2005-02-06 - 11:34 p.m.

one thing i have learned staying here (berlin) on my own is the differences between english and german. for one, i'm typing this on a german language keyboard, and the german language has more 'z's than 'y's. thus the 'normal' positions are reversed on the keyboard. since my main email address is at yahoo, you can only imagine the minutes i've wasted. another problem is that there are no contractions in german, hence there is an umlauted A where the ' ought to be. and i type # every time i mean to type ' . of course that is just the beginning.

i don't speak german, never took it in school. mom bullied me into taking spanish instead, a very sensible choice since i grew up about 100 miles from mexico. i went on to study hebrew, mandarin, some arabic. no germanic or scandinavian or even slavic languages. well, except english, my mother tongue, which is of course a germanic language. but that makes it even more confusing in some ways. because a surface-listen leads me to believe everyone is just speaking english with a really weird accent. which i suppose from a certain drunken perspective could actually be true.

in any case, my band mate and her travelling companion have been forced to hole up with the flu. i'm left to explore the cracks and crevices by my own self. being in a foreign city alone is kind of amazing, very weird, and a lot like therapy. so far i've heard german drinking songs sung on the underground, shopped for trashy vinyl in a fleamarket in the former east berlin, learned several new cocktail recipes, gotten lost in potsdamer platz, taken dozens of photos, been the subject of several photographs myself, overslept several times, been kept awake by snoring even more times, done my laundry while having a beer, eaten way too much meat, and made friends with every turkish newagent and d�ner cook in eastern kreuzsberg. tonight i went to my new favorite bar, Mysliwska; favored primarily for its friendly bar staff, cheap prices, proximity to my hostel, and eerie approximation of my favorite watering hole on the southside.

i've also plowed through four english language novels and am started on a fifth. the last three were pure trash. weirdly, i think those are the only novels i've read in over a year. and i used to go so gooey over fiction, then when i moved to the current loft, nothing. it's amazing how travel strips everything down to its essentials. i feel as if i had to get away from home just to reaaffirm what i really think is important.

but enough of this introspection. it must be the frigid cold and the cheap beer and the teutonic night but i've turned downright psychoanalytic the last coupla days. the expatriot is taking me vinyl shopping tomorrow and i'm so excited i wonder if i will be able to sleep.