The Innerer Schweinehund bars us from greatness. Oink.

Brandenberg Gate

Even in the sweaty drizzle that glues autumn leaves to shoes, Berlin makes the point over and over that Minimalism is kinda hot.

After German unity, architects were let loose in wild packs to move the nation's capital, from Bonn to Berlin.

Across the hundred meters of death zone that straddled the old Berlin wall, they conjured clean lines and soft grass while enshrining some of the bulletholes and Russian graffiti.

I'd work here just for the architecture.

I often thought about how the French would have added in some flourishes or an extra curlicue, but the Germans were able to just leave it simple and walk away.



But before Berlin action, Mira was in town, so we convinced ourselves to get up at a most godly hour to hop on the misleadingly named Oxford Tube to...well, yes, Oxford.

The confusion is that the Tube is a bus.

This is what libraries look like in Oxford.

If Cambridge looks anything like Oxford, I can see why an education at Oxbridge gives you a certain way of talking and a hitch in your step. Students live in dorms like churches, and if you told me that Quidditch was played adjacent to the rugby pitches, I'd nod and be okay with that.

We're under the Thames!

We had mayonnaise sandwiches before going to the Ashmolean, the oldest museum in the UK. Mira found mobile chairs to her liking, and I got harassed by a museum usher whenever I forgot I was supposed to pretend to be pregnant with my backpack. Botanical gardens completed our hot date, and I got to see that the ginger plant indeed looks just like ginger buried in dirt.

Then it was frightening museums and cream tea with Erica and James before we drifted back to London.

I'm moving again in December, but the walk home along Brick Lane has been lovely. I still haven't been to any of the Indian joints slinging curry and meal deals, but I'm tempted by a salt beef beigel on the daily.

Here's a view of one of the gates right after I got offered some rum punch at the art gallery.

I love how the Arabic alphabet ends with a very stoned-sounding, " Ha. Wow, Yeah." و  ي

Language learning is probably my favorite thing ever, and the two hours of Arabic every Monday stirs up all that magick dust of how much fun it's been dabbling.

Japanese class kept me laughing throughout law school, French has been the grumpy dog that kinda follows me around  since college, and Cantonese is family.



Random words get caught up in the brain burs, so I now know two ways of saying hypocrite: منافق (munafiq) and مذبذب (muthabthab). The latter of which allegedly refers to an insect that digs two holes?

It's only been a few classes and I barely know the alphabet, but it's been fun reading bits of Arabic on my walks home. Halal over and over, falalfel off my favorite food tent, a tattoo on a gay DJ with probably his actual name, Ayman.

كيفين لو is how I write my name! Keefeen Lu is a little less exciting sounding though.

I turned 28 on the day I flew into Berlin, so although I didn't get a chance to celebrate with London friends, I did get to have a photoshoot in front of the Reichstag with our Yemeni client. And a coronation chicken sandwich at the airport.

I trot out my oversized suit so rarely, but it's fun to play dress up and pretend to be an adult every so often. A hefty Italian dinner at Sagrantino, and then we were in the sky above Berlin having some biscuity German beers.

Flashing the pearly whites after our meeting with the Human Rights committee

Birthday dinner o' pork tenderloin with truffle mash potatoes, nom nom.

I never had such a strong sense of history until I spent time out of the United States. It's a dumb thing to utter, but honestly, I just never thought about the past being so real for people back then. Checkpoint Charlie is one of those moments, seeing the picture of the same intersection with all the tanks and barbed wire.

I start my days off with a solo salmon-eating contest, and then it's a series of little coffees as we orbit the Holocaust memorial by the government center.

We finally spend some time walking around the stelae. Two thousand of these blocks, just rising and falling, some extending way out into the sidewalk.

German kids ran across the tops until the ever-present polizei hassle them to get down.

My favorite thing is walking around a city reading street names to myself.

I don't fetishize getting lost, as Millennials often love doing in cities (though really only backpacker meccas), but it's nice to have a glimpse of what daily life would be.

Berlin gives off Washington DC vibes, though I'm skewed by the slice of Berlin we spent the most time puttering around in.

It's hard to not have currywurst when there's a little kiosk that dispenses it every block or so. Whether accompanied by fries or a little bun, the main attraction is the diced sausage smothered in ketchup and a shimmering of curry powder.

Currywurst!

My chosen currywurst vendors were a trio of German bros, who greeted me with "Ni hao! Are you Japanese? You look just like Jet Li. Where are you REALLY from?"

The barrage of intense ethnic questions down the street from the Holocaust Memorial is a little weird, but let's roll with it.

Yayyy socialism!

Berlin wall right along the old SS headquarters, a street away from my hotel

I bought myself almost 200 schokoladenkränze as gifts for folks back home, and raced through the Topography of Terror on one of our slow evenings. During the Third Reich (1933 -1945), the SS schemed and swarmed here.

Charging documents for Nuremberg Trials

We easyjetted back to London, and I spent the Gatwick train ride chatting with some Irish wrestlers in town for a match.

And then I was back in Hackney.

"You have a beautiful girlfriend," the woman with the biker-girlfriend curls comments to me as she hands me my flat keys. The two Turkish bears who work the shop sigh longingly, like we're all in a rom-com from the mid-90s.

I stay in bed until noon the next morning reading The Man in the High Castle, which was a strange book to be in the midst of while in Germany. After a week of meat on sticks, fried meat, meaty sausage (there's a theme here), it was good to make myself a giant pot of veggie soup pasta. 

I'm going to miss this terrace.

Mark Boyle is my power animal. I don't go quite as far, but StreetBank is lovely.

I picked up a set of towels from a German boy about to head back to the motherland. And he threw in a gas canister for my camping stove as well. Same day, I was gifted a kombucha scoby from a lady around my corner named Gaia.

Of course she moved to London from Portland.

I finally made it to a French meet-up. En train de faire les mots-croisés.

Home is an ocean away, but I keep encountering little burrito joints in the world that advertise "California Mission Burritos!" The text is usually in a matte white font that aspires to be Comic Sans, and I've never eaten at any even if they make me smile. Does El Farolito deliver trans-Atlantic burritos?

Out of a misguided pride, I'm basically a freegan when it comes to Mexico food in Britain: If it's not given to me, I won't eat it.

I consume plenty of California rolls, though only when Itsu has them half off. 

After this weekend's parkour session, I'm pretty okay with jumping across buildings, sure.