Tourist Season.

(Right: a shot of my breakfast, just to make you jealous. L-R: Yogurt with honey, müsli, bananas and mixed berries; mehrkorn brötchen with soft-boiled egg, cucumber, tomato and cheese; brötchen with cheese and paprika wurst, and black gourmet coffee.)

It's tourist season in Berlin. Everywhere you go, the tops of stairs, narrow sidewalks, doorways and train stations are occupied by enormous groups of camera-toting travellers, mobbing around like Chinese people and trying to get as many photos in front of as many historical landmarks as possible before jumping back on the tour bus and heading off to Dresden for dinner and drinks. Annoying.

I do and don't get why people decide to do Europe in ten days. On one hand, if you're from any part of the world besides Europe, traveling here is expensive. If you're from the U.S. or Japan chances are that no matter how good your job is, you can't take off more than a couple weeks off of work. But on the other hand, if all you're going to do is stand in front of the Brandenburger Tor and eat a curry-wurst then you could have saved €2000 by just staying home, Photoshopping yourself onto a postcard and boiling some sausages from Albertson's and eating them with ketchup. I want to take an Al Bundy vacation too.

The crappy thing about hating on tourists is that I am one. I mean, OK, I've lived here for nearly three years but I haven't seen everything and I do still go around to the touristy bits of town and take photos of shit. I justify it to myself by claiming that I get there on my bike, pack a lunch I prepared in my home, and don't pose in front of anything. Yadda yadda here are some pictures.


I was totally annoyed that these tourists wounldn't get the eff outta my photo. They ruined my shot at least five times by standing directly in front of my camera, hands in front of them like mummies. I think they were Italian.

The gods live in unlikely places.

Space ships in the subway station.

After this photo shoot I wound up at a gallery opening with some friends and after the opening they looked at my pics and chose this one as sufficiently arty enough to have made it into a pretentious, shallow art show. They even recognized that the beer bottle was the star of the photo. I am so profound.



Nothing beats Berlin graffiti. This is an ultra-swank neighborhood and I love that no one makes any attempt to cover up or remove the graff. I like the guy with one closed and one happy eye.

I'm wet.



This was a cool little secret garden that I discovered behind some other swanky-looking shite.


At Baiz. It's called a communist bar for some reason. The first time I went there I was like "So I can pay for my beer by washing dishes or handing out pamphlets or preaching about Mao or what" and they were like "Zwei euro bitte." Fucking fascists.

The TV tower behind some buildings. You do not even want to know how many times I took this shot.



Taxis actually wait here. There must be five entire taxi stands in the whole city. Who leaves a restaurant and goes, "well I could walk three blocks to the train station or four miles to a taxi stand"?

Cookie and Graham and I at Baiz. Sorry these are a bit out of order. The beer in the foreground is Erdinger Alkoholfrei and it rocks your world if you're trying to stay off the sauce. I took one sip of it and asked the bartender if it was indeed alcohol-free. He smiled and showed me the bottle and I was appropriately pleased and surprised. Cookie told me later that that is EXACTLY how the TV commercial goes. Ha.

I couldn't stop talking about that gotdang beer and bought six bottles of it at the store two days later.




And that is all.