Or at least, they do in guidebooks. I got snookered twice today: the Natural History Museum's dinosaur section is closed for renovations (and the remainder, while not bad, was comparable to the Harvard Peabody Museum's natural history section, minus the glass flowers - ok, but nothing to write home about), and the Currywurst Museum, which I was really excited about, does not seem to actually exist. The latter is the bigger letdown: I have fallen madly in love with currywurst, and the idea of going to a currywurst museum was simply mindblowing. I was going to buy at least one t-shirt. Maybe 2, if they were cool enough. But alas, no such luck. So now I sit in the hotel room, and curse the currywurst museum gods for abandoning me.

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.

Go get 'em. I've started commenting them up and should get that done sometime. Other observations from my first 30 hours in Berlin:

• There are two Dunkin' Donuts between my hotel and the Zoo. That's more than there are in San Francisco.
• Speaking of San Francisco, there's a Hotel California across the street and down a block.
• Lots of expensive stuff on Ku'damm.
• As seems to generally be the case when I go to Europe, I had trouble finding a place to buy bottled water/soda. I found one eventually, but they're never as obvious as I expect them to be.
• The zoo was very good in terms of animal selection, but not so hot in terms of the conditions the animals are kept in - after the San Diego zoo, cramped cages just make me sad.
• While I'm nowhere near as screwed here as I was in Paris, all my attempts at German preparation vanished out the window once I got here. I can't remember anything useful, and so end up staring vacantly and looking like an idiot when people try to talk to me. Luckily, everyone's got at least a smattering of English, but I still feel stupid.
• There's something a little creepy about wandering around what was once East Berlin. I guess I've just read too many spy novels - I keep seeing Stasi around every corner in my mind.
• Speaking of creepy, I went to the Markische Museum, a history of Berlin and the surrounding area. Not a bad museum, but I was the only guest there, so the security guards/docents stalked me through the whole place. Which got really disturbing when it was an old German guy giving me dirty looks as I looked at a concentration camp exhibit. Urm.

That's about it for now. Still wonky time-wise - I slept 10 hours last night, but I think my jetlag is enhanced by my cultural disconnect: like I said, it's just impossible for me to really feel like I've got things under control when I don't speak the language. It's intimidating, and frustrating, because I really did try to bone up for this, but none of it stuck. None. Zilch. I'll have to take this into consideration before any future solo trips to non-English speaking places.

Yes, I know, it's been...well, over a year since I last posted. I think I may have actually been in Paris then. In which case I've managed to have consecutive posts from different places in Europe with an entire year in the States in between. I rule.

Anyway - I'm sitting in Frankfurt airport as we speak, waiting for my connecting flight to Berlin in a few hours. I'm bored. But at least they have wi-fi this time - when I was here just about three years ago, they had "wi-fi", btu it consisted entirely of an airport webpage. Now there's real net access. I'm happier.

EDIT: Ok, the last post was the one saying comments weren't working from the day before my birthday in '05. That was probably made from San Francisco, possibly Boston. Comments still aren't working, for what it's worth - I could rename the comments script back to the original name and have it work again, but then I'd get flooded with comment spam again. If I actually get back to blogging in any meaningful sense, I'll go get some sort of passkey system to keep those buggers out, but for now, it's probably not worth it. More babble below - I moved it to the extended entry in case there's still anyone out there subscribing to my RSS feed, so as not to dump a giant megapost on them out of the blue.

EDIT: Ok, the last post was the one saying comments weren't working from the day before my birthday in '05. That was probably made from San Francisco, possibly Boston. Comments still aren't working, for what it's worth - I could rename the comments script back to the original name and have it work again, but then I'd get flooded with comment spam again. If I actually get back to blogging in any meaningful sense, I'll go get some sort of passkey system to keep those buggers out, but for now, it's probably not worth it.

The truly surreal thing about sitting here in Frankfurt is that I just had an IM conversation with a friend back on the West Coast - and it was 10:25pm there when he logged off to get ready for bed. Meanwhile, it's 6:25am here, my body had finally adjusted to Eastern time (and DST) by the time I left today, and I somehow managed to sleep about four hours on the plane. This is, without a doubt, the weirdest set of time changes I've ever been through - Saturday, I woke up on PST and fell asleep on EDT for a four hour difference, and then last night moved another five hours forward to CET - which isn't on DST yet, because the Europeans aren't raving idiots, unlike Congress with its fiddling with DST.

The gate screens and flight monitors in the terminal in Boston were all borked in re: DST - my flight's departure was listed as 4:40pm when, in fact, it was leaving at 5:40, until they fixed it. Meanwhile, the other flights in the area also had the wrong times listed until they were individually fixed as well. Dad mentioned various issues they were having at his office with Cisco voice products going bonkers with the time zone change, and a friend in the office in Boxborough was having all kinds of problems with his Linux mail/calendar client getting its scheduling straight. I'm convinced there were more actual things that went wrong in the aftermath of the DST juggling than did after Y2K - Y2K, after all, was just the result of short-sighted programming shortcuts that were easy to see ahead of time. The DST stupidity was less well-known and, well, not the coders' fault, exactly. Yes, almost every system that cares about time zones/DST/etc isn't set up to handle changes as it should be, but what rational reason was there to change the damned system in the first place?

I'm sitting about 30 feet, I think, from where Arwen and I were sitting for our similarly-timed layover on the way to Prague three years ago. I recognize the bar to my left - when we were here then, they allowed smoking there, and seemingly everyone in it was smoking a putrid cigar. The air circulation took the fumes from the tables jutting out of the bar proper straight into our faces. Good times. I wouldn't have cared if it was cigarette smoke, but cigars just annoy me. Now smokers here are confined to what seems to be one or two smokers' kiosks per floor. I just took a picture of the one downstairs - the smokers are clustered immediately around the ashtrays. It's kind of sad. There's what looks like an LCD tv sitting in the middle of the kiosk showing nothing but a Camel logo. I'm hoping it's just a lit display and not an LCD tv, 'cos, well, that'd be a waste.

Oh, I saw the Telepresence (not sure if I should capitalize that, but, well, hey) setup Cisco's put in at the office in Boxborough. It's whacky: three giant plasma screens right next to each other, with the ones on the right and left slightly at angles to the one in the middle, and then an expensive looking table with expensive looking chairs in front of 'em. I'm not sure what exactly the big deal about "telepresence" is - it just looks like really badass video conferencing to me. Of course, I violently hate video conferencing. My ex-boss tried to get me to do video conferencing, since it integrates with our phones and such. I laughed at that: even when I'm in the office, which is rare enough, I'm not really into the idea of having to worry about people looking at me while I'm on conference calls. That's the advantage of working remote to the rest of my group: I can scratch my ass or play videogames while in meetings.

I'm babbling a lot here. Guess I missed blogging more than I thought. I'm still not sure exactly why I stopped blogging, but looking at when my posts started to really taper off, I think there's a connection between raiding in WoW and my blogging rate. Once I was basically logged into WoW whenever I was home and not working, there was a lot less time to just ramble for 20 minutes at a time on a blog post. I haven't been that sucked into WoW since last summer (though it still absorbs what's probably an unhealthy portion of my time), but I guess I just got out of the habit of posting here. I'll definitely be picking it up again for the duration of my stay out here - my pictures will all end up on my photo gallery, and, honestly, I'm betting that being on another continent, unable to actually talk to quite literally any human being that I know, will result in me feeling a compulsive need to talk to some sort of audience, even if it's just the largely hypothetical one represented here. So if you *are* still reading here, expect more. I promise it'll be boring.