Welcome to Berlin, Joneseee

It's Sunday evening at the beginning of my second week here in Berlin, and my repository of downloaded TV shows has run out. So, time to start a blog, right? I guess the idea here is that I'll focus on concerts I go see. But I'll also probably talk about general stuff that happens to me here in Berlin. For example, just now, an embarrassing amount of chocolate just found its way into my mouth. Like 4 euros of it. Oh, and if you don't get why the the name "Berlin Noise" is clever, allow me to spoil the surprise and inform you that there's a thing in 3D graphics called "Perlin Noise" which is used to generate random fractals. So, basically, the title of this blog is the cleverest wordplay thing ever.

Okay, here's a quick summary of stuff that's happened so far:

Flight
Lufthansa, Business Class - Flew business class on Lufthansa. I highly recommend Lufthansa. I also flew them to Hamburg a few months ago, and it was equally great. Far better than the flight back to the US on United. The dude sitting next to me was a little weird. He seemed to know the flight crew really well and would get extra bread and stuff. He also kept putting his feet up on the chair in front of him, which I think is a really bullshit thing to do on a plane, even though the seats were built such that the person in front of him probably had no idea what was going on. Movies I watched this time: Rocky Balboa, Miami Vice, Happy Feet. None of these were particularly great. Miami Vice was the worst. Happy Feet was probably the best. It's worth noting, though, that Happy Feet doesn't really have any jokes, and as a result, is less entertaining than March of the Penguins (which had 1 joke -- penguins falling down).

Dining
Maximilian's, Mitte - Pork cutlets. This place was actually pretty good, but expectations were low, since it's the restaurant in the hotel. I was also really tired. But for the money, I think this place is not a bad way to try some German food.

Lutter & Wegner, Mitte - Schnitzel. I'm not sure, but I think I went to a Lutter & Wegner in Hamburg as well. (If only I'd blogged about it...) In any case, I kind of think this place sucks. Or, rather, it's just not a good deal. I think I'm also pretty much done with schnitzel at this point. Basically, it's just a big piece of fried veal. So, there's plenty of reasons not to eat it if you don't like it. I would say Lutter & Wegner is like the Houston's of Germany. It seems better than Houston's, but only because it's German.

Biscotti, Charlottenburg - Mistra Salad, Gnocci with some special thing that comes from onion leaves, and black currant sorbet. Super good! Best meal I've had so far, by a long shot. And one of the better Italian meals I've had in my life. Got a matchbook so that maybe I can take my parents back here if/when they come visit.

Nightlife
Newton - This is a bar near the hotel. Nothing particularly special. I guess it's affiliated with Lutter & Wegner, because we sat there while we waited for a table. I did read a review somewhere where a businessperson described it as a good bar scene. But I think that may have been nonsense.

Club Magnet - This will be its own post, as it was really great and there are bands involved.

Bombed Out Place Near Studio 54 - Went to a really awesome place Saturday that was like a big bombed-out building with bars and stuff in it. Super cool, though the scene was not really happening. It was near a place called "Studio 54," the address of which is Kantstr. 17 10623. Of the things I've seen so far, this is the least like anything in America. There were a bunch of other bars and stuff in this little area. Seems like a cool place to go.

WEEK12END - After that place, we went to Week12End club, which is a club that operates Thursday through Saturday nights and plays house music on the 12th floor of a building on Alexanderstrasse. Web site is: http://www.week-end-berlin.de/ but there's not much there to look at. We had a sort of hard time getting in with 5 visual effects dudes, but eventually the bouncer took pity on us. Maybe he would have thought twice about that if he'd known there were like 7 more visual effects dudes behind us. Personally, I wasn't that into this place. I thought the scene was a little poser-ly. But I'm not really adapted to Berlin enough yet to officially make that sort of judgment call. If it wasn't poser-ly, it was maybe just not the scene I was in the mood for after having had a taste of Club Magnet. I did manage to make myself dance a little bit at this place, which I failed to do at Magnet.

Call-a-Bike - All over Berlin, there are bikes you can rent. You dial a number on the bike, give the dude a bike number, enter a code into the computer on the bike, then ride around for a bit for .08 Euros per minute. Then when you're done, you call the dude back and give him the exit code. Pretty great. Another dude and I did this to get ourselves back to the hotel from Alexanderplatz (where Week12End was). The subway would have been cheaper, but we both wanted to figure out what the deal was with the bikes. I think it cost us .80 euros more than the subway would have. But we didn't really take the most direct route possible, either. One weird thing was that the dude from Call-a-Bike was always the same dude, and he would make small talk and stuff. I've noticed that in Germany, people with sort of bad jobs seem a lot less stupid than the people who would have those same jobs in America. Or maybe they just sound smart because they're speaking English with a German accent?

Tourism
Berliner Unterwelten - We went to a tour of the underground bunkers/bomb shelters today (Sunday). This was really cool. The first bunker was all messed up and everyone would have just died anyway. The second bunker was a cold-war bunker, built to protect people from nuclear blasts for like 2 weeks. It still would have sucked to be down there. We also learned a lot about what it was like in Berlin when the wall was still up, from the perspective of the subway system. Pretty interesting. Definitely a cool tour to do if you're here. To do it, you go to the Gesundbrunnen stop on the subway. The web site is http://www.berliner-unterwelten.de/en/

EU 50th Anniversary - This was actually last weekend, and isn't really even worth talking about. There were lots of people, but there isn't anything interesting to talk about. Basically, there was a tent for each country in the EU, and you could buy food and wine. We ate some paella that was pretty good. And the chubby blonde girl at the paella stand may have given me "the look." But she was pretty chubby. Presumably, this is because she's constantly surrounded by huge frying pans full of paella.