Category: Places
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Ice creeeeeam!
So this is how crazy Berlin is. I’m riding my bike through our neighborhood yesterday. It’s almost the coldest day of the year, which means practically nothing this year, but let’s say for the sake of argument it’s near freezing. Cold. But around the corner I hear a song, as played on a very lo-fi…
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Northern European hurricane
When the lightning lit up the sky last night, and the wind was howling over the rooftops, we were pretty clear it was a storm. But an Orkan? C’mon. Apparently so. Winds of up to 110 kmph (roughly 65 mph) in Berlin alone, worse elsewhere, 34 people dead, according to the Berliner Morgenpost. A two-ton…
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German word exports
So — is it true there’s no word in German for “fairness?” Der Speigel writes about the debate over English infecting the German language, following a recent study looking at German words being adopted all over the world. Letting languages evolve is better than trying to keep out foreign linguistic influences (a la the French),…
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The rockets’ beery glare…
I had no idea what New Years in Berlin was like. We were told there would be fireworks, and when the firework shops started opening, and we saw the fairly massive artillery in there, we began to have a clue. But only a clue. Where I grew up in Washington we had “Safe’n’Sane” fireworks —…
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Merry Christmas, everyone
We’re off to Dresden for a few days, where we’ll huddle in a little apartment across the platz from the reconstructed Frauenkirche, sipping coffee with a friend from Prague and with luck figuring out how to roast our first goose. I’ve been torturing Aimee by playing Bing Crosby Christmas carols in front of our little…
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Spritzbread. Err. Shortiz. No….
I think that’s pronounced “Shorties.” I made Weihnacht Spritz cookies as we were decorating our stubby little tree, but they came out as shortbread. Maybe it’s the European butter. Tasty, but not spritz. Any theories?
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Music karma, sonic books, and punctuality
A bit by way of explanation. Months, oh, months ago we saw that Sonic Youth was to play here. Having been in a bit of a dry spell musically, our fault, not Berlin’s, we immediately snapped up tickets. What other 25-year-old band is still so unremittingly creative, still rocks so hard, after all? They never…
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Fine, the tree sez. We’ll just skip the winter bit.
Under our historic bridge, along the train tracks, the trees have lost their minds. It’s perfectly understandable. We had winter, it was two days long. Then a month of mild weather. Of course they’re going to shoot out buds, and even begin to blossom.
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Uh… we don’t have a country anymore? Oh, ha ha…
Pity the poor folks in Belgium watching television who believed, ’cause it was on the news, that their country had split up and gone the way of the dodo. Or, say, Czechoslovakia. A state-funded channel ran a long broadcast Wednesday showing footage of fleeing monarchs, blocked train routes, and information about the “secession” of Flanders,…
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What happened to just plugging the TV in?
So, kids, there used to be a day when you could go to the store, pick up a television, bring it home and actually watch TV. No, hear me out, I know it sounds like some kind of crazy fantasy, but it’s true. Once, in those wild college days, we even scoured back alleys for…
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Grand city, and cocktail robotics
I’m in Vienna for a few days, covering the extraordinary evolution of cocktail robotics. Roboexotica is an art show and technologist’s playpen, where towers of tubes and slides can make a decent mojito, a little blowtorch attached to a bottle can make what is by reports a truly awful (but fiery!) Spanish Coffee, and the…
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The winter sweats, and hallucinating trees
We wander through the city with our friends from New York, who we sternly warned to bring warm clothes, because, you know, Berlin winters are cold. Instead we get beautiful blue skies, sweatshirt weather. Last week one of the newspapers carried a complaining headline: “Unsere Wetter hat einen Fieber.” (Our weather has a fever). And…
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We’re legal!
Und so… Yesterday morning at a distinctly not-bright but early 8:00, we show up for one last go at the Ausländerbehörde visa office. Our friend Gülçin bravely met us there, despite the hour, to translate. In theory this was just supposed to be my visit, while Aimee would return next week. But when we got…
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When Hell freezes over
OK, a quick word of explanation. Last week I flew to Geneva to visit the Large Hadron Collider that CERN is building there, which will be the most powerful particle accelerator in the world by a factor of about 10 when it turns on next year. Amazing, inspiring stuff, which I’ll write about for Wired…
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Birthday snow
Snow for the Geburtstag. Who would have thought? We sat inside a warm Italian restaurant, and when the flakes began drifting though the lights outside, the normally staid Berliners erupted: “Das ist unglaublich! Was ist das!” Apparently this is earlier than usual. We, however, wandered home through the cold, running after the few flakes we…