A woman stopped me today on the street, asking for directions in German. I understood where she wanted to go, so I helped her in English. She spoke good English herself, and since we were both going in the same direction, we strolled for a bit talking about the city. Turns out she’s been here 9 years, but is originally from Guatemala.
I love this town and will be sad to leave it.
After tasting Berlin’s smorgasboard of Croatian, Chinese, Thai, Italian, Japanese, Indian, Turkish, Russian, Vietnamese and Indian food, I realized I hadn’t had nearly enough German cuisine. I ended up at Berliner Republik, which had been recommended by someone here. They have an interesting system where the beer prices go up and down like a stock market, depending on demand, and every so often the market crashes and prices reset.
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.
You’d probably like this, Jorge.
It’s a carbonated mate drink. Very refreshing, although the taste might be a bit on the light side.
On my last night in Hamburg I went out drinking with the Unity folks and the guys from Nordic Game. Not entirely unexpectedly, it turned into a major geekfest. A guy was carrying a Magic the Gathering deck, someone else claimed to have a 1st Edition D&D tome, there were bets on if American Beauty or Fight Club had been released before (I won). What I did not see coming was when the bartender, a girl in her 20s, jumped in singing Where is my mind?, served everyone white russians while calling them Lebowskies, and pretty much won the whole my-library-is-geekier-than-yours thing when she said she had a 1st edition of Paranoia. And that was before we got into the flaming drinks.
It was a lot of fun.
Weather was really nice in Hamburg. It wasn’t even snowing, and temperature was only -2 celsius.
You know, it took me 4 days to realize there was no TV in the flat, and I only noticed because I saw the stereo’s remote and began wondering where the screen was.
Berlin is littered with memorials, particularly for the jews murdered during the Holocaust. Everywhere you look there’s a plaque, or a statue, or entire areas covered in mock tombs. There’s even talk of making independent memorials for other groups, such as the gypsies.
None I’ve seen have so effectively conveyed the message as these small copper pebbles, embedded in the road outside the houses where those deported and exterminated used to live. They list their birth year, where they were sent to, and when they died.
My next door neighbor is Irish. There’s an Australian married to a German living downstairs. An italian couple stopped me on the street and asked me for directions, right after I came out from having dönner at a Turkish place. Two dutch took my photo at fragment of the Berlin Wall, and a japanese woman did the same favor at the Berliner Dom. A Bosnian woman begged for money. Later, at the Reichstag, a couple who may have been dutch as well took another photo of me, right before I walked about 1km to a russian tea house, where a very nice Peruvian guy who is studying Mechanical Engineering translated my order in German to (whom I presume was) the Russian owner.
It was a long and varied day.
Gabriele, the very nice lady I’m renting the flat from, left me some breakfast
Someone’s getting fat.
Fuck it’s cold.
I had forgotten what real cold was. I had experienced it on Romania, a few years ago, and quickly came to the conclusion that any weather in which you can unplug your fridge and leave the food on the balcony without it getting spoiled (not even an open balcony, mind you) was just not designed for humans to live on.
But you know these things intellectually. After a while you forget the experience since, you know, in Costa Rica we consider 22 celsius to be cold. You don’t grok them again until you cross a gate in a sunny Holland afternoon, wearing a heavy coat, and are blasted by freezing air. Air so cold that you’re soon shivering and breathing in short quick gasps.
And Holland was sunny. Coming down into Berlin I could see a large canal full of ice, and found it was very lightly snowing when I stepped off the plane.
Then at the airport I was greeted by this:
Springtime For Hitler. That’s nice and timely.