Quarter Life Crisis

More Berlin¶

614 words

Other notes from Berlin around the new year.

• No-one in Berlin seems to work. Instead, everyone is sitting around having coffee. As a consequence, getting a seat in a nice café can be hard.
• Kebaps are a ridiculously cheap €2 here. As opposed tp €3 in Göttingen. [For the benefit of my British readers let me add that unlike in Britain, in Germany kebaps are edible and even enjoyable even when you're not completely pissed. – I still remembered when my British flatmates thought I was completely crazy when I thought having a kebap before drinks was a good idea.]
• Being to the Potsdamer Platz, by some considered as the middle of Berlin, I was appalled once more that all they managed to put up there are corporate headquarters and bland multiplex cinemas (of course showing lord of the rings on at least half of their screens for reduced choice). All this, decorated with 'strictly no poor people'-house rules and the ugly faces of security guards that come with them, of course. It seems pretty dead. But perhaps its a good symbol for this country becoming more and more of a corporate whore.
• Some girls boss their boyfriends around in a way that's not funny anymore. Others do the same thing a bit more subtly. Of course bossing around takes two. Still, I think it's not OK to boss someone around just because he'll let you.
• I offered my Powerbook for music services on new year's eve. Once more I noticed that people will easily pick the worst songs off my hard drive. There seems to be absolutely not excuse for keeping bad songs. Not even 'just in case'. People will play them. And I'll still hate them, not enjoy myself and have the feeling that I even contributed to that non-enjoyment myself.
• In the same department: iTunes could do with a 'kiosk' mode. I.e. a way to run it full-screen with no possibility to ruin my playlists, easy queuing in a single playlist (for automatic fading) and no need to have a separate user for all this.
• And why the f*** does anybody think that a 'soul' – or 'black' as they seem to call it these days – cover version of a bad song is a piece of music worth listening or even dancing to? I blame Ally McBeal.
• We also wen to the Pergamonmuseum, which I hadn't been to before. It's as crazy as it is impressive: They have actually moved complete walls of buildings from ancient times to Berlin and into the museum to restore and exhibit them there. Twenty metre high marble columns and similar things...
• With the many new an modern buildings in Berlin, you get the impression that nobody can build boring old rectangular buildings anymore.
• We also visited the Europa Center – a pretty old shopping centre because there are two funny clocks: One is a proper 24h clock that is so strange that it's virtually useless, the other and more spectacular one is water-driven and very cool to look at and try to understand. The best thing: We happened to be there at one o'clock – just the time when it flushes completely.
• Having to buy a non-trivial railway ticket at one of the automatic ticket machines was a pain. I don't think that the 'assistant' way of doing things, i.e. asking adequate questions in step-by-step way is a good thing. It tends to make me nervous because I only have a very local view of what's going on and have to trust the machine to get everything right. Also, this approach makes it very hard to try out different options and compare them directly.

January 4, 2004, 18:11