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I spent the past days in Berlin, visiting Jean and meeting Mona as intended. As usual, visiting Jean went along with excessive media consumption, many records were purchased and listened to, as were several films, focusing on Johnny Depp and John Cleese: The former in Gilbert Grape (which I had intended to see for ages by now) and Once upon a time in Mexico, which wasn't quite as bad as I had expected from peoples' comments but which didn't quite live up to the previous two films of the supposed trilogy either. Also, I'm a bit annoyed that every film seems to need choreographed fighting scenes &c these days.
We enjoyed John Cleese in the infamous Don't mention the war
episode of Fawlty Towers and a very old and hilarious programme called How to irritate people. We watched About Schmidt as well – falling into random comments starting with Dear Ndugu
afterwards.
We also did our share of walking around, looking at things &c. We went to the German historical museum, which has a cool new building now and featured a special exhibition about John F. Kennedy.
Uh, and then we didn't have internet access for a while, because Jean's beloved black PowerMac 5500 with all thrills and frills (read G3, Ethernet, USB, ...) that's used as an internet router these days had some strange problem causing it to ignore its USB card. Getting that to work again took ages – and still no-one has a clue what was wrong to begin with. This wasn't exactly the 2-step solution to getting on the internet as the Mac is supposed to be – but don't tell anyone.
Getting on the train on my way back, I definitely added old people to my list of pet hates. About three coaches of the train were reserved by a group of pensioners from Bavaria (or somewhere else in the south – who cares) who took ages to settle into their seats and stowing their luggage – both things necessary for everybody else who had been unlucky enough to enter the train at the wrong end to pass. Furthermore they actually complained about people passing and taking evasive action of their fellow passengers shuffling around huge suitcases and being in everyone's way.