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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It was a lot of fun.

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