I just (as in, two days ago) got back from an amazing trip to Germany with a friend of mine. It was filled with shockingly good food (Persian walnut and pomegranate stew anyone?), fun adventures, and… also art!

We didn’t travel to Germany looking for art, and in fact only went to one art-specific museum, but something I learned from Berlin in particular, is that art doesn’t need to be put in a concrete box to exist in a city. The street art in Berlin is astounding! There were several instances of entire buildings whose sides were done up in murals.

Here is just a tiny sampling of what we (literally) stumbled across:

(Note, some of these are from the East Side Gallery, which is the remaining Berlin Wall… transformed by art. Others are from Berlin’s streets, and a couple are from Bonn.)

There was something wholly liberating about seeing such vast quantities of street art. It hadn’t been painted over, or scrubbed out. The city embraced it, and that was so freeing to see.

Traveling always leaves me in a different place, mentally, when I come back. It reminds me that the world is very, very big. And (most importantly) that there are more ways to walk upon it than I can even begin to imagine. It’s exhilarating, in a way, to look at your life and realize it could be so, so much bigger.

(And filled with so, so much more art!)