Staying up to date with my writing is going to be a minor chore, as I feel that I need to finish with the previous day before embarking on a new one. Last year’s trip to Europe tracked my step count; this one is tracking my word count. Three days into this exercise and I’m somewhere near 4,400 words put on to the page. You may notice I said three days while only two blog entries exist so far. While I left on the 4^th, that travel day blurred into the 5^th because after leaving Arizona in the evening, I landed in Germany the next day. I felt that since I left Phoenix and did not have a night of sleep and arrived in Frankfurt for the evening, the flight ended up being a teleportation problem with timing, and I simply needed to finish the 4^th on the streets of Frankfurt. Enough of those details. Above is my Airbnb.

The sky was overcast when I woke at 6:30 with a startle that it already felt late. Well, that early in the morning was certainly not late, as I’d finally gone to sleep last night at 23:30 and dreamed of sleeping until at least 8:00 to settle my jet lag. After the obligatory things one does when preparing for the day, I was finally out in the breezy cool of a clearing sky and heading to the Schöneweide station.

I needed to buy a train ticket for the next six days to avoid the hassle of having change or cash every day to do so. That should have been easy enough, but the English version of the menus offered choices that were ambiguous. Settled with my choice, I find that I cannot buy this with my credit card as I don’t have a PIN for this particular card. Feeling the pressure to finish my transaction so others don’t have to wait for the amateur to figure things out, I threw a 50 Euro bill into the machine, received my 8 Euros in change, and had a ticket. A message flashes momentarily on the screen to inform me I need to validate my ticket before starting to use it. Where does one do that? With my ignorance reeling at having to deal with the situation, I ask myself if I should or can get validated on the train with my new 6-day pass.

Arriving at Neukölln via the S45 to transfer to the U7, I see a guy sticking a ticket like mine into a red unmarked box that, with a stamping sound, spits his ticket back out at him. This must be the act of validating one’s ticket, so I do the same, and with that, my ticket now has a time and date stamp. Makes sense now that maybe the buyer purchased the ticket the night before when leaving the station and doesn’t want to lose 10 hours of usage.

Read your instructions beforehand, or else the place you think you are going might turn out not to exist on the high-level overview maps found in train stations. The first person I asked could not tell me which side of the track went to Mittenwald. Upon checking my itinerary I see that my location is on Mittenwalderstrasse near the Gneisenaustrasse U-Bahn stop. That the guy I asked about the “Neesen au Strasse” stop was able to decipher this was amazing. On the train, I learned my stop was called “GaNeezen au Strasse.”

So here I am, sitting in the bakery at the intersection of those aforementioned streets, waiting for Die WollLust yarn store to open at 11:00. It’s nice to sit down to write a short while and indulge with an Erdbeer-Vanille Plunder (strawberry vanilla croissant), a double espresso, and water before going shopping for the wife. Whatever I end up getting her, I’ll also be looking for some sock yarn for myself.

Sock yarn heaven for the spoiled man whose feet only know the pleasure of being wrapped in hand-knitted love. Caroline being absent from this leg of the trip required me to stand in for her yarn store pose and ask the co-proprietor to take my camera and deal with the fat old guy looking silly; somehow Caroline looks far cuter in this pose than I do. Also, I rather enjoy (I mean tolerate) watching her shop for all the unnecessary new yarn supplies she inevitably adds to the hoard when we travel, but with her still in America, I had to shop for her. So what’s a good husband to do?

You buy all the yarn. And that yellow she asked me not to buy (she was very specific about this; I quote her email here: “No pink/black/yellow – something more neutral, please don’t get something super bright just to “teach me to get out of my comfort zone,” but if you think it is beautiful, I trust you.”) well, I bought yellow, it’s peeking out from underneath the red. Sadly, they were fresh out of pink. Hah, no, they weren’t, but my cruelty has boundaries.

With a full day ahead of me plus the fact I have some issues, some aversion issues, to carrying bags in public, the husband standing in for his relatively famous wife Birgit Freyer, who owns this shop called Die WollLust (I’ll translate that as Yarn Fetish) threw a fellow guy a favor and kept this nearly 2kg of yarn and stuff and is sending it to us just before we go home.

This was the last view of the kid looking at the fountain before I punted it into the center cup of water down at the end. It was worth 40 points, which translated into 3 euros off my lunch. That probably didn’t happen, but don’t go thinking I wasn’t imagining it. Okay, so I wasn’t really imagining it, but I needed to write up something for this photo that I found appealing, so some nonsense felt in order.

In my goal to separate myself from the main tourist area, I found an outdoor table in front of the Marheineke Markthalle, where I sat down for a bite to eat. With some ravenous birds pooping on all the chairs, it wasn’t easy to find a poop-free one, but perseverance paid off. Now, under the shady trees, I’m watching parents, hippies, oldies, fascists, and students walk by. It’s quiet here compared to the bustle of yesterday. Interestingly, there are more bicycles riding by than there are cars here; next up are people pushing strollers, though people on foot definitely dominate.

Many of the people are with friends. Most are dressed smartly even though there’s a dearth of vibrant colors. I can count dozens of people going by, and morbid obesity has missed this neighborhood. Of the 100 or more students walking by, not a single fat kid was among them. Some boisterous teen boys are showing off their adolescence with raucous boy behavior, but they are not the rule. The amount of English being spoken is interesting, more than I thought I’d hear. One of the tables near me was talking about VR and all things 3D, while the next table was discussing the pros and cons of social media. As for countries of origin strolling these streets, it looks like we could be in Los Angeles.

Under these bright green trees, the day could not be more spectacular. The occasional light breeze rustles the leaves that silently flutter and paint the ground with undulating shadows. If the sun dips behind some clouds, the effect on the temperature is nearly instantaneous. Still, here we are on a Tuesday afternoon, and it’s well after lunch, but people are hanging out, taking extended pauses while they linger over a coffee or conversation.

The people hanging out here are seriously hanging out, some for nearly 300 years. Not one is drinking coffee. What brought me to a cemetery in Berlin, you might ask? A right turn that suggested this old place could be a tad more interesting than the busy street. I didn’t recognize any famous people, but maybe that’s because their names are all in German.

There’s an extraordinary amount of graffiti strewn about the German capital; though much looks similar to the work of others, there are some serious works of art. Unfortunately, I’ve either been on the train and couldn’t capture them, or something is obscuring them from getting the shot that would show them in their best light. This is typical of the more common stuff seen all over town.

The Landwehrkanal runs through Böckler Park near Kreuzberg. I suppose it’s easy enough to see what the attraction is to walking the dirt path on a nice sunny day with swans in the water preening themselves. So, I’ll just leave any other descriptions to your own imagination.

The holy land a.k.a. Schneiders Laden. This icon of the Eurorack synthesizer community is directly across from Kottbusser Tor and nearly impossible to find. Be careful here as the area is trying to find you; well, the cast of shady characters might be. While not overrun by skinheads, this corner of Berlin certainly has its fair share of sketchy-looking people who might qualify as thugs. Once you get past that and find the hidden door, you are in for some wallet/bank account emptying Goal Acquisition Syndrome (G.A.S.) gone rampant. Try to get out without your dream modules. Somehow, I did just that, but that might be true because I have just about everything I could want. The module or two I’d really love have not been released yet, so I felt safe to go into the den of temptation.

Schneiders Laden is the sponsor of Superbooth, which starts this Thursday. One of the salespeople at the shop was telling me of her performance this Thursday at Seaside starting at 19:00. Her name is Jessica Kert, and her Bandcamp page can be found here. Another woman in the shop I spent some time talking with was from Florida and only recently got the bug; she got it bad from all indicators. While talking with her, Brandon Fessler of Mordax showed up weighed down heavily by severe jetlag. Moments after that, Scott Jaeger of Industrial Music Electronics texted me that he just landed and was wrecked. Hopefully, everyone recovers in time to re-exhaust themselves with some very long days and nights at the conference.

Time to find some dinner; little did I know that exercise would take nearly two hours. I get hungry, and I get picky. The walk I took was nice, but the food looked dull, so I kept on walking.

I didn’t walk long as I had to give in to the call of nature in the worst way. Half a dozen times, I considered just going homeless guy style and discretely pissing against a tree or in a corner so no one could see my junk, but then this magic toilet house appeared. I put my 50 cents in, the doors slid open, I walked in and the doors would not shut. I tried all the buttons, I tried waiting, I looked for a sensor I could flail at, but those doors just stood wide open. So I did what I had to do: I stood there with my back to passersby and took my much-needed pee. With the pressure ratcheted down, I felt I could focus better on compromising for some food and just get whatever, but just as Caroline already knows, that’s not in my playbook. I kept walking until I found exactly what I didn’t know I wanted.

Berlin cuisine looks like shit to me. No wonder everywhere you look, you find Vietnamese, Thai, Indian, and Middle Eastern, while döner kebab shops are everywhere. Sausages are fairly ubiquitous, too, but nothing struck me as truly inspired. So what did I do? Did I visit a Michelin 3-star joint? Nope, I opted for the Berlin famous döner. So why the photo of the canal? Well, sometimes the photos of döner look like someone took a dump in a pita pocket.

Meet Can (pronounced J’chon, kind of like John), aged 19, from Turkey, and Aleks, aged 25, from Croatia. I did tonight, and it was great chatting with these guys, mostly in German too. Coffee Fellows is one of the coffee shops open relatively late here in Berlin so I stopped here after dinner for some caffeine to keep me going and to give me a place to do some writing. It was awesome to talk to these two young men about politics and nature, how dangerous conservatism is, how amazing the world’s cultures are, and how important enjoying life is. It’s kind of funny how American these two really are, meaning they are very outgoing and enthusiastic to talk with me. They are the future of Europe as long as extremism is able to be held back.