Well, not entirely, but I went to the Jewish Museum here today. My initial plan was to go to Checkpoint Charlie first, but that was a mob scene. I'd actually attempted to go to Another Country, an English language second-hand bookstore with a great sci-fi selection, but they were closed - I'll make another run by there Monday or Tuesday. It's hard to resist visiting a place that sounds like a geek-expat version of Isotope/Borderlands.

Anyway - ended up spending the whole afternoon at the Jewish Museum. It was a good museum - the temporary exhibit on the exodus of German Jews in the '30s was heartbreaking and wonderful at the same time. My highlights there were a great mishmash of film clips featuring German Jewish exiles in Hollywood and a video clip from a man who escaped in the mid-'30s, quoting what he said to his friends as he left: "If I ever come back, I'm bringing a gun." I'll admit to a weakness for that sort of defiance, especially in the context of Jews and Nazi Germany: if there ever was a government worth taking up arms against, it was that one. What made that quote so truly great, though, was that he *did*: he came back to Berlin in '45 as a captain in the US army.

The Jewish Museum proper wasn't as great. It was much more crowded, and the crowd wasn't quite as somber as at the Jewish museums in Prague. I felt uncomfortable, though I probably shouldn't have - it's just that there I was, a Jew by the standards of the Nuremberg Laws, surrounded by Germans, in a museum about the Jews of Germany, who were killed or driven off by Germans 75-65 years ago. The history material was fantastic, with some very detailed information on individual German Jews of note over the last 800 years. But the section on the Holocaust felt...I dunno, brief. They did have a collection of books containing the names of every German Jew who died from individual cities, which was heartbreaking to flip through, seeing the names of people born in 1933 who died at Auschwitz a mere 10 years later... It's stating the obvious to say that the Holocaust is depressing, but it really, really is. I guess the approach they've taken with the museum, to make it more of a celebration of German Jewry throughout history than just a funereal mourning of its extinction, but part of me wants to shove German faces into the Holocaust, wants to make 100% sure that there's no way they can ignore their history. That's not fair, though. I know it isn't. I just get angry.

On brighter notes: currywurst is just f'n awesome. I could eat that stuff forever. It's simple as hell: pork sausage, cut up, covered in ketchup with a ton of curry powder mixed in. But it's *yummy*. Really yummy. That was lunch today, and will probably be lunch the next couple days. I admit to weenieing out a bit tonight for dinner: I went to the Hard Rock Cafe. Well, hey. It's a couple blocks from my hotel, and I had a feeling everyone there would be fluent in English, and, frankly, I get homesick for English. I ended up with a waitress from Miami, and saw half the waitstaff jump up on a counter and dance along to "YMCA". Which was strange. But hey.

Now I need to figure out what to do the next two days - a few places I'm interested in going are closed tomorrow, and most of them are closed on Monday, so I'll have to juggle things around a bit to make sure I have enough to do both days. And maybe tomorrow, I'll brave a non-English-speaking restaurant for dinner again. Or I'll just go back to the Hard Rock. I'm lame, but they did have an awfully good steak.