Events

(Posted retrospectively on Feb. 17.) Roger Ebert once said that good movie reviews were good, but bad movie reviews were fun. Anthony Lane's review of the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey falls into the latter category: Who could conceivably play Christian Grey, the awkward young billionaire with the extensive neckwear collection, let alone Anastasia Steele, the English-lit major who is also, as we gasp to learn, one of the leading virgins of Vancouver, Washington? Many combinations were...

Since last report, I've spent time at two bars known for their craft beer selection. Even though I've seriously reduced my beer intake for a variety of reasons (especially its effect on my Fitbit numbers), spending a couple of days away from home let me feel a certain license in my consumption. Friday night, therefore, I found Kaschk, a Swedish-owned pub on the fringes of the Mitte district in the former East Berlin. Within a few moments of entering I knew I'd come to the right place: Old Rasputin on...

Berlin's Tegel airport is supposed to close at some point, so I shouldn't be too surprised at some of the, ah, artifacts in the place. For example, in the A terminal, the security checkpoints only control pairs of gates, so once you're through you're totally stuck with whatever concessions are inside that gate pair. In my case this means €9,60 (about $12.50) for a ham sandwich and a latte. (Come to think of it, that's about what it would cost at Starbucks...) This is apparently a feature, not a bug...

Another big walking day in sunny weather took me up to Bernauerstraße and the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall Memorial): That's a mostly-preserved but partially-reconstructed section of the wall at the corner of Bernauerstraße and Ackerstraße, near the site where the first person trying to flee over the wall was killed. It's hard to imagine that the place I'm sitting now was once in East Berlin, just a few hundred meters from the place by the Wall where Reagan gave his famous speech in 1987. I...

Nobody, I think, visits Germany for the food (or the UK, for that matter), but when in Berlin, one does as...a tourist to Berlin. And that is why I got suckered in by this guy: And ordered this: That is (literally) a hot mess of grilled pork and chicken (though which bits no one can say) in a cream-of-mushroom sauce with some fried potato bits on the side. You think yesterday had surplus calories? I am actually shocked that Germany isn't as fat as the US, on average. Fortunately, I walked another 14.5...

For just a few euro and an hour each way by train, I visited my 24th country this afternoon. Here is the heavily-guarded border between Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany and Słubice, Poland: Seriously, though, if I hadn't had a phone with a GPS and cached Google Maps I would not have known exactly where the border was. It's not marked; there's just a two-lane bridge with sidewalks. The border is about 100 m from the German bank of the Oder, with no indication that you've entered Poland until the roundabout...

The Times Wellness blog today reports on fitness tracking devices: Each volunteer was fitted with a pedometer, two accelerometers, several wristband monitors and, in each pocket, a cellphone, one of which ran three iPhone-based fitness-tracking apps and the other of which featured an Android phone running one tracking app. The volunteers then began walking on treadmills set to a gentle 3 miles-per-hour pace. A researcher stood nearby and manually counted every step each volunteer took until that...

Unfortunately, it's my Canon. So even though I promised photos, I'll have to get an old USB cable tomorrow in order to post any. Fortunately, I have a phone on my camera, so I was able to photograph this Apfelstrudel goodness that I'll be walking off for the rest of the week:

Fitbit says I've gotten 10.4 km in so far today, over to the Brandenburg Gate, through the Holocaust Memorial, down to Mehringplatz, then up Friedrichstraße past Checkpoint Charlie and back to Unter den Linden. I might have some more walking in me yet. One bonus (at least on that front) is that my hotel room is not only one of the furthest from the hotel entrance, but it's up one flight of stairs and down another to get there. Nice room, though, with windows that actually open, which is unusual these...

I've arrived in Berlin, whose international airport reminded me of LaGuardia, and I've just woken up from a nap. That makes some sense, as my body thinks it's 7am, not 2pm, and the caffeine from the tea they served me at breakfast (just before 11pm Chicago time) may have worn off. After showering and putting clothes on I'll start exploring. I foresee no difficulty making my Fitbit numbers, but I do foresee some difficulty taking in this immense city in three days. But, my Dog, I do not like overnight...