideas. Theres so much to see around the city that a few days could be easily taken up just walking round looking at stuff, (if thats your thing). If your going to go out clubbing go out at 02:00 in the morning, and try and avoid the tourist traps.

    That is all for now but not without a face….

    MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

     

     

     

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    A Kind of holiday d273

    Whenever I do a new blog post I have a kind of process where first of all I go to my own blog to see what the last thing I posted was. Then I realize that its been almost a month since I last updated, tut tut. No matter how much I promise myself that I’ll try and diligently do one post a week it always ends up being once every, 2, 3 or even 4 weeks! So, just before writing this I checked my blog and the last thing was about the Site visit to Berlin. One month later and I’m back in Berlin on a kind of holiday which has comprised of a small amount of work at the beginning, then straight into a 4 week intensive German language course at the Goethe institute which I am now in the middle of week 3, so let me consult my photo library and we’ll backtrack to where I left off!

    Lets start by travelling from Stage One down to London to start a 3 week job for 59productions, Davide, a colleague and a good friend was driving down south so he offered to give me a lift, luckily we managed to squeeze all of our bags and tool cases into his AudiTT, thankfully there was only two of us so we managed to make it fit!

    We made it down to London in pretty good time, and Davide dropped me off in kings cross and didn’t even try to shag me once, thanks Davide, I owe you a packet of Strawberry bon bon’s.

    The following day i was at the Helicar & Lewis studio to do some preproduction on a project they had been commissioned to to for Adidas. Thats what the Site visit to Berlin was about in my previous post.  Im gonna digress here as theres no real other ay of telling thins, so, I digress…….

    Late may i decided i needed a holiday, I’d  been working my ass of since September 2013 and even I hd noticed that i was more grumpy than usual. So, knowing that i love the city of berlin I decided to have a holiday there,and also at the same time deciding that it would be a good oppertunity to have a holiday and attempt to learn German/Deutsch. So in this order, i booked a 4 week intensive german language course at the Goethe institute and then i Booked my Flight out and then after much searching managed to find a room to rent  via the sister of a friend. THEN! Yes, capital THEN, in the middle of this process i got a call from Helicar & Lewis asking if i was available for a job in Berlin, it was one of those brilliant times where everything was aligned and just worked!

    So tracking back i was in thh HCaL studio building a structure i had specced for their projection mapping installation. more of that later.

    The amin reason iw as don london was to work for 59Productions on the install of Digital Revolution which is currently (23July2014) running at the Barbican, London. It was a hectic project, not what I was expecting in terms of workload. Initially things were behind schedule with external contractors, which had a knock on effect. At the start it seemed like there was never going to be enough time to get everything done but withe the genuinely good all round team “Shit got done!”.
    It was pretty neat to see Tim Webber (Mr VFX) watching his own work (Gravity)  presented by 59 in an immersive video-wall structure.  The only down side was that after the install testing we all heard the grunts and panting of Sandra Bullock far to may times!

    Closer to the completion of the install, classic devices like the Gameboy and the Nintendo Game&Watch were on display. Obviously who couldn’t resist having a go and getting sucked back into the early 90’s games. I think Lysander is playing Tetris and Sam is playing Donkeykong!

    After 3 weeks Digital Revolution was ready, there was an opening party where we all drank free alcohol. It was quite surreal seeing visual artists whom I’ve followed their work for a long time at the press party. It always feels strange knowing someones work but not the person, and it was good to see that there was nobody at the party who came across”A bit of a cunt” as you generally find at these kind of gatherings.

    Moving forward to the 4th July i find myself in Berlin with HcaL installing the Adidas Flux display which was running as part of Berlin fashion week. It was great to be working with Joel Pete, and the team on this as technically it was a pretty major achievement regardless of how easy it looks to the viewer. This was some serious projection mapping onto a surface and a shoe from 2 projection sources .

    Work never really seems to stop and theres always overlapping projects which is good as its good to be kept busy and  on your toes this was my desk one late thursday? maybe night.

    Back at the Adidas project Jonas was busy making dome projection mapping magic happen, with some custom open frameworks software along with other developers Joel & Patricio. The install seemed to be well received from what I’ve seen but currently seems to have very little internet presence to the common surfer, hopefully this will change as the internet does its aggregation thing.

    The past couple of weeks has been a pretty good time to be in Berlin, I  never watch football but couldn’t help but watch the last 2 games with my classmates. On the final Berlin went mad, there were people cheering int he streets, cars beeping their horns an there was s superb vibe.

    Something i didn’t realise was that beach volleyball was popular in Berlin, one of my classmates Yamman is pretty a good volleyball player so he organised a trip to one of the local volleyball places, which now we’ve al been to at least twice. Great way to spend the evening.

    I have no idea what this is but i pass it most evenings walking from the train station back to the flat and it makes me smile.

    On Saturday we had a pick nick in the forrest, 30 min outside of Berlin at the Grunwald  forrest. It was a good get together but non of us were expiating so may mosquito bytes. Raquel on of the girls also studying at the Goethe counted 75 mosquito bytes the following day. ouch.

    Before coming out to Berlin i was stopping at my mate Nicks flat in london. I came home once and noticed this, i didn’t stop laughing for about 10 minutes!

     

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    Getting Around d243

    Busy busy busy, always busy. Heres another attempt to keep this blog current and up to date. Where I left off I was at Stage one working on the 3D camera bridle system, which is working well, Karl has made some very clever smoothing algorithms so you can drive the bridle around on a joystick, record your movements and then play it back smoothed out, i am well impressed each time we test it.
    So, it was a thursday eve, and I was traveling down to Milton Keynes to do some media server programming for a a company called LED flex, who were intern installing an LED sculpture in the lobby of a new building for Catapult Transport Systems. Over 2 days I programmed up a media server to play back programmed states which ran colour chases and rolling hues  along the 20feet led strip. It was still a building site whilst i was there so i never actually saw it finished but it did look quite neat even amongst the carnage of building stuff. I left them which a Touch OSC app which allowed them to chose one of 15 different animations/states and the ability to do manual colour sweeps from an iPad. I hadn’t used TouchOSC for quite a while and had forgotten how quick and easy it is to setup program and use, perfect for this.

    From milton keynes i traveled south and stopped in StAlbans for a couple of nights to visit friends in and around london. It was a great weekend catching up with people and being based in StAlbans it was dead easy to commute on the train, the last thing i wanted to do was take the hire car i had in to the centre of London!

    On the Monday (Bank Holiday) I travelled north again and went to see my parents, they had been on holiday to Benidorm and i hadn’t seen them for a few weeks before that, it was nice to see them and I think the holiday done then good as they were really chipper! Whilst i was there a book i had ordered had arrived Vast click on the link for a fill decryption but i can only describe it as interesting peculiar and nice to look at.

     

    After a top weekend i was back at the hangar in weather by, more bridle stuff, i had been designing the playback/control console as well and was nearing the final production build. Heres an image of the almost complete (graphics missing) console next to an earlier agricultural prototype. We had the console chassis 3D printed on one of the new printers at the hangar, version 1 was a bit flimsy but second time round with some mods, adding spines and doing a thicker print it was really quite neat. This is just my opinion but 3D printing still has a long way to go, prints still need finishing as even on a fine thread the finish is still rough. Its still a great technology and I’m excited to see how it will progress.

    Whilst at the hangar i decided to take apart my GrandMA2 wing just to see what was inside. Its an incredibly neat construction, 2 4layer PCB’s holding cherryBlack key switches for the buttons. Also each key is individually dimmable via serial with a Texas Instrument LED driver IC. Theres allot of thought and design has gone into it and i was really quite impressed!

    That weekend i was back in newcastle and had forgotten i had agreed to do a couple of days etching at Dance City for my mate James. It was for a Spanish company called Alacaldanza doing a kids show and actually it was a thoroughly enjoyable couple of days, proper nice company.

    I also got the chance to properly package my projectors into their custom cases. I bought a pair of Optoma EH501 at the end of may then got round to getting some custom cut foam in Peli cases for them. Not only is it protective but it looks pretty cool as-well  olive green was definitely the right colour.  

    In July I’m off to Berlin for a holiday but I’m also doing a German language course which should be fn but I also imagine quite intense. Five hours a day each week day, then the evenings and weekends relax or go out to a club. Coincidentally*  a few days after booking my berlin trip I got a phone call to do a little job out in Berlin which fits in nicely. I can’t really say much about it at the moment but it tie mean that we had to go out there for a day to meet the clients and do a little site recce.  After leaving the airport and gong on the S-Bahn, we  finally got on the U-Banh at Boddinstrase and i remember last time i used this stop it was winter and about -14 Degress C, this time was much warmer!

    Heres a face I saw in the toilets at the airport, i wasn’t sure about getting my phoe out in the toilets to take a picture but then i thought, aaahh, fuck it…

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