Berlin FAQ Blog

Well, I made it all the way to Bangkok courtesy of Thai Airways, an entirely uneventful flight punctuated by occasional conversation with the nice Thai lady sitting next to me, who has lived for a long long time in a small village near Dortmund or Essen or some such place and was returning home for the first time in five years.

Bangkok, how should I say, is hotter and stickier than I imagined. I made the mistake on the first day of going out in just a short-sleeved shirt (and trousers etc. of course), which sounds logical but is actually an excellent way of generating interesting and highly visible sweat-patterns. Fortunately I remembered a useful tip from some website, viz wearing some kind of t-shirt or vest under the shirt which soaks up the sweat, while not actually making one any hotter. I sidled into a department store, had one of those culture-shock stress moments trying to guess whether an L size would be big enough or turn out to be a European M size, and trying to work out the payment system (the shop assistants take your cash and the desired goods, run off somewhere and bring you back your change and the purchase in a plastic bag), and surreptitiously donned the t-shirt in the changing room. It fitted, and seemed to do the sweat-absorbing trick, although now my hotel room wardrobe contains a pile of festering white t-shirts. I should go and have them washed, but at hotel prices it's cheaper to buy new T-shirts and I haven't yet found a "normal" cleaners in the vicinity.

If anyone can figure out a way of getting some nice fresh Berlin autumn air here, I'll pay for the postage.

Oh, and I found the packet of crisps in the photo (click for enlargement) in the local Tesco's.

It's official: the cold season is officially upon us. You can tell because the supermarkets (at least on the eastern side of the city) have cleared out their multipacks of cheap mineral water and replaced them with pallets bearing heating coal and kindling.

Fortunately it's been about seven years since I last had to haul a bucket of black, dirty bricks up the stairs to keep myself something approaching warm, and I can't say I really miss doing it. Mind you it's a much more efficient system than the open coal fires they used to have in Britain - I wonder why this bit of practical technology never made it over the channel.

The trick with procrastination, I am finding, is not to feel guilty about doing it, because that stops me enjoying the time it frees up. In fact I think I might start a Verein called ProKrastination e.V. or similar to spread the word. When I get round to it, that is.

I have however finally managed to do my tax returns for 2005, a duty which I traditionally leave until the tax office sends me a series of stern warnings sometime in late November. Boy is that a task I dislike, especially because I need to fill in about 5 different forms to account for the various parts of the MountPenguin commercial empire, and I'm too cheap to hire someone to do it (and my filing system consists of a cardboard box which I shove receipts and official-looking bits of paper in). Actually it isn't all that difficult in theory, but the forms appear to have evolved organically over a course of many years and changes to tax law, so finding the right spots to fill in is a bit of a PITA. OK, it's easy enough to work out that I neither work in the timber industry nor am employed in Belgium for at least part of the year (yes - there's a special field just for Belgium), and have never knowingly participated in commercial animal breeding, but I have to sit down and sob silently into my copy of the Verpflegungsmehraufwendungentabelle when confronted with the question of whether I have ever paid Vorsteuerbeträge aus Leistungen im Sinne des §13b Abs. 1 UStG (§15 Abs. 1 Satz 1 Nr. 4 UStG). Apparently not, but I do wish they'd organise the forms so they read something like "for normal people just write your income here, and your expenditure here, and the total you think you owe us in here so we can have a good laugh; for people who voluntarily engage in three-way exchanges of goods and services throughout the EU and other perversely complex stuff, see pages 2 and 3 in the company of your accountant and a large bottle of valium".

Meanwhile, for some time I've been meaning to find some proper work again, i.e. the kind of gainful employment which requires the wearing of trousers and possibly some form of shirt (though I draw the line at neckties). This is quite an easy thing to procrastinate at, given the splendid autumn weather and Berlin's ridiculously low cost of living, but Mrs. Penguin thinks I should stop annoying the cat with my elaborate practical jokes and get out of the house more often. With impeccable timing a mail arrived late one night from a former colleague - we'll call him S. - now living in a hot and sultry coup-infested capital city in southeast Asia, asking whether I had any plans for the autumn and if not would I like to be flown over there for a couple of weeks and poke around at their software installations. I don't think that was quite what Mrs. Penguin was imagining, and my northern European genes are more suited to bracing tramps across high moors than hot and sticky conurbations in the tropics, but I see the supermarkets here are just preparing to put heating coal on sale and they will even pay me to take a taxi to and from the airport (though only an economy class flight, I hasten to add) , so my answer was a rhetorical one along involving acts of arboreal ursine excretion.

Dunno whether I'll have time for any serious blogging, so if you don't see any entries here for a couple of weeks, that means I'm busy - either working or being mugged by a gang of post-op transvestites.

I was sitting there wasting my time clicking through blogspace deep last night when suddenly (to put it in geekspeak) the secure shell connection to the server upon which this blog resides timed out with the message "server not responding". Which turned out to be the case, 'cos it had vanished from the network completely and resisted all attempts at a remote restart. Sighing, because the lucrative half of the MountPenguin Internet Empire resides on selfsame server, I sent a mail to the support people, and resigned myself to being serverless until they get in at 6:30am (24 hour support not being included in the contract or anything - I'm cheap). Fortunately they're pretty on-the-ball so I was able to retire to a horizontal position in a fairly relaxed state of mind.

Me wakes up next morning, some time after 6:30am (not a very popular time of the day in the MountPenguin household), checks mail and finds a reply sent shortly before 4am that my server has been resuscitated and is open for business once again.

Oh yes, and it is a German company.

Recently I've been too busy procrastinating to even get around to blogging, but I today I awakened to news that the evil, dastardly North Korea has just tested its very own earthquake-generating machine, which reminded me I've always wanted to tell everyone about one of my favourite places in Berlin, the North Korean Embassy in the Glinkastraße.

'Tis a strange place, almost unchanged since the start of the 90s (apart from a lick of paint applied a year or two ago). Originally the embassy compound consisted of two buildings, but the main building has been rented out to capitalist running-dogs and the comrades have retreated into the former living quarters, a very dowdy-looking Plattenbau. It's surrounded by a solid metal fence and is watched over by what appear to be webcams (rather than the more martial-looking surveillance cameras one normally associates with such places). In the carpark at the back there is an ever changing collection of middle-to-high class cars of German origin, often with number plates from other cities in Germany. There is also a basketball hoop. In summer you can sometimes see the staff having a barbecue on the driveway, and if you're really lucky you can follow them around the Ullrichs supermarket on the other side of the street, where they appear to do most of their shopping.

The high point for nostalgic cold warriors is the little information box by the main gate, which contains regularly updated and lovingly detailed depictions of life in the Democratic Socialist Republic, most elements of which appear to have been designed or invented by Kim Il-Song (dead, but still President) and Nr. 1 son, Kim Jong-Il (living, making do with the title of "Dear Leader"). The picture here was taken in May, a couple of weeks after Kim Il-Song's posthumous birthday and contains scenes from the great man's life such as his 1957 visit to the Tongju Middle School in Pyoktong district, where he was "as a father to the pupils of the school".

Should you ever have the opportunity to visit Pyongyang by the way, do check out the metro. Apparently, apart from being built in a bombastically Stalinist style, the Pyongyang Metro has snapped up a lot of U-Bahn trains the BVG would otherwise have thrown away. Presumably they don't have the same problems with glass scratching as the BVG does, but I wonder what the North Korean metro workers who renovated the trains thought of all the graffiti and stuff.