prince albert.

I've been looking for free WiFi all day that didn't involve buying a caffeinated beverage, and finally I found a place called Albert's on Karl-Marx-Allee that hooked a brother up. The above is not a picture of it. This is:

I can't believe I've only been here a week, it feels like forever, and frankly I'm ready to come home. For a lot of reasons. I've had a totally great week, but as Rusty Cuyler would say, "Now's the time!" I miss my best friend. I miss vegetables. I miss my bike. I miss my bed. I miss clothes that are much cleaner than the ones I'm having to choose from every morning. I'm out of money. Ect. Ect. Ect.

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I was having a bit of deja vu when I wrote most of this. I was sitting at Prater again, like I was yesterday, in the same spot, doing the same thing, at about exactly the same time of day. My morning, however, was thankfully completely different.

I started with deja vu as well, due to poor long-range planning. If I'd combined yesterday and today more intelligently, I could have killed many more birds with my two giant dangling stones.

So today I was heading down to Checkpoint Charlie as soon as I left the house. My plan was to have a bit of phở for a healthy-ish and quasi-cleansing lunch at a place called Viet Bowl:

This was not the best phở I've ever had, in fact, I'm pretty sure we round-eyes can make more authentic phở than this. But when assessed as a light and brothy beef soup with lots of herbs and ginger, it wasn't bad at all (really, what is bad when served with a bottle of sriracha), and it was the right decision for lunch today.

The plan continued with a walk northwest up to the Holocaust memorial. In short: interesting, in that it made me carefully consider what kind of memorial would really be appropriate enough, what kind of scale would something have to have, etc. This felt a bit on the underachieving side, but was physically kind of beautiful.

There are almost 3,000 of these variously-sized (bronze?) slabs, ranging from like half a meter high to say three meters high. The first picture is taken from outside the arrangement, but then you can walk down into them, which is where the second picture is taken from.

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This issue of scale brings up another Berlin characteristic: it's too big to capture on my little camera. Like Rome, or Paris, or New York, the size of things is grand and impressive, and there's very little an extremely amateur photographer like myself can do to convey this feeling of being towered over.

Speaking of grand and impressive, this is the Krakauer (grilled Polish sausage) I just ordered here at Prater for an early dinner. This...this is my last sausage. And it was a good one...talk about snap, this one had it.

From the Holocaust memorial, the plan went awry. On paper, it went like this: get the hell out of the touristy area as quickly as possible because it was robbing me of my will to live. The only definite antidote that I knew of was Prenzlauer Berg, but I've already been there a few times this trip, revisiting places from our 2004 Berlin trip like Schwarzsauer and Frida Kahlo. So I thought I'd aim for the north end of P-Berg and then slowly make my way down southeast through Friedrichshain, where I'm supposed to be at 7pm.

My problem was, I aimed too high, and walked for a good 90 minutes though the equivalent of Admiral de Ruyterweg (for non-Amsterdammers...imagine an endlessly repeating succession of kebab stands, electronics shops, keymakers, dry cleaners, Internet cafes, pedestrian bakeries (meaning run-of-the-mill, not baked pedestrians, you knew that), drugstores, and "everything for 1 euro" places). It turns out that not all of Berlin is cool. Which was useful to see firsthand, I might not have believed it as thoroughly as I do now if I hadn't walked it myself.

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