i am a jelly doughnut

as my clever title betrays, i spent this past weekend in Berlin. not only had it been on my list of places to stay during my current European sejour, but a friend from "uni" is/was doing a training period with Deutschebank in Berlin and provided extra motivation for paying a visit. And who can argue with a free place to stay?

those familiar with Easyjet and other cheap european airlines may know that to secure the cheapest flights, one often has to be willing to fly at ungodly times of the morning or night; in this case, i had a 640 am flight out of Paris-Orly. okay, that's not too unreasonable, but Easyjet closes check-in 40 minutes prior to the flight, which meant i needed to be there by 6 am and no public transportation would get me there in time. except the night bus, oh yeah!! said night bus was free and fairly speedy, but on the downside, it doesn't run near my apartment. so a couple of friends graciously let me "sleep" on their futon---i say "sleep" because it lasted a mere 4 hours before i had to hightail it to the bus stop. boring story short, i got to the airport, incredibly hungry and incredibly tired, and made it to Berlin just fine.

having spent the past 4, nearly 5, months in Paris, i was nearly shocked by the cheapness of Berlin. transportation, food, drinks, lodging--all are expensive in Paris. not so in Berlin. 1.50€ S-bahn ride into the city from the airport, compared to 8€ from Paris' Charles de Gaulle. lunch on friday, a famed "currywurst", set me back a whopping 1.70€. the most painful, however, was a pint of beer, Weihenstephaner Hefeweizen, a preferred libation of mine--3.30€, in a nice restaurant!! not at happy hour!! you couldn't really ever get a good beer for that much even in a happy hour in Paris.

not wanting to give the impression that all i did was eat, drink, and marvel at low prices, i'll detail a few of my visits. while Jenn worked friday, i hit the city on my own, wandering down Unter den Linden, the classical "strip" of Berlin. at the western end i strolled by embassies, an apparent favorite of Neal Palmer. one in particular was fascinating: the Russian Embassy still has hammer and sickle's carved into its facade. also at this end is the Brandenburg Gate, complete with a man dressed as a soldier with a communist flag in hand, ready for the oodles of passersby in the dead of winter in Berlin to snap a photo and collect some change. not far from the gate i visited the modern Memorial to the Holocaust, which consists of a memorial "park" and an underground museum. if i'm not mistaken, i heard Peter Eisenman, the man who designed the memorial, speak at Vanderbilt just last year. it's a fairly minimalist piece, consisting of blocks of concrete of varying heights in a grid-like fashion. the museum was interesting, not to mention warm.

i also saw the Reichstag's dome, which affords a nice view of the city, but there's nothing much to say about it.

saturday jenn and i(i have a friend here named Justin whose wife is named Jen, and whenever he says Jen and I it sounds like "gemini"...) went to a market to buy ingredients for dinner. this was perhaps the coldest hour of my life, or at least in recent memory. but it was fun to try to ask for certain things, like 50 grams of cheese, or pay for our goods, altogether relying on pointing and guessing at prices. this day was also our Berlin Wall day---on Neal's suggestion we visited the East Side Gallery, a 1/2 mile stretch of preserved wall recently(2000) painted by international artists. then it was on to the Museum of the Berlin Wall, which chronicled the wall's construction and events surround its construction and destruction. finally we finished the day at Haus am der Checkpoint Charlie, a maze of a museum with an overabundance of information but some fascinating artifacts and tidbits.

saturday night we were supposed to eat dinner at Unsicht Bar(unsichtbar means invisible, apparently), a restaurant where one eats in the dark, served by blind servers. there's one in paris, Dans Le Noir, and one to be opening in London. we didn't end up going, however, as it was rather pricey and the 50% off coupon we had wasn't valid on the weekends. i'm glad to say, however, that we did go to a restaurant mentioned in H&M's Berlin guide as a "cool" restaurant; at Monsieur Vuong we had bamboo tea, vietnamese beer, and Vietnamese noodles.

ok, quickly now, after a slow start sunday we hit the Hamburger Bahnhof museum, again per Neal's recommendation. very modern, some pieces interactive, some quite good. we tried to make an evening english church service, but having the time wrong and arriving late, we decided to forego church for the abovementioned Hefeweizen; i'm convinced we made the right choice(....)

starting saturday night, i had to depend on Jenn for dinero as my recently reissued French debit card didn't come with a reissued pin, and my American debit card was back in Paris. so monday morning we went to AmericanExpress to get a cash advance, only to find out that the office was closed. fortunately, the lady there let me borrow their phone to call AmEx and get the pin on my card to use it in an ATM. simple enough, until they, for security reasons of course, asked me questions not related to my account but available in a public database(!!!). they were the following: 1) what is the year, make and model of one vehicle registered to my home address?---answer, '93 Honda Accord; 2) in what year was my current home built?---i have no earthly idea; 3) what is the month of vehicle registration renewal for my home?---having just put the sticker on my car, i answered December, cringed through the pause, and pumped the air when i heard "correct"!

so monday consisted of a cash ordeal, a, once again, cheap breakfast, and a nervous train to the airport that got me there just minutes before check-in closed. but i made it back to Paris in one piece. as it would have it, monday in berlin was beautiful, blue skies and warmer temperatures. and of course it was gray and rainy in Paris. c'est la vie, as they say.

saturday i'm off to Basque country, Barcelona, and Lisbon during my 2 week school vacation. that's right, living in slightly socialist-minded France means 8 weeks of vacation during the school year, 12 hours of teaching as an assistant(now reduced to 10 just because they haven't given me any more hours), and a solid number of national holidays. i'll update on my journeys as i can, so stay posted.

Berlin