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September 06, 2008
One Busy Berlin Week
First of all, a bunch of new pics up:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickdakan/
It's hard to believe I've only been here a little over a week. Damn. So yeah, I've been doing things, lots of things. Some of them even pretty interesting. First of all, I've been writing every day, which has taken up my mornings. I usually run across the street and cut a coffee and a roll or croissant (mmmm, fresh, warm from the oven croissants...). It's funny, the large coffee would not, I think, qualify as a small at most coffee places back home. But I get by. So, making good progress on the new book and hoping this first draft will be done sometime in October. Also getting ready to put out a second draft of Geek Mafia 3 to my publishers and select other readers. So, progress on all fronts there.
I spent a lot of the early week just getting to know the neighborhood here in Prenzlauer Berg. As I think I mentioned, it's full of kids and parents, all very cool and hip looking. It's sometimes too sweet and cute for words really. Someone told me that this neighborhood has the highest birth rate in all Western Europe. Could be true just looking around, although it sounds like one of those "facts" that's just a joke gone wrong. Hmmm, let's go look it up....ok, there's something to it, although it appears to be some weird quirk of demographics. I only spent 3 minutes, but there were lots of articles out there if you're interested.
But after a rainy day I decided to go out when it was nice on Thursday and do some hard core sight seeing. I started with the literally hard core, at the Berlin Erotik Museum, which was not nearly as totally cheeseball as I thought it would be. Yes you have to leave and enter through a large porn store, and yes it's all red lights and red walls. But they actually have a pretty neat, sometimes funny collection of artifacts and art, including the Balinese Fertility Cult icons I've shown in the flikr stream.
Then I wandered down to Kufurstendamm, which was the vibrant shopping center and sort of capitalist show case when the city was divided. It's still full of shops and restaurants and yuppies, although it all felt slightly dated. On the other hand, it's a pretty wall, with lots of trees and such. Then there's the bombed out Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at one end, which is kinda neat in a depressing, war sucks way. There's a plaza around there where a group of people on skateboards were performing tricks and breakdancing for a gathered crowd to the tunes of Michael Jackson. They were mostly older guys, in there 30's or even 40's, and seemed pretty talented.
I moved on to take a long walk through the Tiergarten, which is Berlin's Central Park. It's huge - something like 400 acres - and really very pretty. Towards the center (sorta), is the Victory Column. I climbed up to the top of that, all 220 feet, which was totally worth it. The view was awesome. Inside, the spiral staircase up is covered with graffiti. I mean covered. To a degree that makes it actually compelling in some way - a trace of some fraction of the thousands, maybe millions who've gone up and down before, puffing for breath on those spartan landings.
Then I wandered about looking for the right train station and was quite exhausted by the time I stumbled home. I took a brief nap and then went out to join C-Base. Do what now? Ahhh, that's a post for another time.
Posted by rdakan at September 6, 2008 04:54 AM