Below are the graves of the Brothers Grimm, which I saw on a detour to Schöneberg. There seemed to be papers at the ground, children’s notes held down by stones. Not sure if that was a particular school trip or some sort of tradition I’m unaware of.

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Berlin is very much alive.

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I love this town and will be sad to leave it.

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At Dada Falafel you can get the best falafel im brot (pide bread) ever for 3 euros. Add 2.5 euros more and you get eastern tea with cinnamon and cardamomo and dessert.

At Maximilian’s in Rosenthaler Platz you can get some very good dönner for 2 euros, and a dürum dönner – which he prepares by wrapping it in Turkish pizza instead of taboon bread – for 2.5 euros. They have falafel, but it’s warmed over and can’t hold a candle to either Dada Falafel’s – stick to their dönner.

Not too far is 5 Flavor, an excellent chinese restaurant. At lunch time you can get one of their many dishes accompanied by either hot-sour soup or a spring roll for 5 euros. I got some very spicy Kung Fu Beef with rice and the hot-sour soup – both were excellent.

Really close too is St. Oberholz, a very chic café with free wireless where 5.5 euros will buy you a cappuccino and one of their very large bowls of soup. If you’re still hungry, a few more euros will get you one of their fine prosciutto sandwiches.

Near the Heinrich-Heine Strasse subway station there’s another middle eastern place. They have a good dönner for 2.5 euros, and some decent falafel which they’ll prepare on the spot.

The café at the Bode Museum has some excellent pastries, even if their coffees are a bit on the expensive side. Still, you can easily get away with a cappuccino and some delicious Mozart Cake for about 7 euros.

There are also many oriental food stalls for eating on the go, for instance a vietnamese place right outside Friedrichstrasse Station, where you can get a box of noodles with vegetables for about 2 euros. This will only be a snack, but it’ll hold you until you find a nice dönner place.

On sundays you can gorge yourself at one of the many brunches around town, which will range from 10 to 15 euros for all you can eat of exquisite food. And of course on any random day you’ll find sausage stands, hot dog vendors and pretzels all over the place, ranging from about 75 cents to 1.5 euros.

This probably paints a better picture of what I mean when I say eating out here is cheap. It’s really, really cheap.

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I asked the waitress to recommend something to me, and she brought this monstrosity.

There’s sour cabbage on the other side of it, and mashed sweet potatoes as well. It was such a hun thing to serve that they probably expected me to clean my teeth with the bone.

Dessert was very good, some sort of sweet flan with sour grapes and apple slices.

I had two beers (including a rice beer that had a vanilla twang to it), a cappuccino that was a pretty much an espresso with foam on it, the dessert and the huge pork leg. Ended up paying 25 Euros, including their outrageous VAT.

Don’t let anyone tell you that eating out in Berlin is expensive.

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Right before stepping on his neck and breaking two teeth.

So it seems that we now have the cops to worry about as well. We’re one more step closer to becoming the United States, but getting to pay twice as much for a hard disk in the bargain.

Awesome.

It got me thinking more about how safe Berlin is. When I was coming here, Gabriele gave me directions that included a bus and a subway. I asked, as delicately as possible, if it was safe for an obvious tourist to use those in the middle of the night, while carrying cash for the rent, a laptop and a large suitcase. She replied that the main danger in Berlin was catching a cold.

She wasn’t kidding. I feel like a mirror version of Charles Dance stepping out of the movie in Last Action Hero and discovers the impunity of New York.

I’ve been here for over three weeks. When I arrived I decided on the general rule that when something’s less than 2km away, I’ll walk. As a result I’ve seen a lot of the city – on my first full day here I must have walked a total of at least 14km, and I’ve done an average 3km a day. I’ve been consistently straying from the touristy areas, to explore and find little corner imbiss that aren’t mentioned anywhere. On occasion I’ve gotten lost half on purpose, to make sure I visit areas I otherwise wouldn’t. Hell, I’ve walked home for 3km at two in the morning, and haven’t felt threatened once. Sometimes I’ve been on relatively dark alleys, having followed some Google-provided directions, and I run into women alone walking in the opposite direction without a care in the world. I haven’t seen a single person I could finger as a crackhead. On occasion you do see some odd-looking groups, but they’re only part of the city’s cosmopolitan quality – goths or punk kids or soccer fans minding their own business.

Allow me to show you a thousand words.

When was the last time you saw a BMW Z3 parked outside overnight in Costa Rica? Almost nobody here has garages, so most cars sleep outside – from Toyotas to Lexus and Masserati. Not a window broken, not a radio stolen. I wonder how long they would last in Escazú or San José.

Of course, this could all be tourist naiveté, so I’ve asked around. Nadine from C-Base, who has lived here for about a decade, told me that even as a woman alone she never feels threatened, nor has anything happened to her or anyone she knows. No guns pointed at her head, no knives pulled, nobody even grabbing her purse and making a run for it. Others report the same.

This is not all because of the heavily-armed Gestapo teams prowling the Berlin streets – half the cops I’ve seen look like someone handed a green polizei jacket and a walkie-talkie to my mom.

And about that kid who got shot at by cops who hadn’t identified themselves, the most that the OIJ chief can say is that it would have been odd for thieves to use a siren. Right. Because when I’m being chased by car thieves, I really want to take my eyes off the road to figure out what that wailing noise is (and pause to consider if the people shooting at me for no good reason may be paid to protect me).

But it’s OK, the government will make San José safer by opening fire when you don’t stop your car for unidentified strangers in a dark vehicle.

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Perhaps I should back up a bit.

C-Base is a space station which once moved accidentally through time and ended up crashing in Berlin. The station laid buried for aeons until it was discovered by germans. It has since begun rebuilding itself, a lot of which takes place by rewriting and adapting people’s memories. A good example might be the Fernsehturm Berlin, which is actually the space station’s antenna, and the station then rewrote the memories of GDR officials to make them believe it was a tower they had constructed.

The antenna may also have been discovered by GDR officials who then claimed it was their intention to build a tower there all along – the accounts are uncertain.

The Space Meal is an annual even where space travelers gather to share either the food of their homeworlds, or interesting items they have found in their travels. They’re asked to come in the traditional garb of their home planet. The food is then judged in three criteria:

• Look
• Taste
• Background
• Suitability for a zero-G environment

There. Hopefully that cleared things up.

It was a lot of fun. I knew I was in the right place when I was greeted by this:

Not to mention…

Unfortunately that’s only a hollow shell and has been filled with a PC running Linux.

I was greeted by Hein-C and Nadine, who kindly gave me a tour of this part of the station, which includes public areas, member-only areas, electronic workshops, and more hardware that you could shake a fistful of smartdust at, as well as some peculiar decor.

It seems the Space Meal is usually held in September, but they moved it to February by reasons I could not discern. I had originally planned to come in September to Berlin, but decided to move it to coincide with the Berlinale. It was quickly determined this was another instance of the station rewriting reality – clearly it was September, or both my trip and the space meal wouldn’t be taking place.

Nadine also translated one of the stories for me.

This fellow’s story is that his culture uses those flat bread tablets as books, to transfer knowledge. This leads to knowledge being unreliably transmitted, since scribes will sometimes eat the writing device as they’re working. There are many types of cookies used for writing, which lead to a discussion on taste (both literally and literary).

Fortunately, there was someone on hand to check out that the food was safe for consumption by carbon-based life forms.

Don’t ask me what these were – some type of mint drink mixed with a sweet milky substance and something like pepper. And small shiny edible beads.

There were two other dishes, but I understand that the winners were the blue rolls on the right:

They were a sort of blue sushi filled with blueberry jam from some galaxy far, far away. Interesting choice, and it won on most of the categories. I would have asked more questions, but after 2 liters of various beers I’m not sure I would have remembered the answers. Contestants were then decked out in commemoratory aprons.

That’s Hein-C in the kilt. I ended up staying there until about 2:20am, at which time I decided I’d better start finding a subway before I crashed (the Club Mate was starting to wear off), but this has got to be the single most unique experience of the trip so far.

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You’d probably need to plan ahead if you’re going to take your car anywhere.

All in all, it’s definitely warmer (or at least sunnier) than Hamburg . This is what Hamburg looked like at 8am:

I kid you not.

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Something else I’ve noticed is that groups seem in the habit of waiting outside a place until all their friends arrive, and then go inside once they’re together, instead of the Costa Rican way of waiting inside and the group growing as people arrive. Why a culture that has to withstand such weather would develop a habit of waiting outside in the cold is beyond me, unless it’s to encourage punctuality so that their friends don’t freeze to death.

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That’s the wiesse bohnensuppe, a soup with large white beans that was very good, and came with an excellent bread. The main course was called räuberplatte, which apparently translates to robber’s plate (In Sprachtools we Trust).

That’s three sausages, a lot of pork, some french fries, rice and chopped onions. Yes, the onion on top is on fire. And of course, the inevitable half-liter of local beer.

It was very good overall, if a bit heavy, and an indecently large amount of food for 16 euros. It actually reminded me a lot of Romanian cuisine, in that they share the same we’re-going-to-kill-you-of-a-heart-attack approach to nutrition. I remember now my mom mentioned that her serb uncle uses to prepare something similar to the Romanian sarmale, and the two countries are pretty close, so I wonder how much culinary cross-pollination there was.

That’s it right there – Adria Grill, Berlinerstrasse 141.

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Couldn’t get tickets for Orpheus Und Eurydike, they’re absolutely sold out. Not only tonight, all the remaining shows.

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Mind the location of the photos, by the way, it’s not exactly within Hackescher Markt but a bit to the site.

The online menu looks very appealing, but when I got there they had a buffet lunch for 6.8 euros – very good goulash, vegetable soup, cheeses, paella (which was more arroz con mariscos than anything else), and some mushrooms in cream, as well as desserts. The start of the day were the beers:

I had the house beer (above) and a wheat beer. The latter was good but not impressive, and very close to an Oettinger (OK, so it was good beer, and I’m fucking spoiled); but the house beer really impressed me.

Good strong flavor without being overpowering – kind of like a middle ground between an Oettinger and a Guinness. Can’t wait to go back.

But since en la variedad está el gusto, I stopped by Lindenbräu at the Sony Center today after picking up my Berlinale tickets for the next few days. It’s a pretty good place, with an excellent goulash and a wheat house beer that is a bit better than Lemke’s wheat beer, even if it lags significatly behind Lemke’s own house brew. Also, while very nicely furnished, it had more of a mall feel, but I guess that’s to be expected of the area.

I guess I should start finding things other than drinking and eating to keep me entertained. Fortunately I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I want to do tomorrow night.

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It’s located in the Unter der Linden area inside the Theater im Palais, a small but opulent theater. The lady I’m renting the place from had recommended it, as did the Rough Guide to Berlin. I spent some time walking around the area, unable to find an entrance – it’s neither on Dorotheenstrasse nor on Unter den Liden, but on a little side street that’s not evident on the guide’s maps (but is on Google Maps, Which Know All).

Once you come in, you’re greeted by the luxurious theater lobby.

On the second floor to the right you’ll see a clump of coats and shoes. That’s the teahouse.

Why shoes? Well, the inside is covered in rugs, so you can sit on the floor and eat from very low tables if you wish. All rug tables were taken when I arrived, so I sat myself in a regular table to admire the warm environment and oriental rugs draped on the walls.

They have many types of tea, including pushkin with vodka. Having been walking for 8 hours (literally) in the freezing cold, I decided that some whisky was necessary and ordered Irish tea.

Even if you calibrate for the fact that that the time merely hot water would have been great, it was delicious – the tea was just soft enough, but still blended perfectly with the whisky.

I got in trouble when ordering food, however – the menu was only in russian and german, the russian owner didn’t speak any English, and this was my first time having Russian food. Fortunately a very nice Peruvian fellow who is in germany studying Mechanical Engineering was working there part time, and he gave me some suggestions. I ended up having some russian borschtsch (the traditional one, with beetroot) for entree:

And Pelmeni for the main course.

This is sort of a lamb-filled ravioli, and reminded me of a dish that Mehmet prepares at Aya Sofya. The taste of the Pelmeni was very interesting – a strong taste for the meat, with a very light, refreshing flavor for the pasta. The salad, all too often merely something to fill the plate, was a perfect complement – the carrots were unexpectedly sweet, and a very good contrast to the somewhat acidic greens.

At this point I was stuffed, even after having walked all day, but I had to try the desserts. I told them to surprise me, and this arrived.

The bill calls it bliny preiselbeeren, and preiselbeeren means lingonberries. The photographs do not do it justice. It was once again a very contrasting dish – the acidic berries at the center are on top of sweet cold whipped cream, which is itself on top of some sort of warm tortilla. This by itself would have been enough, but the dish is perfectly rounded up by the very fresh fruits on the outside, such bananas, strawberries and kiwi.

The final bill was 6.8 euro for the tea, 3.2 euro for the Borsch, 7.5 for the Pelmeni and 5.4 for the bliny preiselbeeren – not pocket change, but not exactly expensive either. For those keeping score at home, it’s a total of 22.9 euros, or about 16,000 colones – around what you would pay at an upscale place like Saga for a 3-course meal, and that’s before you factor in the Irish tea, that it includes a high 19% VAT, and that you keep hearing how expensive good food is in Europe (more on that topic later).

In short, loved it, and I’m looking forward to repeat the experience, even if it does mean that it’ll spoil me for other places (and that eventually I’ll have to head back out into the cold).

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