Small satisfactions

I thought I was getting faster on my bike, but today I got overtaken by a man riding one bicycle and steering another empty one with his free hand (I don't have any free hands when I'm on my bike, but there you go). I have yet to overtake anyone myself, even an old person.

Nevertheless I am getting into the whole cycling experience, buying accessories and so forth. Admittedly only as yet from the 1 euro shops along Kottbusser Damm, but still.

At Thanksgiving with some American friends yesterday I encountered a new way of doing shots, currently being promoted by some brand of Venezuelan rum. You put brown sugar on one side of a piece of lime and ground coffee on the other, suck it, then knock back your schuss. This has the double advantage of making the alcohol much smoother and supporting the Venezuelan economy. I toasted Chavez but sadly not all those present wanted to join in.

The West is the Best

The wall came down 16 years ago this month. One of my Ostie friends was telling me how different things are, and although she said it is obviously better nowadays, there are some things that people pine for from the old GDR, like everyone having a job, for instance. She personally misses the day off a month that all working mothers used to automatically get, to catch up with their household chores. Today, where you used to see the allied guard houses of Checkpoint Charlie you can now visit Snack Point Charlie, a charming neon lit establishment where you can buy an overpriced sandwich, pizza or kebab, and then pay 50p to use the toilet.

Had a peculiar appointment at the physio today. My normal woman is on holiday so I saw one of her colleagues, who does one of these weird German therapies. It consists of her feeling all your organs, and the muscles and ligaments that are attached to them, and when she finds something ‘wrong,’ poking and pulling at you until it’s ‘right.’ I was in enough pain throughout to suspect that she may have missed a calling working for the Iraqi Interior Ministry. At one point she informed me (if I understood her correctly) that she was opening up the entrance from my large to my small intestine.

Saw my worst mullet so far: completely bald dome and sides, but last bit of hair at back of head grown very long and carefully fanned out over shoulders.

Goodbye to Gerhard

A quick word of thanks to Gerhard Schröder for entertaining us one last time by leaving office to the tune of 'My Way.' I for one will miss him.

Bad news

Oh no, oh no. The USA football team is now ranked 7th in the world. Before long we shall all be calling it soccer and they’ll stop the game every 15 minutes to show adverts.

Colder in Mongolia

BBC World have now informed me for three days running that it's cold in Outer Mongolia. I tried CNN for a change, but where BBC have programmes about Renaissance architecture, CNN have Living Golf.

In France Chirac made his TV appearance to announce more and more measures to try to win a ceasefire from the seething sink estate youth. It would appear that the French government maybe now realises that calling them scum wasn't the best idea they could have had.

I ventured to the Finanzamt this week to try to get myself a Freiberufler Steuernummer (freelancer's tax number) but I came away utterly defeated. It seems that there is no limit to the amount of separate words that the Germans will fit together to make one long one. A World Cup qualifying game thus becomes a Fussballweltmeisterschaftsqualifikationsspiel (talking of which, glad to see that Spain made it through, though disappointing that Australia will be there too) . To make things that little bit easier, the German government recently changed how certain words are spelled, so not even the locals know how to write anything anymore.

Reasons why I need to improve my German:

1. I need to learn how to argue. I had an altercation in a shop this week and had to resort to shouting in English, which without a doubt detracted from my moral authority in the situation (which was great, as the man seemed to think that you can save your place in a check-out queue by leaving a small bag of veg on the conveyor belt, then turn up with a full trolley some minutes later and expect you to let him go in front of you). Needless to say I still won.

2. I want to be able to put people in their place. A man got on the U-Bahn to beg; I couldn’t understand all he said but it was based around asking for money for food because he was hungry. He looked as though he probably was hungry. A middle aged woman (who looked as though she probably wasn’t) started haranguing him, saying something about getting a job. In London I would never have let her get away with this, but here I sadly had no choice.

Gross coalition

So Germany finally has a government again, after all these weeks. It would have to be said that it didn't seem to make much difference not having one, maybe because nowadays politics is just the shadow cast on society by big business, as John Dewey said. Meanwhile some people are looking over at Frankreich and starting to burn cars, including a couple here in Kreuzberg. Perhaps it's some of the young people you see on the U-Bahn who have some unaccountable aversion to using headphones to listen to their music.

I went to see Franz Ferdinand in the week and they were very good. In the audience we saw Daniel Brühl, who in the time honoured tradition of good looking film stars turned out to be 5 foot 4, leading me to wonder whether becoming an actor is yet another manifestation of Short Man Syndrome.

Cycling back from Treptow today I actually got overtaken by a dwarf on a child's bicycle.

Scorchio

I have been introduced to a whole new world and it's BBC World. They do a weather forecast where they randomly pick one or more regions of the globe and cover their weather for the next few days. For some reason they often seem to include the Middle East, so you're treated to the sight of some poor woman having to say 'Jordan, very hot and dry,' 'Syria will be hot, and dry,' 'Saudi Arabia, extremely hot there at the moment. And quite dry.' Given the fact that this seems to have been the year when the really interesting weather started, it seems odd to concentrate on the desert.

A news item last night however informed us that Europe (and the UK in particular) is heading for an unusually cold winter this year, and in case we hadn't put two and two together yet, pointed out that fuel prices are shooting up. At least when the oil and gas run out and nobody can afford to heat anywhere anymore I shall cope better than some, as I'm being toughened up by the Berlin habit of keeping one's heating at a temperature that just about stops ice forming in the home but certainly doesn't in any way make one feel warm. I seem to spend quite a lot of time at the moment checking radiators thinking that they must not be working. Nicht warm genug, indeed.

I can't decide whether Hertha or FC Union should be my football team for the duration of my time here, but I'm leaning towards Union.

La rumba barcelonina

I just returned from a rather fabulous weekend in Barcelona, of which the details are unfortunately not really suitable for public consumption. Noticeably balmy there compared to chilly Berliny. While the plane back waited to take off we were treated to some muzak over the speaker system, which consisted of a hideous techno-lite track over which every so often someone intoned the word 'easyjet' in the way that they used to say 'acid' or 'pump it up.' If dance music hadn't been dead and buried for several years now that would undoubtedly have been the final nail in its coffin.

Back in Berlin I'm extremely glad that the hordes of slack jawed tourists have not yet discovered the city, as they certainly are ruining Barcelona. Cheap flights are a bad thing for so many reasons, and I say this in the full knowledge that I'm a hypocrite for taking so many of them.

Incidentally, after a great deal of detailed research, I can now safely conclude that a combination of vodka shots and red wine gives me my worst ever hangovers.

Wunderbar indeed

Discovered that the chocolate bar they call a Wunderbar is in fact a Starbar, only slightly bigger. Will probably have to eat at least one a day from now on.