My mom is snoring gently in my bed right now as I clack away on the keyboard. I've barely had time to sit down since I got back - after two solid weeks of visiting friends back in the states, I got back here only to be dragged off by my housemate Adam on both Friday and Saturday night. Not that I was really complaining, mind you, except for the occasional laughing whimper of "I have to get up in the morning and do stuff, man!"


Yeah. Morning. That was a nice thought. It worked out OK, though, and it was totally worth the sleep deprivation. First of all, I have both my cameras here with me. Finally. Both my point and shoot, which has been broken for so long, and my big SLR, which I haven't taken out just yet. The point and shoot came with me this weekend, so I can finally let you see what my life looks like here...

I wasn't just out drinking, this weekend. I was actually practicing my German. For real. I managed to have a relatively long, if not very deep, conversation in German with a very nice punk kid that Adam introduced me to. It's hard to find people who are willing to deal with my bad German - their English is almost always so much better that they just don't have the patience for it. But this guy did. He's totally fluent in English, but didn't speak a word of it to me all night. I really appreciated it.

This is Jan (the random guy) on the left, and Adam making his "gangsta" face on the right.

For more red-lit images from that night, check me out on http://www.flickr.com/photos/kristal_images.

Shortly after that, I found myself following my fearless roommate under the fence of an abandoned, graffiti-covered complex. At about 6:30 am. With camera in hand. One of my better photos from that morning is here...


This photo exploration quickly devolved in to Adam making out with his new Tiki boybriend. I'm not asking what that plastic tubing is for.

Finally, back at the house, Adam reaches the point of total collapse. Although, in his defense, he's just pretending to be passed out. I know this because, moments later I found myself giggling hysterically. "Shhh... shhh... don't laugh," he said, "you're wasting energy. You should be focusing all that energy on preventing a hangover tomorrow!"

Well, I'm back. It's hot. It's only 11am in Los Angeles and it's already hot. Gross. I want to run screaming back to the cloudy grey skies of Berlin, but the urge to go in search of my favorite taco cart is winning out. I hope it's still here.

I went to a former favorite bar of mine last night, and found that it's gone even further downhill than last time I was here. It started out as a cheap, comfortable dive bar where you could get a full pint of Pabst for 1$ during happy hour. As the Silverlake hipsters spread their way down to Echo Park, the crowd got trendier and trendier. The mixed drinks gradually got more expensive. Finally, they added a pool table, put in a dance floor, raised the happy hour Pabst to $1.25, and switched to 14 oz. "pint" glasses. But the hipsters were still eating it up, and if you got there early enough you could sit back, enjoy the energy of the place buzzing around you, and leave before the crush of white belts and greasy, in-the-eyes, product-infused hair became unbearable.

Not so much, last night. I went in about 10pm to find the place relatively vacant, by it's usual standards, and those who were there were a crowd that I find possibly more depressing than the hipsters. It was filled with wanna-be-hipsters. Now, I don't really like hanging out in a bar full of hipsters. They're pretentious, they look down on me for not being "one of them," and their conversations rarely stray to anything deeper than the latest album out on Dim Mak records. See http://www.bluestateslose.com for further examples. Suffice to say, we don't have a lot in common.

The problem with wanna-be hipsters is that they have a lot of the same social pretentions of hipsters, but none of the cocaine cool that at least brings some energy to the bar. It's the giant middle ground of the school lunch room between the socialites and the social fuckups where, in reality, nothing much is going on at all. It makes for terrible people watching, which is really the only reason to hang out in a bar by oneself anyway. That, and pinball, but the change machine was broken last night. So, after watching two Echo Park natives get creamed at a game of pool by a guy with side-swept hair and a buttoned up blue plaid shirt, I gladly took off.

Schedule of events for today:

1) deposit all the US $ traveler checks that I needlessly brought to Europe with me. (They have ATMs there too, people.)
2) Trader Joes!!
3) Sallys Beauty supply for bleach and goop for my hair. No one in Berlin seems to know where to buy professional quality bleach without going to a salon.
4) Freestyle, to convince my former coworkers to buy a bunch of cheap Holga cameras for me to take back to my friends.
5) Echo Park, for the taco cart.
6) Possibly Footsies, later on. (See the Bar Interiors group on my Flickr page for examples - although for some reason I forgot to post the Jackalope photo.)
7) Possibly out to Carnies hot dogs for a delicious chili and kraut hot dog that I'll probably regret later.

OK... my housemates and I have been watching this SNL clip almost non-stop for the last three weeks. It's Justin Timberlake on SNL, making fun of... Justin Timberlake. We're so ridiculous that, at this point, we can sing along, and we start laughing before anything funny even happens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dmVU08zVpA

Also, this Natalie Portman bit is pretty excellent as well: "When I was at Harvard/ smoked weed every day/cheated every test/and snorted all that Yay..."

http://www.nbc.com/Video/videos/snl_1439_natalieraps.shtml

OK, back to packing...

T - minus 12 hours... not until I leave. That's not for another 29 hours or so. 12 hours until Scotty, everyone's favorite main renter, comes back.

Several weeks ago we completed the search for a new housemate. This awesome Danish graphic designer/video artist/ musician was supposed to move in from February until the beginning of May. The day after we told him that he was the one, we got an email from Scotty. He decided to come back early. Early, as February 13th, rather than May as he had planned. So, aside from our serious disappointment at losing the Danish guy, we've just spent the last 5 hours scrubbing the apartment. Granted, it was kind of a disaster anyway, but sheesh. It was comfortably grubby, as long as you didn't go barefoot. Now it's the kind of clean that makes you avoid using the kitchen...

I leave Berlin about 7 am on Wednesday morning. After a three hour layover (and, if my housemates have their way, hangover) in Heathrow, I get back to Los Angeles at 2:30 Wednesday afternoon. I've gone practically nocturnal for the past few days, so I might actually be ready to go when I get in. Or I might collapse in a giant gooey puddle in the car seat. I'm not sure yet. At any rate, I can't wait to see all you guys again.

Here's an amusing anecdote from this evening, which should be especially funny to all you who know how cold I always feel: I took the garbage out wearing cropped pants, a tank top, and a light windbreaker. Upon returning, I commented on the unusually warm weather - we had snow two days ago, so today feels practically balmy. In fact, I probably didn't need the windbreaker for the short trip to the garbage.

I checked the weather just now, and discovered that it is, in fact, 44 degrees.

LA is going to feel like summer!!

Oh, and here's a photo of the Krack Nuggets I mentioned last week.
http://travel.webshots.com/photo/2140243140098275383kOiiYL

I thought that Snacky Cracky brand snack foods were amusing. I found them so amusing that I have a small corner of a chips bag, reading "Snacky Cracky," taped to my wall. I thought my display of "Deutschlish" was complete until today, when I had the good fortune to run across... Krack Nuggets. Yes, this is an actual food product sold in Germany. I havenl't tried them yet, but it appears to be a peanuts coated in some kind of crispy, possibly carmelized coating. Let's just take a moment to savor that, shall we? I am now the proud owner of a pack of Krack Nuggets. A whole 250 gram pack, for only 1 Euro. Not too shabby, eh?

Aside from that... I HAVE INTERNET IN MY ROOOM!!!!!! Holy mother of god, my life is now complete. It's been 5 months since I could access the internet without either 1) going to an internet cafe, of 2) stealing my roommates computers while they are gone. I now have my OWN computer with MY pictures and MY internet that I can use when I FEEL LIKE IT. I've been chafing at my bit, but it all finally came through for me and I have internet access again. Halle-fuckin' lujiah!

And... I feel like I should make some kind of explanation of the nature of the Berlin Wall. The wall was put up in 1961, unexpectedly, by the East German government, to prevent East Germans from "deserting" to West Germany. Now, anyone who wanted to "desert" couldn't look like they were up to anything, so if someone decided to make a break for it they had to leave behind virtually all of their possessions in East Germany, walk in to West Berlin, and ask for assylum. Despite the obvious hardships of leaving behind everthing they owned, millions of East Germans defected in this way in the years before the wall went up. The wall was put up unilaterally by the East German government, and was never in any way approved by the west. It was, obviously, the most visible and poignant symbol of the cold war years.

So, the physical border between East and West Germany was opened up in 1989. Over the following years, The Wall was gradually dismantled, and the areas of the former "Death Strip" surrounding the East German border are still being built-up to this day. Almost all of the wall has been removed. There aren't actually (as I thought at first) random chunks of it floating around the city. There is a two-block long portion of it preserved in the main tourist area of Potsdamer Platz (near the Reichstag and the Brandenburger Gate), protected now from the souvanier-seekers by a wire fence. There is a small, 30 foot portion preserved at the site of the Mauer Museem (Wall Museum), and then there is the East Side Gallery. The East Side Gallery is a 1/2 mile or so stretch of wall that has been preserved on the far east border of the wall, right near where I live. You can see a little more info on it here: http://www.eastsidegallery.com/historyesg.htm

The wall itself is fairly anti-climatic, even with the graffitti and paintings all over it. Until I consider that I wouldn't have been able to get to almost any of the places that I regularly visit, it's hard to imagine the historical significance of such an ugly line of concrete. It looks so, well, dull. But as I walk along the edge of the East Side Gallery from time to time, and consider that that wall would have limited my ability to contact my friends, family, and anyone from the outside world... I realize that huge changes really are possible in the world if enough people are committed to making them happen.

Finally, on a lighter note, another great moment in Life With A German Speaker. Jörge, having recently bought himself the Nintendo Wii (pronounced "Wee") made the following, totally innocent, comment last weekend: "Yeah, Sarah said she wants to come over tomorrow and play with my Wii..."

I know it's been a while since I posted last - we got snow for a couple of days, and it's already gone. We're back up to 8 celcius ( sorry, I think of cold temps in celcius now ) and it's rainy. Tomorrow it ' s supposed to continue raining, except it'll be about 3 celcius. It' s much better to have it below freezing and snowy than to be almost freezing and wet. The snowy days were some of the nicest days we've had this winter. Globa lwarming is a major topic of conversation here, though. It's normally about 4 or 5 degrees below zero ( in Fahrenheit!) in January, and we've barely dipped below thirty so far.

I spent yesterday with my housemate Adam helping a local gallery owner (and friend of the apartment) tear out the temporary walls he had installed in his gallery . In exchange, we got a couple of free matrasses, a chunk of the Berlin wall, a rusty rail road spike, and all the building materials that had been used to construct the walls . Adam is going to use them to build a loft in his room... but getting them there meant hauling probably a couple of hundred pounds of drywall and lumber the three blocks from the studio to our apartment. In a shopping cart. Over cobble stones. Yeah... Adam owes me.

OK, not a lot of time right now, but... I have photos up on Flickr! Not all of them, and they don't all look nice, but they're there! Sorry I haven't labeled them yet, but I'll get to it soon, I promise. http://www.flickr.com/photos/kristal_images

Also, an interesting anecdote: My housemate Adam answered an ad to help a sculptor get his stuff from the airport to a studio near our house. The sculptor ended up being this really cool guy named Ted, and since we have an open room he's staying with us for a few days. This place is, in many ways, like a small town - except with all the good parts of a big city.

Oh, and I was talking to a girl today in my German class. She's an army brat and has lived all over the world, currently splitting time between London and Berlin with her husband. She was born in the same hospital as me. And we were both premies. Weird, huh?