I enjoyed this stirring re-enactment of the events of November 10, 1989: Notice how there’s a Hasselhoff-ian figure atop the mobile platform thing, and how lights start going on and off as he performs once the Wall falls. Nice touch. This atones for the minor historical inaccuracy my wife pointed out: that the Wall actually [...]

At the end of December, our initial six-month sublet here in Berlin ran out, so we packed up our stuff and went back to Czech for the holidays. Then, a few days into 2012, we drove back from Prague and — boing— straight into our new flat, located in a section of Berlin’s Schöneberg neighborhood known [...]

• This is my first winter in Berlin… and, man, it gets dark early here. We’re already down to 4:30pm daylight curfew and there’s still a month to go to the solstice. I’m about ready to curl up in the solarium with a few bottles of vodka for the next few months. • I caught [...]

Two recent sightings from opposite poles of Berlin’s cultural zeitgeist: 1. Not-So-Little Cleveland Indian Last week, I was biking home from a basketball game in early evening and ran into this, looming over Alexanderplatz: What? Aha, it turns out that this is art— an installation by French media artist Cyprien Gaillard, exploring the legacy and [...]

[Note: this post was originally written for another Mission-oriented blog, hence the direct references to San Francisco audience] Raising a child is a breeze in Berlin thanks to the wide availability of kid-friendly beer gardens. (Note: a ‘child’ is a small human who has not yet achieved adult stature— I was a little unclear on [...]

In case you’ve been reading along and worrying about whether I’ve found a workspace here… fear not, it’s been taken care of. I’m currently based out of the Berlin game studio Kunst-Stoff, where I sit at a makeshift desk set up in the office kitchen, pumping out my mellow blend of adult-contemporary design. Kunst-stoff (the [...]

I’m so up on being in Berlin right now that it’s annoying even to have to hear myself thinking about it. Yesterday when I started biking home from my workspace, the trip began with me standing on a sidewalk waiting to hop into an adjacent bike lane that was so packed with bicycling Berliners that it [...]

So far, during our first week in Berlin, my wife and I have agreed to a system whereby I’m allowed one comment per day along the lines of ‘Berlin awesome! / Prague sucks!’ so that I don’t drive her crazy by continually beating the same conversational drum throughout the day (plus, you know, denigrating her [...]

So, as intimated in last post (and a few other ones), we’re taking the leap and moving to Berlin in beginning of June. The plan is to try it out for six months, see how it goes, and then revaluate towards the end of the year. The short version of the story is that you [...]