Category: Places
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Victory! The new, virtual, land is is ours.
We are at last online. The DSL and Wifi are humming away, and I can finally sit at my little egg-shaped table overlooking the trees three floors down (and the really noisy trucks) and surf the Net. Or, as Brad noted, ignore completely the fact that I’m in Germany. But it’s not true, there’s really…
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We have a home. We just can’t go there yet.
We have an apartment. We can’t move in until Friday, and the payment details are still a little sketchy, but we have signed about 20 pages of duplicate contract pages, had them stamped (stamps are big here) and paid our 2 months kaltmiete to the agent. Kaltmiete is base rent, warm is with heat, warm…
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Prenzlauer or Kentucky?
Nearly a week in. We’re looking for apartments, starting a round of open houses this afternoon. Our first, yesterday, was a large echoey white box with huge windows and zero furnishings, except a stainless steel sink shoved against a wall. We’re finding that we probably can’t afford the neighborhood we want, which isn’t a big…
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Chilling at the wifi park
Sitting at a cafe table on Bryant Park, just outside the 42nd street library. We’d hoped to get a glass of wine here while waiting to meet people for oysters at Grand Central Station, but the cafe hasn’t yet opened for the summer. The trees here are still bare, arching over the park’s edge like…
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Homeless in New Jersey
Four days into homelessness, I’m sitting at Keena and Grigo’s dining room table in New Jersey, listening to the LA Philharmonic’s recent Arvo Part concert from iTunes and reading European tech news. Travel isn’t what it used to be. I’m as connected, or more connected, than I was at home in San Francisco. My laptop…
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Berlin’s river design
It’s still cold in Berlin, although the snow showers seem to have stopped for now. That doesn’t mean it’s not time for a bracing swim in the river. Design blog Inhabitant writes about the Winter Badeschiff recreation area, created from a sunken cargo ship off the banks of the river in East Berlin, and designed…
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help me, i’m surrounded by whales
I didn’t get any pictures of the whales. But they were everywhere off the coast of Maui this weekend, more of them than there were sparrows darting and chattering in the palms above Aimee’s parents’ condo. The whales are birthing now, we were told. Or have, recently. They spend their days showing off to each…
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Pulling down Berlin’s history
When we were in Berlin last year, a man sat down with us at a Bavarian restaurant and asked us how we liked the city. We were thinking of moving there, we told him. We loved it: the way it felt, the cafes on the streets, the energy of change and art. He shrugged, and…
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A Short Audio-Visual History Of The GDR
Hail the sights and sounds of the German Democratic Republic. Watch the cheery white-helmeted men scramble into a Trabant and careen dangerously around orange traffic cones. And just look how much you can fit in that trunk! Link: WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: A Short Audio-Visual History Of The GDR (mp3s, videos)