It’s two in the afternoon, and it’s an absolutely wonderful day outside in Berlin, 79 degrees and sunny.  And of course, I’m sitting inside, looking out the window and listening to the traffic at Potsdamer Platz. But I did walk about six miles today, so I don’t feel too bad about it.

We had a late flight last night from Nuremberg to Berlin, which meant we had a full day to kill in the old city. We checked in our bags and wandered around, going to the design museum and the national museum. The design museum was pretty cool, one of those all-white modern things with high ceilings, no right angles, and twisty spiral staircases that look like something out of a Star Wars movie. The national museum was oddly Nazi-free, and focused a lot on ancient history, giant tombstones from the 16th century, Gutenberg bibles, and lots of the Jesus, in the form of esoteric wood carvings and gold statues and whatnot.  Both were great museums, but I’m now pretty museum-ed out, and don’t feel like seeing much here.

We got into town late, and caught a cab with an interesting cab driver.  Oh, I should mention the strangest cab ride I’ve had in a while — this was in Nuremberg, and we were going to a dinner, and the cab had a horn in the back seat.  It wasn’t a French horn, but rather what I think is called a “natural horn”, although of course he called it by some German name that was 216 characters long.  I asked him about the horn, just curious if by some coincidence it was made by Conn or Selmer or someone else in Elkhart.  He asked if we wanted to hear him play, and then popped in a CD of what sounded like some Germanic orchestral march music, and then whipped out a harmonica and started playing along the part, holding the metal instrument with one hand while driving on this winding cobblestone road with the other hand.  Very weird.

Anyway, last night’s cabbie was a younger Muslim guy, maybe a college student, and very clean-cut and sort of preppy looking.  He had the nice model of Mercedes cab (it’s funny that the US only gets the high-end M-B cars, whereas they make a whole range of cars here, and you see many total piece of shit Mercedes vehicles, like little diesel econoboxes that are closer to my Yaris than a luxury ride.) and we drove from Teigel with the moonroof open and a cool breeze from the city night filtering into the back seat.  You could immediately tell we were no longer in this ancient castle city, as we cruised on the ultra-modern autobahn and saw the lights of the big city.

He started asking us about where we were from, and we mentioned California, and he said “the Dr. Dre California?”  When we said we were from San Francisco, he asked us if that was where all the gays lived; he didn’t say it in a negative tone, just curious.  We said yes, and mentioned that Silicon Valley is there, too.  The talk went to politics, and Sarah asked him his opinion on Obama, and he said that many people don’t see him as much different than George Bush, which was interesting.  His main thing was that Obama continued what he called the “holocaust” against Muslims with Guantanamo and the various wars, which was a different take than I was used to hearing.  I mentioned that the President was only a third of the national government, and although Obama promised to stop these things, he was largely powerless to do so.  He immediately started asking about the Supreme Court and I thought it was interesting that a German knows all of this stuff about our government, but if you mentioned Angela Merkel to an American, there’s a 99% chance they’d ask what TV show she was on.

We’re staying in a Hyatt near Potsdamer Platz, and I got a slow start today, mostly because of fighting with the hotel WiFi and my Mac.  I’ve had astonishingly bad luck with internet connectivity on this trip, and it seems most hotels have simply handed over their WiFi to a major vendor who then gouges you for something like 3 to 5 Euros per hour for a spotty WiFi connection.  When I fired up my iPhone to check out the prices on 3G, it turns out that international roaming charges are something like $1.50 a minute voice and $20 per megabyte, meaning there’s no way in hell I’ll take my phone out of airplane mode.  I’m currently paying $18/day for wired Internet in the room, and doing internet sharing to feed the other wireless iDevices.  If I came back again, I’d probably look into getting some MiFi adapter that supports a pay-as-you-go account.  Domestically, Virgin Mobile supports a $99 device with a really cheap pay-as-you-go data plan, but it’s CDMA and mostly useless in Europe.  I think there are cheap GSM solutions, but I don’t know which provider you’d use on this end.  The other option would be an international iPhone plan from AT&T that would enable tethering, but the two problems with that are that I don’t travel overseas enough to justify the international plan, and if I switched to a plan that enabled tethering, I’d lose the grandfathered-in unlimited data plan I have now.

So I spent the day walking around the city.  I hit all of the usuals: Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, Checkpoint Charlie, the Holocaust Memorial, and a decent excursion into what used to be East Berlin.  All through the city, there is a dark brick line on the ground that traces the old path of the Berlin Wall, and in a few specific places, there are pieces of the concrete wall left behind for tourists to snapshot.  There’s actually pieces of the Berlin Wall all over the place; every shop hawking post cards and t-shirts has chunks of concrete sealed in lucite or on keychains, all purporting to be pieces of the original barrier built in 1961 to divide the city.  There are concrete blocks in cafes, outside of museums, next to currywurst stands, on sidewalks, and in parks.  And back in the states, it seems like every military museum has their own spray-painted chunk of the barrier, as if it somehow invokes the ghost of Reagan in a major “up yours, commies”.  All it gets from me is a major eye roll, like when the same museum has a foot-long section of “WTC steel” which may or may not be a piece of rebar from Home Depot.

There’s a strange park next to this cluster of buildings by our hotel, this chunk of corporate glass-and-chrome towers housing Daimler, Sony, Deutsche Bank, and other businesses.  This huge strip of green was full of businesspeople eating lunches, and I sat on a park bench and worked for a bit while the cleaning people went over our room.  I’ve got this next book, still untitled, sitting on my Kindle, and I’ve been combing through it for errors.  It felt nice to sit outside this business park and chip away at it while a gentle wind blew past.  I’ve still got a ton of work to go on this, so I need to get back to it, but it’s a great day to do it.

So I’ve got tonight, then tomorrow we have a dinner at the Reichstag, and then the big fun flight from Berlin to SFO.  We leave Berlin at three and get home at eight, but that’s really thirteen hours.  And then I work on Thursday, which should be interesting.

It’s my second-to-last day in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg, and it’s something like seventy degrees outside, but I’m in the hotel, looking out a huge window at the sun, listening to birds chirp, and editing a book I hope to get published by June, although I just realized that’s in eleven days, so given that the book doesn’t even have a title yet, I should start saying “by summer”.

I’m staying in the old part of town, which is all inside a giant set of castle walls, the kinds of things with bricks like the kind they build pyramids out of, with parapets and archer slits and giant arches and the whole nine.  If I was really into fantasy and Tolkein, this would be far more interesting, as would the 17 medieval-looking churches in the area.  It is pretty stuff to photograph, but when my mind wanders, I’m not thinking dragons and elves.  I’m mostly wondering what got destroyed by allied bombing, what got repaired, and what’s brand new, or at least post-1945.  Sometimes, it’s very obvious; you can see a building that’s totally new, and its neighboring buildings are new from the second floor on up, and it’s obvious a bomb hit right in the middle of them.

I’ve done a lot of walking. On our first day here, I walked to the Nazi parade grounds, which is where Triumph of the Will was filmed and all of those huge party rallies were held in the thirties.  A good chunk of it is now apartments, but they kept the remains of the never-finished congress hall and turned it into a museum.  It’s all in German, but you can get one of those English headphone things.  It’s fairly creepy, and focuses on trying to explain how the propaganda took hold in the country, and then how the Nuremberg trials happened after the war.  There was plenty of creepy Nazi stuff, and endless irony that the hall where the great Nazi congresses were to meet is now largely used as a storage facility.

Nuremberg isn’t a tourist destination, and English isn’t as prevalent as it was in Berlin.  The place also has a small-town feel.  It actually reminds me a lot of when I visited Stratford, Ontario back in high school, I guess because of all of the old-looking architecture and the fact that a lot of the town’s just working and doing whatever instead of busking tourists.

Even though the city isn’t huge - somewhere around the size of Oklahoma City - it does have a full underground subway system.  I bought a day pass for just under 5 Euros yesterday and took a quick trip around the U-Bahn.  It’s Germany’s newest train system, and has 46 underground stations.  Like all German trains, it’s ridiculously clean and incredibly sedate and orderly.  And like other German systems, the ticketing is practically on the honor system; there are no turnstiles or gates.  You’re expected to purchase a paper ticket when you use the system, but nobody was checking them and no machine stopped you from just walking downstairs and onto a train.  Maybe the cops spot-check people, but I didn’t see this happening.  I think I gave some train system ratings on a 1 to 10 scale system, and the U-Bahn here probably rates in the low 9’s, with Berlin being a high 9, the main difference being that the Berlin system will tell you when the next train is coming.

Lots of diesel cars and VWs here, which made me start thinking about Summer Rainduring yesterday’s walk. That book starts on the Friday before Mother’s Day in 1992, meaning we just passed the 20-year mark, which made me think way too much about it. It’s strange to wonder if twenty years ago I’d ever imagine myself 4500 miles away in Europe.  It’s strange to think about it even now.

Anyway, this book awaits.  There’s some kind of freaky festival tonight, the blue night festival, and nobody can seem to explain it to me.  When I ask someone, the explanation usually goes something like “there is this, how you say, acrobats, and in town square, there is, you know, man running, and with blue light on the buildings, you know?” which leaves me even more confused.  We fly to Berlin tomorrow at 8

at night, and then have three days until we return to SFO, at which time my sleep schedule will be completely fucked.  I’m hoping for an interesting evening with these blue lights or whatever it is.

I’m now in Nuremberg, after a rough travel day yesterday. Here’s a general brain dump in bulleted list format on my short stay in London:

• I thought London would be a lot like New York, except darker.  I actually liked London more than Manhattan for a few reasons:
  • It isn’t as dense or vertically packed, or at least didn’t seem like it to me.
  • Many of the buildings are pretty new, like New York, but the old buildings are ancient.  I don’t know how any of them survived the blitz, or if they were partially knocked out and then repaired, but there’s some impressive architecture to be seen.
  • There’s a lot more green in the city, and some pretty astounding parks.
  • The city seemed much cleaner. Part of this could be some massive restoration program prior to the Olympics, but I saw nowhere near as much graffiti or general deterioration as Manhattan.
  • Cars are all but banned in the city.  They are allowed, but you need some kind of special “green” pass, meaning that aside from taxis and delivery vehicles, the only cars I saw belonged to the ultra-rich.
  • There seemed to be a lot more money.  Part of that could have been where we were staying, but I saw so many people driving super-high-end cars.  I remember walking down a street, and every single car I passed had a six-figure (in dollars) price tag.  And this was parked on a public street.  When’s the last time you’ve seen someone park a Ferrari on the street in New York?
  • I didn’t hear a car alarm the entire time I was there.
• That said, the city was insanely expensive.  I didn’t notice this at first, because I was like “hey, entrees are only like twenty bucks here!” but that was twenty pounds, or like $32.
• I found London insanely polite.  My experience in New York was always that people were insanely impolite, but that was the price of living in a big city.  For example, when I was in New York and riding the subway on crutches, if I asked someone for a seat, the typical response was “go fuck yourself”.  In London, the Underground gives out buttons that pregnant women can wear so that others will give up their seats for them.
• The food was generally pretty good.  Both Yelp and OpenTable are fully operational there, so we managed to get into some decent restaurants.  I did not have fish and chips while I was there, which is a shame, but I did have pretty decent Indian food twice.
• I saw the changing of the royal guard at Buckingham, and I totally don’t understand any of the procedure, but found it interesting.  Of course, I don’t pay taxes there, so maybe I would have a different opinion of the large amount of overhead needed for tradition.
• I went to the Imperial War Museum, which was decent, but not massive.  The big takeaway there was that I know so little about post-WW2 British military history.  The general collection was divided into WW1, WW2, and post-WW2.  I was trying to think of what that entailed: Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan, …?  Turns out they have been in a few dozen military actions - basically, every time another bit of decolonization happened, there was another “war” or whatever you want to call it.  (“Emergency”?  “Conflict”?)  There’s also the Northern Ireland business.  Bottom line, I have a lot of reading to do.
• We went to the Tate Modern and saw their Damien Hirst exhibit, which was pretty interesting.  That twelve-million dollar shark was there, floating in formaldehyde, as were the split-in-half cow and calf, the spin paintings, and the butterfly room.  The Tate Modern itself is pretty impressive - it used to be a power plant, and looks like one of those gigantic turbine facilities that some commando team has to blow up in a World War 2 movie.
• 288 photos.  I’ll try to weed through them and post them to flickr when I have a real internet connection, which might not be until after I return.

And now I must go write.  I walked ten miles today, all of that before lunch, so I have more stories to tell, probably in another annoying bulleted list.  Stay tuned.

When I moved to Oakland in 2009, I rented a storage locker in this old warehouse that always reminds me of that scene at the end of Indiana Jones, and has the smell of a place where the Ark of the Covenant is probably packed away and forgotten. I’d been shuffling around boxes of stuff I didn’t use on a daily basis but couldn’t just throw out, and we moved into our first loft, I needed to stash this stuff somewhere.

Since high school, I’ve moved to Bloomington, back to Elkhart, to Bloomington again, back to Elkhart for a summer, back to Bloomington, to Seattle, to Washington Heights in Manhattan, to Astoria, Queens, to the Lower East Side, to Denver, to LA, to South San Francisco, and then to Oakland. Each time, I accumulated more zines and more books and more papers, and then sold books and donated CDs and junked electronics. Every once in a while, I wonder if I still have a copy of XYZ or if I ever kept this and that magazine or printout. While I like our attempt at an ultra-sleek open-concept loft, I also liked when I would run into one of these questions at ten at night and could just go to The Pile Of Boxes and start digging, rather than find an opportunity to drive over to the storage place, climb four flights of rickety stairs, and play the reverse-Tetris game of pulling things out of this tiny four by eight room.

Today I went after one main thing, and decided to go stem to stern through the unit to confirm or deny a few other things.  This is not a complete inventory, but here’s what I found:

1. The George Foreman grill.  (The stated goal.)
2. An original issue Darth Vader Collector’s Case, in “well-played” condition, containing about two dozen figures, ranging in condition from fair to “buried in back yard for an entire Indiana winter”.
3. A large box of photos with no negatives which have never been scanned, ranging from childhood pictures to a bunch of Polaroids I took on my cross-country trip in 1999.
4. A wooden box I made in junior high, containing a bunch of pin-on buttons that were at one time pinned to the collars of various jackets, most of them being of Iron Maiden.
5. A folder full of every story and poem I wrote in the 7th and 8th grade.
6. A mimeograph of a typed script for a talent show I co-MCed in the sixth grade.
7. A certificate from the Daughters of the American Revolution awarded me for some unknown history project in 1983.
8. A set of six Western Digital EIDE hard drives, ranging in size from 6 to 160 GB.
9. A printer paper box full of zines, including all of the masters for Xenocide 1-5 and Air in the Paragraph Line 1-9.
10. This picture:

That is all.

I did something the other day I haven’t done since July of 09.  I rode my bike.  Not a lot, maybe a mile or so around the neighborhood, a quick shakedown cruise after wiping off three years of junk from the frame and hitting the chain with some oil.  I’ve been away from the little Dahon because my last bike ride resulted in a broken arm.  And of course, we managed to close on our house a couple of days later, which meant I got to sign my name 40,000 times with a broken arm, which I’d recommend about as much as spending six or seven hours in the Oakland hospital ER.

Anyway, the bike ride is part of the latest attempt to get my shit straight with fitness.  After this latest health scare that wasn’t, I took stock in my situation, and things have been slowly slacking off since I started working from home, and the numbers at the scale have been getting progressively worse.  I haven’t had to run out and buy elastic-band maternity pants, but my absolute lowest weight during Weight Watchers was 168 at the start of 2009, and I’m currently sitting at 183.  Compared to the 250 or so I was at back in New York, that’s still not bad, but I wouldn’t mind getting back into the 170s.

So part of this new quest has been getting a Fitbit, which is a tiny little thing you clip on your belt or pocket.  It has an accelerometer in it, and works as a pedometer, recording every step you take, as well as recording how many flights of stairs you climb.  This info is beamed back to your computer wirelessly, and then back up to the mothership, where a freaky web 2.0 site enables you to track other stuff, like food, exercise, and all that jazz.  You can also wear the tracker to bed and it will record your sleep time and efficiency, graphing the number of times the cats wake me up in the middle of the night.  If this thing also tracked the number of words I wrote and the amount of money I spent every day at Amazon, it would pretty much be a total solution.

The fitbit solution is interesting, because it quantifies everything.  The only reason I ever went from 250 to 170 was from being held accountable for every piece of food I shove in my piehole, but when you make something very quantitative, it’s easier for the geek in me to deal with the whole thing.  It’s like sitting at a Jira bug tracker and seeing the number of defects that have to be resolved before a ship date, and not just some vague emotional conquest that may or may not be working.  Fitbit also heavily gamifies the whole thing, awarding badges for passing certain goals, and enabling you to add friends and compete with others.

The first thing I learned is that I walk a pathetic amount during the average work day.  The arbitrary goal is 10,000 steps a day, and unless I do anything out of the ordinary, I’ll average around a thousand.  Add in a trip to the grocery store, some trips to the dumpster, and another errand or two, and that goes up a couple of thousand. But I’m not burning enough, and I’ve been making more of an effort to get off my ass and go walking after lunch or after work.

The other thing is that my eating has drifted heavily from the WW regimen, and I need to get that shit straight.  One of the neat things about the Fitbit is that if you’re entering your food, it’s keeping track of your calories in and calories out.  So you can set a goal of how many more calories you want to burn than consume, and at any given point in the day, you can see if you’re eating too much and need to run around the block a few times, or if you’re starving yourself and you need to go eat something.

I’m trying to heavily change what I eat, not eating processed stuff and eating smaller meals through the day.  I work ten feet from my kitchen, so I don’t have any excuses about the inability to prep food.  The hard part right now is retraining myself to know what I can eat and what I can’t.  I went through this before, because left to my own devices, I’ll just eat ten thousand calories of carbs and fat, and I know that the one thing that keeps me mentally together is protein consumption through the day.  So there’s a learning curve on figuring out the routine.

Oh shit, I just found out you can track ANYTHING on this site, and add your own custom trackers.  So I just added one for writing, to track words written a day.  This should be interesting.