Hope you had a wonderful, birthday-ish week. Here in Berlin I've been balancing work with pounding the streets, fending off the constant rain, eating doughnuts etc.
On Friday night I went on a recce to an open mic night in an underground Kreuzberg bar, and had my first currywürst of the season, then headed off to a cool nearby covered market the following morning, and on to Tempelhof air field to cycle down abandoned runways, which was pretty awesome/windy.
I also checked out all seven floors of the Kaufhaus des Westerns (or KaDeWe pour les intimes), which is apparently the largest department store in Europe and basically the German Harrods, full of people perched at counters eating grilled lobster tails and suchlike - very cool, and absolutely packed.
On Sunday I went to Museum Island via Hauptbanhof, Unter den Linden and the Bundestag (= "the building of bottoms" in Portuguese), but the rain set in and I had to bail out at Alexanderplatz, heading home for tea and Skype.
And yesterday I went to see the Junge Deutsche Orchestra in the cheap seats at the Berlin Philharmonic, which was pretty amazing. I basically just went to see the inside of the building, and was expecting to watch a bunch of kids play Three Blind Mice, but it turned out to be an experimental, Stockhausen-esque tour de force featuring 8 double basses and a guy bashing sheets of metal at unexpected moments. The best description I could come up with is "the end of The National Anthem crossfaded with the end of How to Disappear Completely, but with Radiohead edited out entirely". And then a bit of Schumann in the encore to calm down the traditionalists in the audience.
I have made, how you say, eine neue Zusammenstellung, and my Brazilian expression of the day is "to know someone from other Carnavals", which is a wistful turn of phrase for running into an old acquaintance, and seems fitting now that Carnaval season is over and everyone in Brazil is starting the new year proper at the moment.
Ice cream in Berlin in four days! (Or ice cold in no man's land in 40 seconds)
Sigmund Fred
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