Sitting in a smokey Internet cafe around the corner from the Landwehrkanal, and our little temporary studio apartment. It’s cold outside, and supposed to reach freezing point tonight. This just a few days after the entire city spent an afternoon sunbathing — some of them nude– in the Tiergarten. We’re on the way to find a bowl of pho. That should take the chill off.

The big news of the day: we’ve purchased a mattress, the first thing to go into our as-yet-empty-and-echoing apartment. For now, I stand in the living room and whistle, and it sounds like I’m in a stadium. I think I’ll sample the sound before we put a rug down, if I can get enough power adapters to get my little ministudio running.

We probably won’t move in until Tuesday. This weekend is a holiday, with Mayday on Monday, and nobody works (or delivers mattresses). We’ll wander around and take pictures on Monday, but not too obviously — it’s a day of protests, for which many businesses are already boarding up their windows, and we’re too obviously Auslanders, and probably Americans, to make would-be-rioters happy, I fear.

Drinks with our landlord’s local agent last night, a former squatter here in Kreuzberg who said that tourists come for 1 May to make trouble, and to get in fights with police. He prefers to stay away. Important to remember, of course, that he described himself in his squat as “the only punk with a pillow.”

Which I think should be an album, or a T-shirt. Off to nudeln now.