nawl

The last week of winter vacation was a whirlwind tour of your stereotypical favorite European captials: London, Berlin, and Paris.

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I'd never actually been to London before.

I wandered around with Lucas, who I hadn't seen in five years, rode the Underground a lot, ate a lot of sushi. (Though sadly we discovered that Itsu, the sushi place where that Russian guy got poisoned, was temporarily closed. A sign out front stated "An international espionage incident has transformed this Itsu into a world-famous meeting place. Sad and shocked... We will reopen and we will flourish. Meanwhile, enjoy Itsu's health and happiness at...")

It wasn't worth bothering to be a tourist for a day, so I mostly saw the big monuments in passing, and that's fine with me.

The parts of the city I saw were very polished, rich, shiny, seemingly happy.

I had high hopes for the Indian food, but the random restaurant I tried was awful.

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Berlin was uglier than I remembered.

I suppose revisiting places tells as much about how I've changed as about the place itself. In this case, I was surprised at how *eastern* east Berlin was, how much certain things reminded me of Budapest. Just with, well, awful architecture.

But of course the magic of Berlin is in the way people seem to more freely transform spaces into something different and funky, at least compared to cities with comparatively higher property values.

We met up with Jake and followed the remnants of the 23rd Chaos Computer Club Conference for a couple of days. The first night, we ended up drinking Club Mate in the basement of c-base, a sort of hacker space/bar fronting a darkened muddy path along the river a few blocks from the Park Inn hotel at Alexanderplatz, where rooms cost 150 euros a night and have windows onto the shower, but not to the outside world.

New years eve began before sundown as a steady crescendo of firecrackers, bottle rockets, home fireworks. Everyone had them all over the city, and as we walked people tossed them off buildings, into the streets, down the stairs to the U-bahn stations. At midnight itself we ended up somewhere around Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden in a joyful war zone of a million other people, all of whom were shooting off their own fireworks. I felt ash raining down on my face, but surprisingly, given the number of drunken people with flaming projectiles, sustained no actual injuries. Later we watched the continuing explossions from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which may well be a solemn place of remembrance at other times of year, but at that point was full of revelers playing hide and seek.

I was awake early enough the next morning to see workers sweeping up the last of the evening's detritus, broken champagne bottles, firecracker wrappers. The city was serene, quiet, hotel room rates had dropped to more reasonable levels. Breakfast discovered at a random hotel was suitably German: bread, cheese, fresh-squeezed juice, fruit with yogurt.

On our last evening we ate a luxurious vegetarian feast at Ex Oriente Lux, a Persian restaurant hidden in a seemingly nondescript neighborhood further from the center of the city than we would have ventured otherwise. The food just kept coming: tiny cups of interestingly flavored sauces and bread, platters of cous-cous and vegetables, interesting sweet sauces, sweet tea and coffee, shishas, absinthe. We were there from 8 pm until something like 3 am.

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Paris, in contrast, had somehow transformed itself to the stereotypical Paris de mes reves, cleaner than I remembered it, charming in all the right ways.

(I'm not sure where my memories came from, the city could only really manage to be dingy in comparison to the cote d'azur.)

We chatted with shopkeepers, bought croissants and pains au chocolat from boulangeries on the street, wandered nearly all the way across the city in a night, peered into crypts at Pere Lachaise, and in a fit of tourism, visited the millions upon millions of bones in the catacombs.

Renaud managed to find a second vegetarian restaurant in the city, Le Potager du Marais, a charming little place offering vegetarian versions of our favorite French dishes, such as tartiflette and boeuf bourgignon. Every single one of the other tables in the restaurant was speaking English.