Category: Places
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LOLdogs in Charlottenburg
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…
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Disciplinary organs?
This is way too good to pass up. Reuters writes about a crackdown in China on firemen eliciting bribes, often sexual. It quotes Xinhua, the state news agency: “For every 10 corrupt officials, nine are involved in illicit sex. This old tune has already been proved by statistics from disciplinary organs many times,” Xinhua said.…
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Visa woes and Haino screams
Two poles of Berlin existence yesterday, after sending lovely Ms. Peasant Glasses off to Hawaii for three weeks. After a year of pretending it didn’t exist, it was time for me to visit the friendly Ausländerbehörde, Germany’s version of the INS, again. I had my docs in order; income statements, proof of insurance, rental contract.…
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Snow, time, and Soviet science fiction
Incredible how time sneaks by and I make excuses not to blog, like this is some chore or activity I might actually get paid for. Oh foolish reflexes… It’s snowing outside (or at least it was when I was originally writing this), thick flakes filling the air like it’s the middle of winter, although the…
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Signs of the season’s change
The gray sky and sub-20 degree temperatures are all anybody really needs to tell that the summer is well over. Any serious sun we get from this point out will be cooler, and an undeserved gift, like finding that forgotten $20 bill in your pants pockets before you put them in the laundry. But here…
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Droning Shiva-style in Alexanderplatz
I ran into this guy, India Bharti, playing in Alexanderplatz yesterday. He’s a wandering musician of uncertain (but distinctly sandy-graying) age, a white yogi type, sitting crosslegged, sunflowered, maybe deeply cliched right up to the point you looked at how he was making his sounds. He was playing a pair of homemade instruments: one a…
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A moment of mourning for lost sky-blue seas
It’s not that I don’t like Berlin. I do. It’s a fabulous place to live and work, to free yourself from the fetters of a daily office. But returning last night from a vacation in the Greek islands, the Hauptstadt’s foggy summer and distinct lack of crystalline blue Mediterranean shorelines were almost hard to take.…
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Rodent, run
Is this a bad omen? I’m riding down Kollwitz Str. today when a big gray rat runs across the street in front of me, apparently gets spooked by my onrushing bicycle of doom, and turns back right into my tires. I swerve a little, and feel a bu-UMP. I look back; it gets up, shakes…
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To the East pt. 1: Witkacy
We’re back from two weeks in Poland, Hungary, and Romania, of which more, including pictures, later. But first a bit about Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, or Witkacy, a Polish artist who dominated that portion of our trip. The son of an impossibly stern 19th century artist and critic with Nietzschean ideas of modern education, Witkacy was…
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Off to Mordor we go
Well, to visit Poland, Hungary and our friends in Transylvanian Romania, really. But this map here, which places Middle Earth on the real map, says we’re actually going somewhere in the vicinity of Mt. Doom. Probably will skip the whole destroying-the-ring-of-power thing this time around, but we should get some pretty good mountain views. Tho…
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A German fusion recipe to avoid
The task in front of me was simple: Make dinner with what’s in the fridge. I struck out a few times — no rice for the average stir-fry, no peanut butter for peanut sauce — but finally settled on a simple Pad Thai recipe. Aaaand then looked in the fridge. Real Pad Thai probably doesn’t…
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Happy Bloomsday…
…even in Berlin. …O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar…
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Flickering storms and by-the-gallon rain
More crazy storms last night, lightning flickering outside so that we thought first, before the thunder was evident, that some light in our courtyard had started going south. Then came the rain, hard enough to make a monsoon downpour blush at the competition. We’d left a window open a crack, and I woke up again…
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Ludwig II and his fairy tale half-life
Poor Ludwig II of Bavaria, a king that should have born in the middle ages, or better, inside the pages of some fairy tale; but instead presided over the loss of Bavaria’s sovereignty and the assimilation of his alpine wonderland into the decidedly less romantic Prussian empire. This Saturday we drove with T & K…
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Love note to Thor hammer-handed
Thunder outside, raindrops that leave an inch-wide mark on my T-shirt as I ride in out of its fringes, hail bouncing off the window, cars already leaving wakes like speedboats on Bornholmer Str. outside. But it’s nothing compared to yesterday, when the sky turned an ugly orange-red in the west, and then black, and then…