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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   downtime in Berlin
Monday, September 16 2024

location: room 305, Klassik Hotel, Berlin Germany

It was relatively quiet in our room overnight, with the silence only occasionally disrupted by passing emergency vehicles and a few rowdy drunks (at least one of whom was communicating in Spanish). Evidently the techno club at that corner does not operate on Sunday nights. Later this morning after an energy drink kiosk folded up and went away, I could train my camera on the source of all that noise Friday and Saturday night. This morning it looked like a depopulated homeless camp with a few pigeons bathing in a puddle, but apparently it's an outdoor electronic dance music venue called the Suicide Club.

Gretchen likes to maximize her experiences in life, feeling that going out and doing things is the way to do that. I accompany her for some of that as part of my obligations as a spouse. But eventually it gets exhausting. I need my downtime, and when I'm on vacation, I occasionally need a vacation from my vacation. Today was a day of doing that. So while Gretchen was using both commuter rail and her rented bicycle to travel all the way to the west end of Berlin to check out the Käthe Kollwitz Museum and then eat some amazing Vietnamese food, I stayed back in the room and noodled around on my computer. I was still tweaking how the timespan dropdowns affected the date dropdowns when paging through graphical data in my ESP-8266 Remote system. The specific feature I was adding was one that, when the timespan was changed, would switch to whatever datetime was closest in the new timespan to the current datetime in the old timespan. So if we're on September 2nd and timespan is day-length and I change the timespan to week-length, then the datetime should switch to September 1st, which is a Sunday. That gives a sense of what I'm talking about, although in my system the days, weeks, months, and years are divided into pieces starting from the day you're on. So a year-long timespan viewed today shows graphical data beginning on September 16th, 20023. And a month-long span begins on August 16th, 2024.
Since I was out of all the alcohol I'd been carrying (most of which I'd taken with me from Hurley back in early September), I didn't have any to recreationally drink, one of the things I like to do on my down days. This was what eventually led me to go out onto the streets of the neighborhood. Had I wanted to just get some alcohol, I could've just gone to the drinks store on the corner of the same block as the the Hotel Klassik is on. But I decided I wanted to check out the neighborhood a little more expansively, doing it at my pace. It's a totally different experience from doing it with Gretchen. Best of all, she wouldn't be rolling her eyes at my alcoholism as I figured out what booze to buy.
I went an additional block eastward on Revaler Str., which, looking at the map, I see just got me to the corner of a block that was diagonally bisected by Libauer Str. I then went north to Grünberger Str. and then over to Bundesstraße and back southward towards Hotel Klassik. It was on Bundesstraße that I finally got up the necessary motivation to go into a "drinks" store and buy some booze. Such stores mostly sell wine and beer (and also things like chips and cigarettes, which is why I think the store Gretchen referred to two days ago as a "bodega" was actually a drinks store). But they also sell booze, with an emphasis on Jagermeister, since it's a local thing and all the visiting backwards-baseball-cap-wearing American bros and their blond-ponytail girlfriends want that. It takes more effort to find things like gin and vodka. They're there, but much of the featured stuff tends to be expensive. I'deally there would've been a cheap 750 mL bottle of rotgut Polish vodka. When I couldn't find any bottles that size cheaper than 20 euros, I decided to get smaller bottles. They don't sell nice flask-sized bottles, so I had to end up buying three little 100 mL bottle. (That is the upper limit of the bottle size allowed on airplanes, and it was just a matter of time before liquor companies figured that out.) Two of the bottles were some sort of whiskey and one was a vodka, and the total came to a little over ten euros. I put them all awkwardly in my pockets and hurried on down the street. As I passed the goth clothing store Mystica, an older woman dressed in a cheap-looking black velvet dress was just arriving to open the store. Her hair was dyed jet-black, but yellowish roots were showing on the top of her head. Some looks work well with aging, but I don't think goth is one of them.
Back at the hotel, the cleaning lady had yet to clean the room, and that was something Gretchen had said I should let happen. I would've been happy to just stay in the room and not have it cleaned, and I was little resentful that, in telling me to have the room cleaned, that Gretchen was reaching across time and space and controlling my down day. But keeping her happy is important, so I grabbed my laptop, Gretchen's two day old leftover kabab sandwich, and a cup of tea, added some of the whiskey I'd just bought to that, and went down into the dining area of the first floor near the checkout desk. It still stunk down there like cigarettes, and near the kitchen that unpleasant odor was joined by a smell I would describe as "ancient grease trap." But there was a table I could work on and the WiFi was good, so I opened up my laptop and continued working on the software issue described above. At one point the bitchy woman working checkout (the one who'd charged me for a cup yesterday) came over and asked if I wanted coffee, and I told her "I'm good."
When I returned to the room, I found that it had been cleaned, meaning I could relax in it once more. I even took a nice hot shower. But then I checked my messages and Gretchen had written to say that she was at an all-vegan donut shop just up the street but that she only had cash and they only accepted credit cards. She wanted to know if I could come and bring my wallet. Again my down day was being interfered with! But I put my clothes on, climbed on the rental bike, and met her at Brammibal's Donuts. I didn't want any donuts, but while Gretchen was buying those, I had her put in an order for an oat milk cappuccino. When Gretchen got the donuts, she launched into a whole new register of effusiveness about how amazing they were, and I was in no mood for it whatsoever. I put a cork on these feelings, but by the time we'd returned our bikes to the biked shop and returned to our hotel room, Gretchen could sense that I was not in a good mood. But I recovered after just a little more not running around in the room.

In the very early evening, Gretchen and I caught the commuter rail train near the hotel and rode it in a northwestward arc about three miles to an all-vegan traditional German restaurant where she'd made a reservation. Tonight was "schnitzel night" and Gretchen was eager to eat some all-vegan schnizel. As always, we rode the train for free, and it gave us view of a part of Berlin we hadn't yet seen. There is, for example, an apartment complex with enormous colored silhouettes of geckos stenciled on the front of it.
When we entered Försters, it had a bit of a cheese smell to it that to me was mildly unpleasant, though that's a common thing in restaurants. There weren't many people there, so it seemed like we'd come at good time (it was only about 5:30pm). A young man with an easy smile came over to give us menus. But then he promptly forgot about us for the next twenty minutes. An older woman showed up while we waited, went behind the bar, made herself some sort of coffee drink, and then went out to outside table to drink it while smoking a little brown cigarette. We wondered if this was maybe the owner of the restaurant and the young man was her nepo-hire. Eventually the young man took our order, but then Gretchen watched him and it took forever for him to key it into the computer so the kitchen would be aware of it. Every time he came over to our table, I could smell his armpits. It was the smell of a teeshirt that has been worn for days, and it's a smell I know well (his body odor fairly closely resembled my own). Once the food was in the system, it came out pretty quickly and was very good, suggesting there might not be any nepo-hires back in the kitchen. Gretchen had ordered the schnitzel, of course, but I'd ordered a special menu item that spoke to me: linguine with chanterelles. We also each drank a glass of fairly good red wine.
After that meal, Gretchen wanted to do some walking. So we ended up walking something like two thirds of the way back to the hotel along the rail line, knowing we could get on that at any point. I eventually was tired of walking and decided we should get on it only about three stops before our next destination.
That next destination was an all-vegan shop selling a confection known as a "chimney." It's a kind of coiled pastry that is then filled with icecream. I'd just eaten a big meal and had no interest in such things, but again, Gretchen needed to have her experiences. So I had Gretchen order me another cappuccino while we waited for her chimney to be manufactured. While waiting for that, I was sitting in a booth whose seat was so far above the floor that my feet couldn't reach anywhere near it as I sat, and it was of a piece with the general misery I feel when I've got a gut full of food and just want to go home but I am with someone who is losing her shit about dessert (not something that Gretchen normally does). When the chimney finally arrived, Gretchen took a few bites and decided she hated it. But she didn't want to hurt the feelings of the young woman who had made it, so she took it with her as we left and chucked it in a trash can about a block away. As we passed Mystic, the goth shop, I told Gretchen about the older goth lady I'd seen opening it earlier today.

Back at the hotel, the nice silver-haired gentleman who had first checked us in back on Friday was working the front desk, and Gretchen said we wanted to make sure our affairs were in order so there would be no delay when we checked out tomorrow morning on our way to the airport. He checked the computer and saw that there actually was an additional charge: for two coffees. Evidently the bitchy woman who occasionally works the front desk had heard me say that I'd gotten a free coffee earlier and decided to charge me for that one in addition to the one I asked her for explicitly. What a snake! Gretchen raised a fuss about it, but there was nothing the silver-haired gentleman could do, since it was already in the computer. He said he'd raise the issue with Kassik management. [In the end, Klassik got back to us, offering us 20% off on our next stay. Whenever that is.]


After a temporary kiosk selling energy drinks folded up and closed this morning, I was able to see the gate of the outdoor club whose throbbing beats made our room less than ideal over the weekend. Click to enlarge.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?240916

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