July 2010
9 posts
3 tags
A Living Fossil
This is a South American Lungfish. To the untrained eye it might resemble an eel, but make no mistake, you’re looking at a living fossil. These guys have been around since the dinosaurs. Lungfish - named after the lungs that enable them to breathe air - might not have built great civilisations or lead interesting social lives, but they have successfully been failing to do this for the last...
2 tags
The Natural History Museum/ Das Museum für...
Today I finally managed to make it to the Natural History Museum. It has been too hot until now, and the building, like many others in Berlin, has no air conditioning. It was already quite toasty inside, and I did not want to wander into the “Evolution in Action” room to encounter a sign reading “You’re not it. All the successfully evolving Berliners are at the...
4 tags
Why is Berlin special?
Why is Berlin special? Certainly not for its beauty or its state of preservation. Berlin is fascinating rather, as a city of bold gestures and startling incongruities, of ferment and destruction. It is a city whose buildings, ruins, and voids groan under the burden of painful memories […] The concentration of troubling memories, physical destruction, and renewal has made Berliners, however...
3 tags
If the historical form of the city is to provide the standard, which of the many Berlin pasts is meant? Baroque or classical Berlin, Berlin from the time of unification or the chaotic Twenties, to say nothing of the insane building plans of the Nazi years?
Peter Schneider
4 tags
A Break from Berlin
As much as I have come to like my current host city, I need a break. Dr Johnson once famously - and a tad optimistically - claimed that if a man is tired of London, he’s tired of life. I’m tired of graffiti, which means I must be tired of Berlin. Actually I’m tired of people taking pictures of graffiti as if they were spontaneous acts of anarchy, and not a compulsory element of the urban...
4 tags
Counterculture
The fight for freedom is always easier than the practice of freedom
- Matjia Beckovic
A couple of days ago I was sitting in one of the city’s countless alternative cafes trying to cool myself down with copious amounts of chilled alcohol. The establishment, opposite a sushi bar and an overpriced organic supermarket, was run as a collective and prided itself on its left-leaning credentials....
6 tags
Firemen and Hot Weather Berlin Style
Sunday saw temperatures rising to 37º (close to 100 Fahrenheit). Those of us who hadn’t escaped to the lakes had no other option but to seek refuge in the shade, lay on our backs and gasp like an asthmatic pug. Even my deodorant, it seems, had left for cooler climes. We were walking back from Frühstück, hopping from shade to shade like a couple of sweaty ninjas, when we noticed a sudden shower...
6 tags
You know you’re in Prenzlauer Berg/Mitte…
When you spot a guy with the ubiquitous plastic rimmed frames and a t-shirt that proudly reads “Helvetica Neue”. Damn right, because Helvetica is for plebs, right? That is for people who still have an iPhone 3GS. Now, if you were really clever you would’ve had it printed in Arial. Bet you didn’t think of that! Except you probably wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart. I assume...
7 tags
The Lakes
In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer quite the other way I have to go to bed by day.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
Summer is finally here and Berliners celebrate this highly anticipated arrival by going to the lakes, where they commune with nature as only an urbanite can. Surrounded by other fellow seekers of the bucolic, beer in hand, they will once more reach...
