Gahhh, I know by definition I can no longer call myself a true blogger because I have ceased to maintain the daily routine a writer ought to have. But I have a worthy excuse. See I have started reading the sequel to Sharon Kay Penman’s Here Be Dragon trilogy and have just entered the reign of Prince Llewellyn's grandson, Prince Llewellyn (they conveniently all have the same name). Anyway, any time I have a free second I either bust out my novel or go online to look at cheap hostels for all my future weekend destinations. Therefore I realized that it has been quite awhile since I have written anything of substantial value and for that I sincerely apologize. I will try to be more disciplined in the future. But, nevertheless, the reality of the situation is that I now have done so much that it would be impossible to tell you all about it in the detail that I would naturally prefer. So I am simply going to cut my losses and move on. Here are the things I am skipping so you can ask me about later if you would like: my solo day trip to Czesky Krumlov, swing dancing with this old Czech man, meeting up with my USC friends in Prague, and the other many little and random adventures I go on from and day to day basis. But I doubt this lack of information is anything that will keep you up at night.
So I shall begin with my weekend trip to Berlin to visit Caitlin! Caitlin Borzi has been friend ever since 3rd grade when we shunned the rest of society finding each other to be far superior playmates, and 10 years later it is like nothing has changed – except the fact that we are prancing around Europe together instead of the swing sets. I arrive Friday night to an already planned out weekend schedule starting that very hour. We meet up with our other friends from high school who are studying in Berlin and go to this awesome club. It takes forever to find it in the freezing cold, but once inside it was this sweet European techno atmosphere with solo dancers just minding their own business, soaking up the apparently famous techno DJ we were there to see. I also might have consumed one to many of those crazy German beers because looking back it probably wasn’t as fun as I thought I was having at the time…but don’t tell my mom.
The next day we wake up pretty early for having gone out the night before and start our walking tour of the city. Caitlin satisfies my need for the classic tourist destinations including the Berlin wall and the communist TV tower, but then she takes back control of the schedule and shows me ‘the real Berlin’. After living there a year and fully integrating herself into the language and the hipster, modern, artsy sub culture of Berlin, I’d say she was a far more qualified tour guide then I could have hoped for. She took me to these crazy alien bars, secret artist squatting zones, overrun graffiti/ street art/ poster parks, and showed me the best food Berlin had to offer. Apparently Berlin is the new Paris in that all the young, poor artists are taking over creating quite an international presence. After the wall fell Berlin felt this need to reinvent itself and start from scratch and embrace the modern, the future, the new… and modern artists eat that stuff up. So now every inch of Berlin is the artist’s playground and the walls are covered (not exaggerating… im talking all over the place) with street art and posters and there are all these famous squatters who are freeloading off of the abandoned spaces in East Berlin despite any efforts to kick them out. Needless to say Berlin is a pretty sweet place to be living right about now.
Berliners also embrace the ‘anything goes’ policy, but they take to a whole new level that puts even LA to shame. The massive weekend second hand flee market is proof of their truly crazy fashion sense. Berlin is the only place I’ve been where being trendy truly takes no skill and random, large clothing items meshed together. It’s great. The only other thing I have to say about my trip is that I successfully spent close to 4 hours in a museum by myself (while Caitlin was at school) learning everything there is to know about the history of the German people and getting way to excited over Napoleon’s hat after he was defeated at Waterloo. However, at the end of the day, one of the coolest things about my trip was that I got homesick… for Prague. I loved Berlin but I missed my city, my home. I missed the beautiful buildings, familiar smells, and immaculately clean streets. Prague is truly starting to become my very own.
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