DDR Museum

A friend visiting from Japan and I went to the DDR Museum. While fascinating, I also had a voyeuristic feeling of looking into lives of others without fully understanding what I was seeing. This page from a notebook had the following caption to go with it: "A Record of Scarcity: Ingebor Lüdicke kept a diary from 1983, noting everything that was not available in the shops: from sliced cheese, frying pans, guitar strings to toilet paper. Bread rolls were invariably sold out by 10 am, the pharmacy was ojut of eye drops and the dentist lacked the materials to make a crown. This little book documents the outrage of an ordinary GDR citizen at the poor state of provision. There was a queue for salted herrings -- but with minus 10 in mid-winter, that was too cold for Ingebor Lüdicke."

@Taffy had suggested I make a collage of several entries along with the plaque explaining it but months later, I realize that I still don't know how to make a collage, and there's a hole in my April album, so here it is -- just one image. It was a great idea, but I still need to learn how to do it.

[Junko Y]

@taffy -- I notice you collage from time to time so that's on the list of "lessons" I need from you! I really liked and appreciated your idea, but I just needed to post and be done with April.

[Daryl O'Hare]

@jyokota I know the note is for Taffy, but I struggled with making a collage too. Picasa (free online editor) has a very user friendly collage making tool. Pic Monkey (the online one--not the app with 365) also has a very easy way to make a collage. @squamloon told me about the Picasa one--very easy and great free editing tool too! http://picasa.google.com/

[Andrew S]

Photoscape is another free program that is good for collages.

[Taffy]

@darylo @jyokota It's sort of a pain in that you can't control size/shape, but I used College It (downloaded from internet, use on mac) and it's quite easy. I did the free for a while, but ended up paying the $19.00 to upgrade so that I could crop within the program. I don't do really complex ones, but for what I've been doing, it works fine. There are things you can control like picture quality, margins, etc.