Berlin!

So as I was getting into my tourist groove today and taking photos, I was narrating each photo in my head in preparation for the awesome blog post to come. I dunno if anyone else does this, but I do all the time :P About halfway through my day and subsequent mental narration of my photos, I realised that I left my camera cable connecting dealie in Stuttgart. So yeah, no awesome picspam blogpost until I get back to Stuttgart :P I was especially making an effort to not take millions of photos of buildings. OMG SO MANY PRETTY BUILDINGS IN BERLIN! But I refrained, mainly because I was on a bus, always on the wrong side and photo taking opportunites were just non existant. So as a replacement for pretty buildings, you guys are gonna be treated to numerous photos of food! Yay! But I will have to leave you in suspense until Sunday night, or possibly Monday night, depending on how tired I am :P

Today's recap will have to wait. What will absolutely not wait is my very first viewing of a German language musical! *EPIC FLAIL* Ok, so I saw We Will Rock You, which is clearly an English musical, but you guise! They translated it! Not all of it, just some of the songs and all the dialogue. Anyway, this morning I rang the phone number you have to call for the cheap student tickets from my hostel's phone, because the girl at the desk wouldn't do it for me *huff* The lady on the phone told me that all the student tickets were sold, but there were some available in every section. I decided not to book over the phone, and somehow thought that I'd be able to find my way to the theatre during the day and book then. Yeah, no. I ended up just rocking up just before 7pm (after some misadventures with my awesome memory map reading :P) and hoping for the best. I'm SO GLAD I did because they obviously just sell any seat that's left at the student price when there's only half an hour to curtain :D I ended up in row 11, which was about a thrid of the way up the stalls. I had seat number three, which I assumed was on the edge, but it's not. It's in the middle. The numbers start in the middle of every row and move outwards. There's two number ones next to each other in the middle, and on your ticket it tells you if you're left or right. Crazy Germans.

ANYWAY I totally cried at the awesome. Right at the start they filled the auditorium with stage smoke and although people around me were coughing, I was breathing deeply and lapping it up like a chain smoker. I never realised I liked that stuff so much, but it's been over a year since I've smelt it and oh boy do I miss it *tear* The guy at the box office warned me that the show was mostly in German, which is fine since I know the story after seeing it in Perth. Then I remembered that the jokes are heavily based on the pop culture of whatever town the show is in. There were A LOT of jokes I didn't get, even if I had understood the words exactly I wouldn't have known what they meant. But that's ok, I had my own private little jokes, like the awesome German accents they had when they switched to English. One guy started singing with this random country twang, alternating with the heavy German accent. Hilarious! I thoroughly enjoyes myself :P

There's a lot of changes from when I saw the show. I was still in highschool, so it was before the days of facebook and twitter, and there were lots of fb twitter jokes added. And it's changed from being set on Planet Mall to Planet Ebay. OH OH and right at the start when there's all those important historical dates like Woodstock and the Beetles touring the world, they added 2010, GERMANY WINS EUROVISION. Gold, pure gold right there :P They'd also added this whole thing about German and English. Galileo dreams in English, and sings only in English, but the Killer Queen doesn't like English or something so she only sings in German. Except the entire second act was sung in English. They translated her songs and most of the first act chorus numbers, but also No-One But You, which was interesting. From what I could pick up No-One But You was totally different, entirely original lyrics. But then again I could be wrong :P

The show pretty much looked the same, but 100 times more camp, as only the Germans can do. I loved it! Goodness me. It's really hard to describe the German style of musical theatre, but it is seriously awesome. No one else can pull it off, look at how Dance of the Vampires EPIC FAILED on broadway.

Theatre etiquette is totally different here too. I've always taken it for granted that cameras aren't allowed. No photos. Full stop. It's the same everywhwere. Well, there was a poor usher running around before the show telling people to stop taking photos. They were blatantly obvious about it too, they'd stand up and lean over the balcony and there's be a huge flash. Then a guy behind me gets out his camera, which was one of those things that you assemble until it's longer than you're arm and looks like it can take close-up photos of Pluto. What was he going to with that? Clearly he was going to photograph the entire show.

During the interval everyone was drinking these awesome looking red things with fruit in the bottom. I couldn't even see the bar because of the crowd, so I just went back to my seat like I usually do. Well, these things must have been potent because there was a whole lot more giggling and singing along in the second act in my immediate vicinity. I loathe people singing along to a theatre performance. It's not a concert, these people are not just singing for the sake of it, their character is saying something so you should respect that. Besides, the people that sing along are usually crap :P BUT I can see why people sing along to a jukebox musical, especially at the end when they're just singing all the leftover songs that they couldn't quite squish into the plot :P. I will just judge them quietly to myself.

Ok, I'm tired now. I forgot about dinner until the show was about to start, so I got myself some noodles from a street vendor and I ate them in the lobby of my hotel. But now I am finished and it's nearly midnight. I don't wanna go back up to my room so late that my roomies are sleeping, and have to fumble around in the dark trying to find my jammies and brush my teeth :P Besides, my fingers aren't working properly anymore and it's a big effort to type. Tomorrow I might go on a walking tour, so I can satisfy the urge to take photos of buildings that I managed to suppress today :P