Seen at Bonanza Coffee Heroes, where they make a rich, flavorful brew with geopolitical relevance.

Americans: If you haven’t voted already, send that ballot in now!

(Cross-posted at Hungry in Berlin.)

From a McCain staffer today (via Huffington Post):

MIAMI — Move over, Al Gore. You may lay claim to the Internet, but John McCain helped create the BlackBerry.

At least that’s the contention of a top McCain policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin. Waving his BlackBerry personal digital assistant and citing McCain’s work as a senator, he told reporters Tuesday, “You’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create.”

There are many things to be said about this. But aside from simply being high on the idiot scale, it misses a fairly obvious point. The Blackberry is Canadian, created by Ontario’s Research in Motion.

Reminds me of the (I think) French ambassador’s comment after the whole “Freedom fries” incident: “Actually,” he said. “They’re Belgian.”

I think I’ve spent the last six months entirely inside. It wasn’t a cold winter, but the dark and cold-enough of it seemed to get under my skin more than I expected this year. Though it’s possible that staring at a laptop screen for 29 hours a day every day has something to do with creating a vitamin deficiency.

But last night, against all odds, we actually ventured outside to this event being thrown by a few dozen B-list clubs across the city, one ticket gets you in all of them, dance to your heart’s content. It’s the first time Peasant Glasses and I have been to any Berlin dance clubs except our friendly local Icon, and so naturally we excitedly started at the old-person’s hour of 11, when everything was deserted. The first few were a bust for me; I never liked high school dances, and have zero nostalgia for the disco of the 70s and radio hits of the 80s. But just in time, we found a group of crazy Romanian DJs playing some kind of hard bass-heavy electronic goodness, two in giant cardboard robot costumes, another laying down live sax squeals over the beats. I dug. Dancing is a collective ecstasy; it’s hard for me to transcend my own inclination to simply nod my head and analyze the music, but it’s a beautiful thing when it happens.

On the way home, we stopped to watch a pair of blackbirds battle-rapping at 4 am, sitting on opposite sides of a long vacant stretch where the Wall used to run, alternating complex and creative stretches of song at the top of their lungs. The sound echoed from the sides of the apartments, lit up the pre-dawn streets like fireworks, made us grin.

Winter’s over, finally.

After a bit of swearing and frowning and several trips down to a part of Wedding which I don’t ordinarily see (but we all should, because there’s quite interesting African Lebensmittel shops there), the Ausländerbehördenites have at last given me a permission slip to stay in this part of the world for a bit longer. Many, many thanks to Bowleserised, who pointed me in the direction of a very helpful accountant who prepared the 3,000 page folder of documents that allowed me to sidle confidently into the office, wait no longer than four hours, and then head off home with a newly valid Aufenthaltserlaubnis.

So, now that nobody’s kicking me out of the country, it’s time to figure out what to do with the time.

A good way to swap the years in and out. The streets of Berlin on Silvesternacht (New Years Eve night) were as always marked by heavy artillery. Even after describing it a hundred times to people in the States, I had forgotten the visceral effect of letting everybody in the city have dozens of rockets far more powerful than anything we had as kids, and then having everyone shoot them off at once.

We visited Unter den Linden again, where at midnight there’s roughly 7 zillion rockets going off at once. The smoke was thick enough that we could barely see the official, professional fireworks down by the Brandenburg gate. But who needs the pros when you have artillery in your bag, and so does everyone standing arm-to-arm for a mile.

And beautifully, the city was covered in snow the next morning. Or roughly morning. Noontime, morning enough for New Year’s day. Thick flakes that coated the trees and covered the red gunpowder stains on the sidewalks, and melted by the close of the day. But enough to bracket the world with fire and ice.

Below is my first experiment with YouTube. Let’s see what happens:

Update: Answer, it broke things. So instead, here’s a link to a little video of New Year’s Eve. Too bad!

Unter den Linden today, or more specifically, the few hundred meters between the Schlossplatz and the Opera House, offers a lovely contrast in Christmas concepts.

One of the biggest, or at least most elaborate, Weihnachtsmarkts is hosted every year on the empty Schlossplatz, a parking lot in more ordinary times. For non-German readers, a Weihnachtsmarkt (also known as Christ-Kindl-Markt, or just Christmas Market) is traditionally where vendors set up little huts and sell all kinds of ornaments, candles, Christmas breads and cakes, and so on. These days they vary from unbelievably quaint to perfectly carny. Carny or corny, your pick.

The Schlossplatz falls on the carny end. A giant ferris wheel looms over what’s really carnival with extras. Other rides are aimed at the stronger-of-stomach, including the tallest “Transporter” free-fall tower drop in Europe. All kinds of games are on offer, of the throw-a-ring-around-a-bottle, shoot-a-basketball variety. One such game blinks “LOSE… LOSE…” at its top. You can’t say they’re not honest.

My favorite is the haunted house, based somehow on the Terminator 2 movie, that advertises itself in huge neon letters as “Gate Of The Time.” But a close second is the sign on the roller coaster offering half off prices to riders who are 60 years or older. I don’t think we’ll be seeing that innovation in the U.S. anytime soon.

Everywhere, of course, are sweets, and other odd German carnival foods. Cotton candy, cookies, crepes and the Nirvana that is Quarkkeulchen (fried dough balls with a bit of quark, like sour cream, in the mix). Lots of brats. Then also Grünkohl mash, and chicken livers. One of these days I’ll give these a try.

For a full report on the goodness of Christmascarnyfood, read Aimee’s post on our food blog, Hungry In Berlin, here.

But walk down the street a block or so and you’ll find the Operaplatz markt, quiet and placid, as though it’s a different century. Actual handcrafts are on sale here, and a booth with handmade German fruit brandies that are stunning, and just the thing to warm you up after a few too many dough balls.

Here’s the New York Times with yet another entry in their strikingly finely described, spot-on series on Why Berlin is Super-Groovy.

This was the original cool Berlin, with its own brand of gloomy, spooky glamour, well before East Berlin’s Mitte and Friedrichshain districts were on the tourist map.

Another Weimar love letter, right? Caberet and modernism, sex tourism and the sparkling, fun side of post-inflationary misery? Well no, this “original cool Berlin” is David Bowie’s West, or actually, the new West of a bunch of very wealthy media types (villas on an unnamed lake in West Berlin, places in Charlottenburg) who think the “New East” is now just too cliched for words.

So, uh, they’re going back to what was cool when they were in their 20s. Or rather, a nostalgic, packaged-and-priced version of it. That’s very original. Yes, indeed, regular cultural trailblazing.

Right, then — throw off that shabby chic of the East, get your late-boomer yuppie on and start glorying in the memory of those Bowie years, whether you were actually there or not. Apparently it helps if you start throwing down for 20 Euro entrees in the West. That’s where the action is now, my friends. I read it in the NYT.

From this column here, which sorta gets inflation and falling currency valuations mixed up, but it’s funny anyway:

Dubyah has turned us into a third world banana republic. We’re Costa Rica to the rest of the World. With lousier snorkeling.

Who can blame the hordes of Eurotrash from clogging the aisles of our Tiffany franchises like an extended family of hillbillies at a dollar store? Everything here is so incredibly cheap. We’ve turned into a discount playground for the world’s trust fund babies. High-end restaurants, the good hotels, VIP sections of our most exclusive nightclubs, Saturday night movie tickets: pretty much off limits to anybody holding an American passport. We’re the minimum wage security guards of a giant high-end outlet mall known as America just one cut rate Virgin flight away from true civilization.

My own personal favorite was being in fairly rural Romania last summer, a country not really known for powerful economic performance, a country that literally has plastic, washable money, and a friend-of-a-friend says: I love going to America, everything is so cheap!

We are unstoppable. Watch out, Costa Rica! What a good time to be paid in dollars.

I don’t mind the rain so much. I grew up near Seattle, and I’m pretty sure I can’t remember a single instance when the near-constant drizzle got me down. It lends itself to reading, cups of coffee, jazz on the speakers.

I don’t even mind so much the lack of light. Don’t get me wrong, I like the sun, I like the beach, when it’s around. But when the sun goes down at 4:15, or I have to turn my desk lamp on at 3:00, well, I’m usually still staring at my computer anyway. What good is the sun doing me anyway?

No, what really bugs me are the wet socks.

If you’re allergic to cuteness, just move right along. I prefer to think of it as an study in parasitic evolution.

So anyway, I’m walking around Charlottenburg earlier this week, meeting some friends to go to an exhibit on the history of the Chinese population in Berlin (small exhibit, a few interesting historical notes, displayed “like an 8th grade science fair” as Ben rightly said). I’m hungry, so I stop in a Backerei for a quick belegte Shrippe.

I start to leave, but as I come to the door, three black, panting French bulldogs — squat, almost puglike creatures with bat-ears and bulging eyes –  set themselves expectantly in front of the door outside. I pull it open and step carefully through them; they look up at me impatiently, moving not a centimeter for me.

As I walk away, the proprietress comes out and bends down, talking to them too quietly for me to hear. She hands one of them a little bakery bag. It takes the package carefully in its mouth, and then all three trot off down the street, to meet an owner who is holding an apartment door open for them.

This takes the already very high standards of German canine malleability to an absurd level. No, I don’t have pics, because my camera was out of batteries.  But I’m sure cute overload has some that will do.