skits ahoy

just one more reason why i am harbouring a total crush on tina fey

===> click me for shits and giggles

===> and click here for a 'news worthy' discussion of the tina fey linkage

saturn returning

i am coming home in a few weeks. yes that's right, i am heading back to my beloved melbourne. it's been almost one year since i chucked the city life in and moved to a quieter, and some would say somewhat confusing, little hamlet called heidelberg. don't get too excited mum and dad, i am only coming back for two weeks before heading off once again to my new adopted hometown. in flight terms, that's 14 days i'll be out of germany and three or four of those days will be spent travelling. (i still haven't worked out time zones and flight schedules. there's a reason i studied english lit and publishing and gave my old nemesis math the boot.) so all in all, i guess i'll be home for about ten days. it's good enough for me, for even though i love germany and the whole european thing (my on again/off again love for germans not withstanding) there are a few things from australia, particularly melbourne, that cannot be beat.

1. i love my coffee and german coffee is not that good, or at least no where near as delicious as melbourne coffee.

2. oh how i long for things such as cordial, a sausage roll, a lamb roast and a good ol' fashioned aussie bbq. (i went to a french bbq here one weekend and was disgusted. there was no no meat, just little bits of chicken wings and no real beer. who has a bbq without 2 slabs of beer and half a cow?)

3. family and friends. even though i've made some brilliant friends over here who i love and i will be friends with for a long long time, there is no substitute for those nearest and dearset who you've known for what seems like forever. plus, not having any family here has been hard at times. not too hard, cause they're only a phone call away, but a voice on the other end of a phone is one thing, an actual face is another.

4. my foriegn dvds. i know it's a trite entry, but i have gone a year without being able to watch anything that isn't in english. i can't watch my asian martial arts movies, manga/anime, french and italian horror movies and i can't even watch anything in spanish or portugeuese that alexis wants to show me, cause the germans either dub everything or only have german subtitles. grrrr... of course this would be sort of okay if i actually could speak german, but even then i don't want to have to pause a film to reach for my dictionary. (although i did watch a film that was half english/half german a few months ago and i didn't do too bad. i understood what was going on, not explicitly what was said, but i could follow it.)

5. and of course my dearest love melbourne. god how i miss that city.

but all of this will go away the instant i get up the morning of my flight. as i board the train to frankfurt i know that i'll start missing heidelberg, maybe not as much as melbourne, but there'll definately be a little something in my heart that's left behind here. even if it is for only two weeks. or ten days.

munchen or bust

i'm going to bavaria this weekend (just for saturday and sunday - nothing too special and fancy) so i thought i'd share with you the only bavarian phrase i know apart from random words like 'servus' (which i thought was goodbye, but apparently is also hello and maye thankyou, it's the bavarian aloha). now apparently bavarian is only a spoken language (whatever the hell that means) so i have to write it in proper german.

here goes:

ist meer wurst (pronounced - ismeer vursht)

apparently it means 'it's all sausage', which is easy enough to understand if you know a little german, but as to where this saying came from it's beyond me. it's meant to be similar to english's 'whatever' or 'who cares', but personally i find it giggle inducing. i can just imagine someone going to work on a monday morning, meeting a colleague and saying, 'hallo fritz, how was your weekend?' 'you know what wolfgang, it was all fucken sausage mate.'

horror nerd heaven

i seriously geeked all over myself when i watched this.

28 outta 100! who says i'm illiterate and shit?

so i stole this meme from a friend's blog who got it from another blog and thought it would be interesting to put it on here. what is basically going on is that the big read has stated that the average adult has only read 6 out of the top 100 books. let's check out how i go.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE, and since i don't know how to underline i'm going to make those books red.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce (started but i got bored and gave up)
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

i guess that makes 28. suck it big read. although there are a few books on there which i can't tell why they are there, why hamlet and the lion, the witch and the wardrobe get excluded from their families, and why there are some glaring exclusions. and why would dickens be on there, what, like four times? he only needs one book to be on there and then put something else. he's not going to be offended, he's dead. that goes for austen too. but i fail to see why bridget jones' diary is on there as well as the da vinci code. but i guess everyone's taste is different. i would have added frankenstein and american psycho to that list, and maybe even put the monk in there too. but it's not my list. maybe one day i'll make a 'tim's books to read list that isn't quite as smarmy as those other books to read lists'. til that day... do the test and let me know how you go.

it's been awhile

so people have been asking why i haven't written here for ages (by people i mean about 5 or 6, and by that i mean friends at home) and there is no real reason apart from laziness. now don't act like you didn't know i was slack at things that i'm not paid to do. well, that and the fact that the berlin story ends in some odd, totally berlin decadence that i was a little unsure about putting down here for fututre prosperity and for my mother to read. think random public sex (not with me, but strangers sitting beside me), sharing toilets with coke-heads, being served by transvestites/transexuals and various other things that may or may not include me being drunk off my arse in an unfamiliar city at 10am in a train station coffee and sandwich cafe. aaahhh... the hazy memories of bygone months. so anyway, i've decided to scrap the idea of finishing it off. sorry if you were waiting for me to do it, but i just can't bring myself to do it. but as most of you know me in real life ask me about it next time we chat and i'd be happy to tell you about it - unedited and unbridled.

what i feel like talking about now is just exactly what i've been up to for the past few months. don't get too excited as it isn't very much. all i've been doing is working, meeting new people and drinking myself into a sort of alcoholic state. work is going well, i've got the hang of waiting tables, which is a little different to back home. apart from the fact that over here you have to work for tips, which for those aussies reading, yes people tip here and so should you when you travel. cheap motherfuckers. and i like to think i've got the hang of the bar as well. the bar was kinda easy, it was more the fact that i had to get used to the different names of things, the amount and types of shots are different and i had to get a little quicker at it. i like working the bar a little more than the floor, but i enjoy waiting tables as there is more tips involved and i feel a certain amount of accomplishment when someone tips well. it's an acknowledgement thing of a job well done. the one thing i don't like about the bar, however, is the friday and saturday night karaoke. now you all know that i enjoy a bit of drunken singstar on the playstation and i do enjoy proper asian style karaoke and what have you. but working during a karaoke night is a completely different story. i don't mind it, it's kinda funny, but the problem is when you have the same people come in every wekend and sing the same goddamned song. like there's this one guy who comes in every week and sings the bad touch by the bloodhound gang. sure it's amusing the first time, but by week 8 you're like, 'do something else you useless twat!?!' what bothers me even more is the fact he's been doing it for ages and still doesn't know the bloody words. ugh... i do enjoy this one guy who used to come in and sing holiday by greenday. not because he was particularly good at it, in fact he was terrible, but i enjoyed the irony of an american soldier singing a sarcastic anti-war song with what i thought was no amount of irony at all. you could almost feel the euros narrow their eyes and look at him with hatred when the line, 'bomb the eiffel tower' comes up. very team america.

apart from working i've also gotten to know the basics of german pretty well. i try and use it whenever i can, even though alot of people will speak english or switch to it when they realise i'm not very good at it. but i can order food, buy my train tickets, ask people about their day and even help people find their way around heidelberg. i'm still a very long way away from being fluent or even knowing the language enough to say i can speak it. although i can understand a hell of alot more than i can speak. my spanish however is another story. it's woeful, plain and simple. you'd think after living with a cuban for 6 months and having a few latino friends i'd pick some up, but nope. my brain refuses to think about another language other than german. all in good time i suppose.

summer is here in germany at the moment and it's killing me. yes i know, i come from australia. land of zinc, beaches, bronzed aussies and skin cancer, but i just spent the last 12 months in winter. i came over here at the end of winter in my beloved melbourne, to arrive at the start of the german winter (which admittedly is alot colder than the melbourne one - you don't see people in melbourne walking around in jackets made for the snow season). so i've become aclimatised to cold, only to realise that i can't handle the heat anymore. and to think i grew up in queensland where the temperature was at least in the mid-forties for almost half of the year. i currently have no summer clothes, sweat all the time (charming i know) and feel like i need a slurpee constanly, of which they don't have here cause 7/11s are non-existant. i suppose if you had a 7/11 then you'd have a shop open on a sunday and that just seems silly. (re:sarcasm. whoever the bastard was that said sunday is a non-anything day needs to be killed. it's like they want you to drink, cause there's fuck all else to do but go to church and hang with your family. let me remind you that heidelberg is a university town. so i ask, 'what family would people have here and why would students go to church?')

anyway, that's the end of the catch up blog. now that i've absolved myself of finishing the berlin story i'll probably blog a little more often. so til next time...

ps sorry if there's spelling mistakes, it's been months and the damn spell check still wont work. fucking stupid blogger bugs... fix it you bastards!?!

new year's eve in berlin - part three

so here we are at part three of this saga. i am secretly hoping that this is the last one, cause after a brief departure of a short blog entry letting people know i'm fine and am now gainfully employed and another very short entry (posted while slightly intoxicated on german beer - mmm... german beer...) showcasing one of the coolest and most useless websites i've stumbled upon to date, i'm back to my story of new year's. to tell you the truth i'm over talking about it. i've told a few people in real life what happened, few people even got the uncensored director's cut version, and it seems like so long ago now that i want to talk about other things, but they'll have to wait til after this story is done with. (NB what i will type here is the slightly censored version, not totally censored, but ever so lightly edited. afterall my family reads this and i would like to keep some of this story for myself and a few trusted close friends. otherwise, as previously stated somewhere on this collection of ramblings, if you bump into me, buy me a beer and i'll be sure to tell you the full story. i'm hopeless when it comes to keeping in stories about myself after a drink or two.) but anyway, on with our story...

so there we were, myself, alexis and paul. we had just gotten off the train and met our friends reinaldo and ricardo outside the station. at this point the alcohol had sort of worn off, but i know that for me the adrenalione of being somewhere in berlin on a night like this, and the added excitement of all that alcohol and firwork fueled mayhem of potsdammerplatz had kicked in to overdrive. add to that the fact that i was en route to one of europe's most talked about, feared and insane alternative dance clubs, well you could only imagine the rate of my heartbeat. before we left our posting at the train station ricardo went to a bank and i took the opportunity to grab some smokes from a little alcohol shop that faced the station. i walked in there to find a massive group of toursts trying to buy alcohol. i know they were tourists because they all spoke english and they all seemed really drunk, loud and slightly obnoxious. i, however, being slightly sober was able to ask for my smokes in german and made no fuss or noise that wasn't needed. to tell you the truth, this is one of those times i was glad that i can pull off being german. having just expeienced the most crowded train ride ever where i was forced to talk to some english college boys i didn't want to have the same conversation again with people who were infinately more drunk than anyone else i had noticed so far that night. my german may not be good enough to fool a german, i have no idea what's feminine, male or nuetral, but i can fool a tourist. and that's all anyone can ask for really. so after a quick, 'drei davidoff classic, bitte? danke.' i left the store, rejoined my friends and we started to make our way to berghain.

berghain is in the midst of a rundown area of town and all that seems to surround it is an empty dirt field with some 3 metre high chain link fence and a few scattered industrial buildings, which look either abbandonned or waiting for hostel 3 to start shooting. it's kind of creepy to walk through this area (although to tell you the truth, alot of berlin looks creepy and dangerous to walk through). but once you get inside berghain and passed the huge number of poeple lined up to get inside, it seems like a whole other place. although it still has an industrial feel and look to it. as a friend of mine said, it reminded him of blade. he was waiting for the sprinklers to start showering people with blood and for the vampires to all come out of the woodwork. i thought that sounds silly, but once you've been in there it's a pretty spot on comparison. i prefer to think of it as if blade and batman had a baby and filled it with industrial house music and never came back to clean or check up on it. but again i'm getting ahead of myself. we arrived outside and as soon as we saw the line we were so thankful that we bought tickets for this place the week prior. the regular line was huge. by huge i mean massive. it was at least 100 metres long, at the very least and about 6 people wide. alexis, reinaldo and myself had tickets, so we left paul and ricardo in line together and headed towards our line, which by comparison was like measuring the distance between the couch to the tv, and between siberia and brazil. okay, that might be a slight exagerration, but you get my point. reinaldo was in the line a little bit ahead of us, cause alexis wanted to talk to ricardo for a little before leaving him behind (they hadn't seen each other in years, and he was only here with us because of a chance meeting two days earlier) so by the time we got inside reinaldo was already in line at the coat check. which was handy cause we got to push in. and germans being all correct and german, will never tell you off for something like that and cause a scene. it's only when it can be done annonymously or privately will they ever tell you off. i can't even begin to tell you how many red lights i've crossed at an intersection and having seen many a german look at me disapprovingly and yet not say anything because someone else is there. hehehe... that's the trick if you ever want to have a perfect existence in germany, don't let people be with you alone if you're gonna do something that's not koscher. also don't let them know where you live or you'll get a letter in the mailbox telling you not to do something. for example, the recycling here is waaaaay outta control. there's four different bins, one for waste, one for compost waste, another for paper and yet another for plastic and/or packaging. there's yet even another three for your different kinds of glass, white, brown and green. alexis tells me that if you don't put the rubbish in the right one, instead of someone telling you off and fining you, cause that would be a public thing, they put a picture of the offending rubbish up annonymously at your front door, like anyone could have put it there. i laughed my arse off and keep bugging him to put the wrong thing in the wrong bin so i can have a picture to bring home, or at least post on here. i, however, am of the belief that the german's way of recycling is just a front. when they collect the glass from the bins it all goes into the same truck together, so the seperating is a waste of time. i am highly suspicious of the rest of their recycling as well. but that's for another post.

(i'm going to have to stop this post here for now, as i have to start getting ready for work. i will probably get into it again either tomorrow afternoon or more likely the next day, as i have to work again tomorrow...)

best website ever

nothing more needs to be said other than what's in the title. click here and enjoy. you wont regret it.

i've found work

so i've started working. big motherfucking relief that is. i've been here four months and i've finally gotten a job. if you're wondering what i'm doing, i'll tell you in german. ich bin arbeiten als einen Kellner bei eine IrischKneipe.

it's not that hard to work out, but for those with language troubles or if i've made a mistake (which i do constantly when using my german) it says that i am working as a waiter in an irish pub. yes i found one of the only professions where i don't need to speak german. although i've only worked three shifts so far and i have used german. once because they couldn't speak english and we threw nouns at each other; the second time they were spanish and it seemed easier to work in a language neither of us were familiar with; and thirdly when i didn't want to talk to someone and wanted them to think i was german. oddly enough, this guy was asian and wanted to know where the bathroom was. he said pointing to a door, 'entshuldigung, Sie bathroom.' which basically means, excuse me, you (formal) bathroom. i had to stop myself from giggling and had to remind myself that i must speak like that when i'm drunk too. but i responded with a polite, 'ja, dat ist das toiletten.' (yes, that is the toilet.)

but enough making fun of people, there's going to plenty of time for that, as every second week is known behind the bar as american week. you see they get paid fortnightly and always come in to waste their money on beer. can't wait. odd thing is though, or so i've been told, the americans will always try to speak german at you even when they know you aren't german, while the germans will try english when they know you speak it. i've already seen this happen. an american said to me, 'ein bier bitte.' (a beer please) to which i responded, in my most australian of accents, 'yes, which one, mate.' he looked at me, i stared back blankly and calmly. then he said, 'ein bier... ahhh... guiness, bitte' i smiled and said okay. i seriously thought i'd just have to smile and walk off to pour whatever beer i felt like, then pretend i don't speak english when he questioned it. but enough talking crap for now, i have german homework to do. yes i've enrolled in a course. been doing it for three weeks now. i'm a lot closer to understanding german, but i still find it difficult to put together a sentence. allthough it is gettting easier the more i know. just don't ask me about the gender of things. it's retarded and stupid. i'll post some homework on here one day soon and you'll understand what i'm talking about. it's a killer.

tschus

ps as for my previous post about things to do in the new year, i can now mark off three. i'm learning german, i have a job and i've made some german friends. but i'll talk about my new friends later andone particular drunken night of free alcohol and clubbing that my german school put on. just as totally random info for you, my school is called F+U. no one else finds it amusing, but every time i hear it i think fuck you. hehehe...

new year's eve in berlin - part two

so here we are again, ready to continue on from where i left off with my new year's eve in berlin - part one. i hope you're still comfortable in your couch's arse groove and you haven't eaten all of your nacho hat just yet. you might want to boil the kettle again as there's still plenty more to tell. after all i only just got past telling you about the countdown and the endless spectacle of fireworks in potsdammerplatz, both government planned and publicly procured, and as we all know, new year's is never the shortest night if planned properly or executed in just the right way. so let's start up this sordid tale of drunkeness, danger and stupidity once more... (and if you haven't read part one i suggest you don't cheat and read this one first, scroll down and read it you damn sneak!)

there we were in potsdammerplatz watching fireworks hit buildings, fly through the crowd in a dangerous display that could easily start off another fox reality show simply called 'When Fireworks Attack!' and let's not forget about the poor fools dodging death at every rusted up movement of the ferris wheel from hell. my companions and i were soaked to the bone with champagne, having been sprayed by each other and random showers from the crowd, and in a very good mood as only the consumption of champagne can bring. but being champagne we knew the drunkeness wouldn't last too much longer and we decided to head off to berghain, the so-called undergroundest of the underground clubs that berlin has to offer. now don't get me wrong, the club is awesome and if anyone wants to start up a franchise in melbourne i am all for it, but firstly a word to the wise - never believe a german when they tell you something is underground. it never is. for if something is truly underground you don't have thousands of people trying to get in or advertising that litters ever bus stop, train station and shop window. that's not even including the fact that i heard about berghain on the radio in berlin, cab drivers know where to take you and people everywhere in freakin' australia told me to go there. AUSTRALIA PEOPLE!!! personally i just started substituting the word alternative for underground everytime i heard it. and it was alot. i also came to believe that underground was the new word for cool. like as soon as something is deemed cool enough by the hipsters of berlin and the surrounding artisan universe then it automatically gets an 'underground' status, but i'm getting ahead of myself here. let's get back to this somewhat linear narrative before i go off in another tangent, as i tend to do.

we left potsdammerplatz, avoiding firecrackers shooting off into the crowd and the drunken revellers that the polizei couldn't, and probably more wisely, gave up on controlling. it seemed as though they just decided to watch for any completely idiotic behaviour and ignored the constant sily behaviour. the night had truly spilled out into the surrounding areas and this being germany, there were no public toilets anywhere. all three of us had to go, and after that much alcohol it wasn't exactly a surprise, so we decided to go against a building. now i'm not much of a public urinator, but when you gotta go, you gotta go. i thought to myself, will i get into to trouble for this? and the answer came immediately. you take a quick look to the left and a quick look to the right and judging by the general concensus it seemed you could pee anywhere, so long as there was a wall to pee on. now ladies before you start your 'you're so lucky you're a guy' monologue, consider this - it wasn't just men peeing everywhere. on my walk back from my own peeing adventure, i noticed four other guys doing it and at least two women. how's that for equality? and all this half a block away from the polizei and their watchful stare, but when you see a constant stream (pun intened) of the peeing public using the side of a building to relieve themselves, amusing jokers trying to blow everything up with fireworks and a throng of people trying to break into a locked door of the train station, what are you going to do? answer, ignore it all and just pray to god, allah or whoever that the night will end soon and you can go home to forget you had no control for one evening.

now walking towards the train station, or bahnhof, i decided to call cousin cass and wish her a happy new year. cousin cass and i over a phone call at christmas time had a deal, she would call me five hours after midnight back in melbourne, which would make it five hours before midnight for me in berlin. i really wasn't expecting her to call as she was spending the evening at a burlesque show (which is kind of strange or ironic, or something to that effect, that i would be in berlin, but it would be her doing something completely german - incedentally i never got to a burlesque show in berlin, but then again i haven't come home and there is still plenty of time for that to happen). that coupled with the fact she was in australia and that we do have a loud and drunken reputation to uphold, i figured she was just drunk and forgot or was just having to much of a good time. either of these reasons were fine, as it was new year's and who am i to begrudge someone a phone call, that is if she could even get through. so it was at this point that i called her, using alexis' phone of course because i never had the oppurtunity to get more credit for my vodafone call ya handy because everything is bloody closed. (prepaid = call ya, and well, handy = phone. i am also under the impression that vodafone are a complete ripoff in germany, but as i can't understand the rates i am just going to put up with it. how funny that a former vodafone employee can't understand the phone rates and charges! hehehe...) the phone call went something like this (note, somewhat summarised as i can't remember the exact phone call);

cass (somewhat hungover and sleepy): hello?
tim (drunk and shouting): HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
cass (still a little groggy): HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! dear god! what is going on there? where are you? what is that noise?
tim: can you hear me? i'm in potsdammerplatz heading towards the train station. this is insanity! i've drunk so much champagne. hahahaha... this is anarchy! there's fireworks going off everywhere, people are fucked and crowding the streets. shit! (to alexis) did you see that? that one nearly hit someone!
cass: what is going on?
tim: can you hear the fireworks? it's like the russians are trying to take back the east! it looks like the french riots a year or so ago, just less blood and way more colourful! FUCK! (to alexis or paul, i can't remember) that one went straight into the crowd!
random female stranger (screaming at me, drunk and looking it): ein gluckliches Neues jahr!!!
tim: yeah, happy new year. (note i had no idea what she was saying until paul told me i said the right thing back)
cass: who was that?
tim: i don't know

the call continued on like this for another five minutes. i enquired about her burlesque, she about my countdown and so forth til i let her get back to sleep and we arrived at the potsdamerplatz bahnhof. and this is where it got a little squishy. if you've ever been in melbourne after the stroke of midnight and tried to catch public transport you'll know what's coming, but even the melbourne public transport couldn't even fathom the pure anarchy of what was going on everywhere. we walk down some steps and into the train station and that is where we have to stop. you see all two point something million people i am certain tried to catch the trains at the same time, and berlin trains, as punctual as they may be, are insane. for example, to get to charlottenberg (major shopping district) from where we were staying near yorkstrasse you had to catch three trains. that's one to get you from yorkstrasse closer into the city, another to get across the city and then another to get from there to charlottenberg. for a comparison let's imagine some mythical trains in melbourne but use the right suburbs for distance - from moonee ponds take a train to central station, from there catch another one over to brunswick and then from there catch the third one back over towards collingwood. it makes no sense at all. i suppose if you consider that the city was cut in two after the war and then had to make do with what they have, plus adding some new ones in without crossing the border from east to west, but then had to join everything back up again it's no surprise. but you try being a tourist and try to figure out where you go and what one you catch! the only saving grace is that a train comes past every station almost every six minutes and they are always on time. beat that one connex! for a city as spread out and obscure as can be, and then to have as many people as melbourne and still run on time without cancellations and without inspectors, it just makes you hate connex even more. if that was possible, that is. but enough bagging connex, it's a fish in a barrel metaphor waiting to happen.

so there we were, wedged into a throng of people all wanting to go the same way but never getting any further. it was strange. it was like a moshpit without music, a shoesale in an all girly town, a UN food distribution in a troubled african village. three words - squishy, stinky and uncomfortable. i felt about four hands touch my arse, some poor woman's breasts in my back, the alcoholic stench of some drunk spaniard in my face and i lost all my friends in the space of three minutes upon entry. it took us about half an hour to get the twenty metres from the door and up the stais to the platform. oddly though, once you reached the top of the stairs it was relatively empty and you could feel a small breeze waft through the place. however during the agonising baby-stepped trundle to the platform someone let off fireworks inside the station. no one could see who did it, and even the polizei yelling at people something i couldn't understand on the stairs couldn't see or do anything about it. i found the whole thing highly amusing and giggled the whole way. i did ask a woman next to me what was going on and if this happened every year. she replied with a smirk on her face, 'it happens every year and she has no idea why.'

when we finally got onto the train and it was more of the same - squished in and more cramped than the actual station was. the only difference was that we were now squished in shoulder to shoulder with a stack of english university students here on a holiday. i so wish i was stuck with germans or even the spanairds again. there's something arrogant and very snooty about hearing an upperclass english accent after a few months of hearing nothing but american and german. alexis likes the accent, but for me personally, i would rather hear a chorus of ballarat bogans singing a footy song than the faux-upperclassness of the british. it probably has something to with the amount of times i've had to watch an english documentary at school or put up with some snooty customer at work deriding my country and it's customs as coming from the colonies. each time i hear that it makes me wanna say, 'it must really burn you up inside to know that america is now on top. after all, they shunned you and let go of all that upstairs/downstairs snobbery.' but that's just me being prejudiced against the english. by the by, i don't mind a liverpool and manchester accent, it's just that snooty one that irks me. you know the one i mean.

but again i come back to the topic at hand, we had a quick train journey and arrived at our destination and met up with a couple of friends. reinaldo, the other guy we were staying with, and ricardo, a friend of alexis' from cuba that we just happened to meet up with by coincidence a few days earlier. now the 'gang' was all together we headed towards berghain and the rest of the party. i think i'll continue the story of berghain another day, as it really does deserve it's own entry. you see anything can happen in berghain, and by that i mean anything.

new year's eve in berlin - part one

even though some time has passed i want to tell you about berlin on new year's eve. i can sum it up in two words - crazed anarchy. it was like nothing i have ever experienced before. it was the kind of evening you'd see in a end of the world film or hear about about happening to a friend of a friend of a friend, but never something you think you'd expereince yourself. it started off pretty normal, the usual new year's dinner and some drinks, but as soon as we left the house things got crazy with a capital K. (to warn you beforehand, this is gonna be a big post so grab a coffee and relax yourself into that arse groove in the couch homer simpson style. hell grab yourself a nacho hat if you've got one lying around.) okay, let me explain the evening...

so, alexis and i headed out in the late afternoon to go grocery shopping, you know, grab some food, some alcohol and champagne and all that stuff. you see everything closes down in germany on a sunday and public holidays, so we had to grab a couple of things to tide us over for the next day or so. when we got the grocery store we found it to be full of people grabbing at whatever was left on the shelves (there wasn't much) and having a hard time finding anything, we were lucky to be able to find enough food to put together a couple of meals. to give you an idea of what it was like, alexis stole a cucumber out of someone's trolley because there was nothing left on the shelf! it wasn't as mean as you think, they had the last five and we figured they didn't need them all and christmas is a time of sharing after all... but anyway, the store was closing soonish, so we seperated and decided to grab whatever we could. left to my own devices and not understanding what half the things were i was pondering at, i wandered around looking for whatever made sense or i was curious about, and that is when i saw it. a multi-pack of FIREWORKS!!! they are legal here and cheap, so after i pulled a face to convince alexis (something between a sad little orphan and someone willing a dish out a damn good stabbing) we trundled back home through the zero degree temperature, our bags full of food, french champagne (which incidentally is alot more expensive than your basic alcohol), and my beloved fireworks.

skip to some time later and after food had been inhaled and alcohol (beer and wine) had been drunk, it was time for tim to play with the explosives. i was looking forward to this almost as much as the damn countdown. after all i am a boy and boys like explosions of any sort, be they small, big or massive enough to bring down a building. (i secretly hoped mine would have, but given they were bought from a grocery store i thought that would be too much to ask for) so beer in hand alexis, myself and our holiday housemate paul climbed through the window in paul's lounge room to the buildings courtyard to set of the fireworks. all i can say is that even though it wasn't the fourth of july i giggled insanely and totally enjoyed myself watching my store-bought goodies whizz, bang, shoot off into the sky and explode. there was one big one in the pack that i demanded to set off last, hell i might not be able to do this again and i'd be damned if i was going to give away my fun. as it turned out the biggest one wasn't the funnest one in the pack, but it sure as hell went into the sky the furtherest and had the biggest bang. the funnest (is that even a word?) one was this little tiny thing that shot out a fair few sparks and squealed into the night, causing all dogs in a five block radius to howl. but then again i couldn't tell if it was us or the millions of other people on the streets going crazy with their own fireworks. bottom line, it was fun and just the begining of a night i would remember forever. if you ever get the chance to be in berlin for new year's eve, do it!

now skip to about an hour later, we were in potsdammerplatz awaiting the countdown. we had arrived by cab (passing exploding fireworks and drunk euros with champagne in hand) or as close you could get to there by cab and only had about 30 mins til the stroke of midnight to reach the centre. you see potsdammerplatz is in the middle of the city, near the reichstag and the brandenburger tor, and because of the new year's celebration all the roads were blocked off and the streets were full of people, fireworks and polizei. there was an estimated 2 million people on the streets, and for a city that's only about 3.8 million people, that's a hell of alot of crowd to get through. it seemed as if the whole of europe decided to be in berlin for this most intense and insane night and judging from all the languages and accents i heard i wouldn't be mistaken in thinking it wasn't just europe that had turned up. now we didn't have a chance in hell of making it to the brandenburger tor, which for the festivities was decked out with a stage and crammed full of people, so we decidd to stay in potsdammerplatz. it wasn't too bad being there, in fact it turned out to be a brilliant circumstance. potsdammerplatz was the better place to be, even though it was totally full of people you could still move around, like being at the back of the standing crowd at the big day out. sure you were crowded, but you could still hear each other, dance around like a fool and still retain some annonimity without being drenched in the smells and sweat of the throbbing masses. if you've ever been to a music festival you know the smell i'm talking about. ew. it seemed as though whoever was in charge of crowds or whatever knew this 'spill out' from the brandenburger was going to happen and instinctively put some amusement in place for the evening. you see in potsdammerplatz a ferris wheel had been set up. i don't know who would want to be in that thing while fireworks were going to be the evening's entertainment, but they sure must have some kind of deathwish (you'll understand this if you keep reading). other than a ferris wheel there was also little stands put in place that sold alcohol and fireworks, now of course the fireworks had all been pretty much sold out and i don't know how they did it, but the champagne at these stalls was cheaper than at the grocery store. they even handed you free plastic cups. we ended up buying two bottles of champagne and stood around close to the stall, for two reasons (well i had two reasons for wanting to be there), 1) we could always buy more champagne without the threat of losing each other in the massive crowd and 2) there seemed to be some breathing room around the stand. the champagne was even nice champagne, not the kind of stuff you drink cause there's nothing else, or you're told is nice, but the kind of stuff you drink because it's actually good. a first for myself and champagne.

so there we were, three half-cut people in a sea of drunk and disorderlies. it would have been a little scary if it wasn't so damned exciting. you see, you don't walk on the roads in the city on new year's cause that's where you throw the lit fireworks. even the ambulances which drove past every couple of minutes had to manuevour around them. you also had to keep looking up at the sky to check for random shit coming your way. and most importantly you don't go on the damn ferris wheel. more than once i saw brightly coloured bits of flying emergency-room-accident-waiting-to-happen hit the sides and explode. it looked cool as hell from where i was standing, but to be on that thing you'd have to be drunk or a complete moron, or a tourist without the good sense to see what was coming. it's not as silly as it sounds, i saw two little indian women looking very confused and scared standing near us. to balance that out though there was a group of italians on the other side of us and they were having the time of their lives, singing, dancing, showering each other with champagne.

from where we were it was impossible to hear what was going on at the brandenburger tor and the concert, so much so that the countdown to midnight would never reach our ears. but that didn't really matter as there was more than enough fireworks going off and amusement happening around us to fill up our time. now if you remember all this insanity was happening in the space of 20 minutes. it took us about 10 minutes from getting out of the cab to get to potsdammerplatz and from there we were witnes to an amazing amount of near death, explosions and drunken behaviour, but that was nothing compared to what happened at midnight. we're not too sure when midnight was, but from where we stood you could just make out where the brandenburger tor was and as soon as firworks went up in that area it was time. it was like a ripple effect. people all started screaming, hugging, kissing and shaking up champagne to spray on everyone to the screams of happy new year! frohes Neues jahr! feliz ano nuevo! boa passagem de ano! it was exciting. it was crazy. it was fantasic. it was dangerous. IT WAS COOL AS FUCK!!!

this is where the new year's got extra crazy. from that moment on champagne seemed to fall like rain, fireworks from the brandenburger tor concert filled the sky, people were losing themselves in the moment and, most impressively, the general public started to let their fireworks off like no tomorrow. that shit was everywhere. imagine the sydney or melbourne fireworks comfined to a small area, not up and down a river, let off with not a care in the world or any concern for public safety. fireworks shoot off from everywhere. they were thrown onto the road, standing in empty champagne bottles for balance and set from deep inside the crowd. they slammed into buildings, they narrowly missed people, and if you were ignorant or stupid enough to be on the ferris wheel you may as well have painted a red target on yourself as i think more fireworks hit that thing than they did the couple of skyscrapers that scattered potsdammerplatz. but most impressively, the public's fireworks went for alot longer than the official fireworks of berlin. so much so that i heard fireworks going until the morning and even the next day you could hear things exploding and bottles clanking.

we stayed there for about an hour and half watching the insanity that was berlin at the stroke of midnight until it was time to go to the train station and make our way to berghain for the next part of our new year's adventure. and that my friends, will be the focus of the next post, the journey to the train station, the rambling new year's phone calls, the cramped beyond cramped train ride and the eventual arrival to berghain for the first big clubbing hurrah or 2008. i would love to type more but i have an ever growing fear that if i type too much blogger wont let me post. i already have issues with the spellcheck and adding photos, so why rock the boat when the ship's full of holes and a storm's a brewing?

til then
tchuss

movie review - the brave one

last night i watched the brave one. now i didn't quite know what to expect from this movie, as i like jodie foster (except for that horrible flightplan movie, seriously woman, what were you thinking?) and i am a sometime fan of neil jordan (he of interview with a vampire and crying game fame), but i really enjoyed it. even though the film takes place in a post 9/11 new york and can be seen as an episode in carthasis, it didn't weigh the film down or exude any of the obvious god bless america nonsense that seems to be all over the place in american cinema these days. plus it has a morally ambiguous centre that by the end still doesn't have any resolution, which personally i think is a very brave move and makes the film seem that much more realistic because of it.

for those that don't know the plot i'll break it down for you. erica bain (foster) and her fiance (naveen andrews, sayid from lost) are attacked and beaten while walking their dog through a park one night. he dies because of the savage (and i do mean savage) beating and she barely survives. skip to three weeks later and she wakes up in hospital a shattered and deeply disturbed woman who doesn't know who she is anymore (figuratively speaking - not amnesia). so much so that her job of hosting a radio program about her love of walking the streets of new york and just taking in the familiarity and how she feels connected to the city she is so in love with takes a darker turn. she doesn't feel safe and everyone on the streets seems like a stranger and potential criminal. even her style goes from upbeat woman with perky hair and girlish charm (something i didn't expect from foster) turns into a simpler and detatched look, with her hair straight and unkempt, her clothes simple and an expression that makes her seem distant and controlled. as one character puts it, she looks scary. now i don't mean that it's all through her clothes and look, but this is only one example of the ways in which this woman is a changed person. she goes so far as to mention on her radio show that she doesn't know her city anymore, she used to laugh at women who didn't feel safe walking the streets at night and now she's one of them. but that all changes when she, fed up with the inability of the police to find her attackers and the general fear she now embodies, buys a gun. this is where the film in lesser hands would degenrate into a revenge film something in the vein of a brian dennehy (i tried to find a vid of him as john wayne gacy but failed, wah!) film or death wish 6 or something, but this is where the film becomes interesting. i will only tell you a small fragment of this part of the film as i don't want to destroy it. she becomes somewhat of an accidental vigilante. while in a corner store she witnesses a murder. a man bursts in and shoots the woman behind the counter, not for money, but because she is divorcing him and she is apparently getting full custody of the children. while bain is hiding, hoping not to be seen by the murderer her phone rings. he obviously hears it and starts looking for her in the old 'don't leave a witness' fashion. he finds her, but before he can shoot her she shoots him. this scene is the start of something much bigger for her - the feeling of hopelessness is gone and she dosn't feel like the victim anymore. and this is what drives this movie, a feeling of empowerment and the lost feeling she has knowing that her fiance's killers are out there, but also the feeling that she is living in the grey area of justice and even though she has killed someone who apparently 'deserved it' she knows that it is not her place to hand out this particular kind of street justice. this is made all the more obvious in a scene where during her radio program she is made to take calls from listeners about the vigilante, who by now has killed a few people. she is at first annoyed, then disgruntled and finally disgusted by what she is hearing coming from people's mouths. as the calls start with a no one should kill people or yay for the vigilante and end up in the surreal area of i love the vigilante, here's my phone number to i am the vigilante you see bain's confusion and repulsion and finally the realisation that she doesn't know what to do or if she can stop.

i found the most interesting parts of this movie were it's themes and how they were handled. for instance bain becomes somewhat of a serial killer. she inhabits alot of the attributes put upon real serial killers. she has an MO, befriends a cop and returns to the scene of the crime. i don't know if this was intentional, but it does lend itself to the moral ambiguity this film seems to wallow in and is a great juxtaposition bewteen street wise vigilante working outside the law and public menace that's killing citizens in cold blood. i also quite enjoyed that race was never seen to be an issue in this film. almost every character was from somewhere else. bain/foster is obviously from south USA, her fiance arabic brought up in england, their friends a new yorker and an irishman, the cop she befriends is african-american, her neighbour is jamaican or haitian, she buys the gun of an asian guy, her attackers are hispanic... the list is endless, and not once does this become an issue or spoken about. the only time difference is mentioned is when the cop (terrence howard) tells his ex-wife that women don't shoot themselves in the head, but in the heart/chest, and even this is more to do with a plot point rather than sexism or validating difference, as no one suspects bain is the killer because she is a petite woman not a muscle bound type A male, thus allowing her to kill more and slowly descend into her own kind of hell.

as you can probably tell i really enjoyed this movie, i could prattle on about it for ever. about the use of a tunnel as her symbolic threshold into her own dark and sinister (anit-)hero's journey, about her dog being a symbol of innocence and even about the fact that foster was robbed an oscar nomination for this role purely because i'm assuming people just saw it as a revenge flick and not as a character study of a woman pushed to extremes through fear and disempowerment. (stupid motherfucking juno gets a nom but jodie doesn't? are you serious? i can see boring shite like no country for old men being there, but juno? do they let monkeys vote for these things? next you'll be telling me page got a nom for actress for playing an unrealistic smart-mouthed tryhard-punk kid? oh wait... DAMNIT!!!) but anyway i can totally recommend the brave one to everyone. i though it was brilliant and if you've been reading my blog you know that i haven't seen anything that comes close to brilliance in awhile. alot that doesn't deserve mentioning (i am legend, no country for old men, the golden compass), but nothing that exceeds excellence quite like ths movie does. see it now and let me know what you think, i would love to hear from others what their take is.

(ps someone really needs to fix the spellcheck on this thing, i am way too lazy to care that much about spelling on a blog.)

one more list for the masses

everyone else has one so i may as well join the throng. and besides, it seems to be the thing to do at this time of year. so here's my list of things i want to and should do before the new year is up.

1. get off my arse and learn german and spanish. i've been here in germany for 3 months now and i still haven't learnt anything new apart from random words. and i still don't know how to form a sentence in spanish. although i have learnt the word for pimp, which can only be a good thing.

2. become one of the employed masses. although i am enjoying taking an extended break from the workforce, i am starting to get paranoid that a credit card company may be able to track me down and demand some kind of payment.

3. make some german friends. although i did make some friends in frankfurt, with german transport being close to the price of a moon landing, it seems a little hard to hang with them any time soon. plus it would be nice to go out for coffee with someone who could help me learn about the culture and language.

4. write more. i'm not talking about this blog, which i must say i am impressed by the fact i've kept it up even if i don't think anyone is reading it. and irish pete told me that my blog writing wouldn't last! ha to you! (note, he wasn't saying it in a mean fashion, but just an observation on his own blog writing ability when in melbourne)

5. travel more. i know, it sounds stupid coming from a melbournian in germany, but i would hate myself forever if i didn't take the chance to visit paris, see portugal, check out spain and chill out in roma.

6. find some worthy postcards to send back home. this one may seem a little trite compared to the rest, but i hate basic postcards and i don't want to send just anything to my nearest and dearest. every postcard here is the same and it's started to really bother me i can't find random and tacky, just upmarket drek for the well-to-do. where are the bum-titty-bum-bum cards with the naked girls? where are the classic german liederhausen cards? do i have to go to bavaria for this nonsense? at least that'll appease thing to do number 5 i guess.

7. try some new food - possibly german. i have eaten so many different foods here, but most of it is either stuff i know already or cuban/spanish in origin. just about the only thing german i have eaten is bakery sweets and wurst.

8. try to be less harsh on the whole american occupation thing in germany. i know the germans did bad some 60 odd years ago and probably deserve some of it. and i know the americans that are here now aren't to blame, it wasn't them who set this occupation and base thing up.

9. stop being on the internet so damn much. big call i know, especially for someone who's keeping a blog going, but i still don't understand why i am addicted to reading all the articles and forums on IMDB, or why i keep reading the age online religiously. i know it probably has something to do with the fact that i can't understand german tv or papers, but i really must stop.

10. stop comparing everything to back home. it sounds a little simple, but it really is hard to not compare things to what i've known for teh last 28 years of my life. and it's made even harder by the fact that people who aren't that excited about being in germany ask me all the time about what australia is like.

one club is not the same as another

let's talk about a club in berlin. i wont bore you with the details of berghain just yet, but what i will talk about just briefly is the kitkat club. this club is one of the stranger ones i have been to. it feels like a rave club, yet plays like a fetish bar. it's one of those places that are very welcoming, full to the brim of extremes and yet somehow still has a hint of innocence. i don't know how it's possible either, but they did it.

a friend of a friend had told us on christmas day, that if we aren't doing anything that night we should head out to the kitkat as they were having a christmas rave. i jumped at the chance, as i had wanted to check it out since first learning we were going to berlin. what's a trip to berlin without the decadence? all i knew was that it was a place with interesting dance music, leather and pvc party goers and a malaise of sexual fantasy thrown over everything. how could i not want to check it out? after all isn't that one of the reasons i'm in europe? to check out everything i possibly can that either isn't allowed or frowned upon back home? so after a massive meal, some red wine and a stop off at a local pub for a beer or two we went. you don't go out in berlin until at least 1am and even then, the clubs don't get pumping til about 3-4am.

upon arrival you walk through the doors and enter a coat room. this is where we obviously put our coats, but others were taking off more than that. one guy stripped down to his underwear and then put on a santa coat. not done up, just hanging losely around his undie-covered body. a girl near him took off nearly all her clothes and strutted around in a leather bondage outfit, complete with arseless chaps. allthough i felt a little weird having all my clothes on and not having had at least fifteen animals die to give me said clothes. i felt alright once i got in there though. (which is an interesting notion in itself - feeling odd wearing clothes. how novel indeed!) other people had not taken the dress code too seriously either and were in civillian clothes as well. to tell you the truth though, if it was one of those places where you had to be naked or close to it to enter, wild horses could not have dragged me there. this pale and pasty body is not for public display. i may be in germany, but that does not mean my sensibilities and prudishness get thrown completely out the window.

inside the place resembled a pretty average dance bar. flouro decorations everywhere, couches and seats strewn all over the place. the only big diffrence in berlin, as opposed to frankfurt clubs, is there's never anyone at the door to the toilets demanding you pay to use the facilities. something which i get sick of very quickly. paricularly because i have yet to see a toilet that is pristine enough to warrant paying for the privilege of releaving your insides. although i have seen many that deserve to be crapped on, but that's a whole other kettle of fish. once inside the music on this night reminded me of the music they play in revolver. not the crazy dance once the sun comes up, but the stuff they play in the pillow room before everyone gets hearded into the pool room. although there is two rooms in kitkat (the other room's music was pretty similar to the first one's, just less places to sit), we stayed in the first.

i had two surreal moments in kitkat. the first was entertaining the fact that pot is legal in berlin and rolling a joint for all to see. it was very odd. i can remember sitting at a table and rolling a fat one when one of the barstaff walks over to clear the table. my first instinct was to hide it, which would have been stupid, given that even though the joint is hidden, the bag of pot is still directly in front of me. and besides, how does that old song go? 'you don't get caught if you don't act funny.' so i just continued to roll. the guy clearing tables just walks over, smiles at me and takes all the glasses off our table. of which there were a few, we were sharing tables with another group. a group it seems had more pot than a columbian drug lord. not only did they spark up constantly, but i swear to god they rolled the biggest joints i have ever seen. i just got high off their second hand smoke.

the second surrealism happened when i noticed what was to the side of the dancefloor. there was a bed set up with a massive sign saying 'fuck for forrest' on it. i'm not too sure what conservationism has to do with sexual intercourse, but if that's how they want to help, then at least they're doing something i suppose. it wasn't until about half-way through the night that i saw this piece of kitkat in action, but once it started it seemed to go on constantly. two girls making out and 'fooling around' while various members of the opposite sex stood around and pleasured themselves. not only did i see a guy in a miniskirt jerk off to these hippies sans clothes, but i also saw a guy with one arm only dressed in tight-fitting leather pants sit to the side and tweak his nipple. i remember wondering if the only reason he was doing that was that he needed help with his belt, but that's just mean.

this wasn't all i saw in kitkat, but it does give you the idea of the kind of christmas day that i had. it wasn't traditional by any means, but i had fun dancing around, drinking beer, smoking pot and being a total voyuer perve. i'm glad i went. the only thing that was slightly disappointing was that i was told that if it wasn't chritsmas there would have been more fetish stuff going on, but most of the fetishists were probably with their families enjoying the chirstmas break. but i did see a few of them. guys in nothing but jockstraps, girls in small miniskirts without underwear. i even saw one of these girls get fingered by a guy dressed as a woman.

my new-found love of hoodies

i have recently (read as the last six months) have begun to champion the hoodie as an item of clothing. (link is another stupid and pointless wikipedia entry, but for the uniformed you get what a hoodie is) previously i have hated and despised the things for years. they seemed so american and so common that i really had no time for them. not that i hated america, but i didn't see the point of an australian, or any other nationality, wearing something that had a great big USA stretching across the back or an american university that i haven't had the (dis)pleasure of attending. that coupled with the fact they started to become popular when this whole rap/hip hop explosion started, thanks to the likes of eminem and other such 'artists', i just didn't see the point of joining in with the masses to line up and get me mine.

now some time has passed, however, i am in a tumultuous love affair with them. from never wearing anything but jackets and jumpers, i am now the proud owner of four hoodies, a hooded jacket and an anorak (with fur hood, no less). my most recent acquisition being a hoodie that is reversible, black on one side, yellow on the other and sporting a neat zip up front. i found it in berlin on boxing day and it was 20% off! bargain! still with the euro conversion, it would be a modest buy in aust, but with 20% off and the temperature reaching a horrid -6 degrees at night, i thought it was a fair and reasonable purchase. the only reason i mention all this hoodie madness is to impart some wisdom to you all. if you ever venture out into the unknown world of northern europe, get yourselves a hoodie. you'll need it. not only does the weather here prompt ownership of one, but they look great under a leather jacket or pinstripe suit jacket. but don't you be stealing my style when i'm around or there'll be trouble. and please stay away from the jackets that have hoods sown into the top of them. you're only cheating yourselves on style. plus everyone can tell you're just a fashion tourist when you wear one. ie you look cheap and somewhat of a twat.

anyway, as pointless as this post is, that's all i want to say for now.
tchuss

reflections of berlin

as my last post states - i was in berlin. i was there for a total of ten nights, eleven days. i stayed at a friend of a friend's house just round the corner from yorkstrasse station and saw many a sight and had many an experience. the only thing i was a little disappointed with, was having no internet for the time i was there. how could i keep up my facebook friendships? how could i communicate with those back home without wasting all my handy (mobile) credit? (which i did anyway!) and how could i remember everything to let you, dear reader, know just what went down? the last one had me a little worried. you see berlin had the tendency to make me drink. not get drunk on ye olde gluhwein like one painful evening in heidelberg, but let's just say the beer and wine and scotch were plentiful and flowing a little too easily.

but anyway, here i am back home in heidelberg and starting this blog writing business again. now my first thought was to just purge everything on here and let you guys sort out the mess, but then i thought that would be unfair and i might be asking too much from a casual reader, so i scrapped that idea. my second was to write eleven entries and have a day for each, but that would be doing an injustice to places that really need more than just a few lines hurriedly written in my failing english. (you see, even though i am still yet to learn german or spanish properly, the effect of talking to non-english speakers constantly is starting to take away from my rather pompous and educated english.) so i've decided to just write and see what i feel like writing about when the words start flowing. i doubt i'll talk about everything to do with berlin (i still haven't talked about my beloved schloss or france!), but at least you'll get a good idea of what i experienced and what i'm up to. so here goes...

berlin is an odd city. i went in expecting a massive sprawling city with skyscrapers and crazy big city things going on everywhere. berlin is not one of those cities. at first i was kinda disappointed by this. that's what i liked about frankfurt. it had skyscrapers and still retained some of it's altstadt charm. i spent the first few days thinking, 'where's the city? are we in the middle? what's going on here?' now berlin has roughly the same population as melbourne, so i expected something similar, not in appearance, mind you, but at least in size vertically. it wasn't til a couple of days later that i figured it out. berlin isn't about the city, it's about the vibe, the small places and what you can find hidden away. this became only to apparent when alexis and i went out for the day by ourselves, and after going through the abysmal new jewish synagogue (i don't recommend it unless you really want to go), we found a large courtyard full of trees and shops and cafes near oranienstrasse. it was beautiful to just stumble across this piece of tranquility amongst the urban sprawl that is the graffiti-soaked berlin main strasses. this seems to sum up berlin perfectly. it's an ugly bitch with nothing much on the outside but 'urban art' to interest you, but dig deeper and you'll find the city's real heart. and it has got heart, you just need to get past the gruff german exterior to find it. everything seems cold (literally and metaphysically, -6 degrees is a killer), but there really is a great liberal atmosphere that makes you think that you could do anything and no one would bat an eyelid or even care. i became very aware of this after spending new year's eve in berghain, but that's a story for another day.

by the end of my time in berlin i had grown to love it. i stopped wondering where the city was and starting taking it for what it was. however i still don't agree with berliners calling everything alternative underground. if your club has advertising everywhere on the streets and it's a very well known and sought after place to get into, it is not underground. that's called successful. at least where i come from it is. it's like calling revolver underground. it's not, it's just alternative. but when does alternative become the norm? is it when you get so popular you can turn people away for no reason at all? or there's an hour long wait in a que just get in? but that's beside the point and not really what i wanted to talk about here.

berlin is now one of my favourite cities, however i don't think i'd want to live there. it's way too depressing and cold, and just like that ugly bitch with a heart of gold, sure you want to be friends, but do you really want to see them everyday? nope, melbourne is still my one and only true love. that city has left a permanent mark in my heart and it wont go away by cheating on it with a euro substitute. however, if heidelberg was the size of melbourne i might be persuaded to take a german lover. just don't tell dear old melbs i said that.