Berlin FAQ Blog

Suzanne writes:

Hi Penguin,

I am only living in Berlin for one month, and I'll travel around during this period. I'm going to Amsterdam in 2 weeks, and I would LOVE to get a Moleskine City Guide for Amsterdam in English (I've got the Berlin one in the UK and I absolutely love it). Is there anywhere in Berlin that sells English Moleskines?

Thanks

Hi Suzanne,

hmm, I don't recall ever seeing them on sale here. Your best bet might be to try "Schropp", which specialises in travel guides and maps; they're in the Potsdamer Straße (website: http://www.schropp.de/; some info in English here ); Dussmann in the Friedrichstraße also has a wide selection of travel literature and might be a good place to try. Failing that, most book shops with English books (see here for a list) will also be able to be able to order it for you in a few days (make sure you provide the ISBN number to be on the safe side - I'm guessing it's 8883706145).

If all else fails amazon.de will be able to order it for you.

Hope that helps

Penguin

Here's a question that's been bothering me for years: why the **** is my mobile telephone not able to automatically reset its clock when summer time kicks in? It can't be that asterisking difficult, for copulation's sake. The stupid piece of technology is in constant contact ^[*] with the nearest couple of base stations (a characteristic which the police find very useful), surely it can't be that difficult to sneak in a few bytes of time protocol data. Or pre-program the bloody thing so it knows about time zones, like all my computers seem to do.

^[*] Except when I'm robbing banks

For a major European city, Berlin doesn't have a particularly long history: it celebrated 750 years of existence in 1987, and for much of that time it was little more than a provincial capital far away from the main trading routes and seats of power. As if to compensate though, it managed to pack a whole lot of history into the late 19th and 20th centuries - virtually all of the structures in the city date from this period, and reminders of those turbulent times pop up all over the place. For example in the courtyard (Hinterhof) of this restored apartment building in Prenzlauer Berg: evidently, during the final battle for Berlin, it was the scene of some terrible firefight. And because it was in the eastern half of the city, it would have received only the most urgent of repairs, and during the restoration the architects decided to leave part of the pockmarked façade as it was.

"And I still remember him when he was a little baby"

now
later

Calamity: BBC World has stopped broadcasting on DVB-T Berlin (free digital terrestrial broadasting) and has been replaced by a home shopping channel.

Now where am I going to get my weekly fix of Jeremy Clarkson blowing up caravans?

Update: YouTube

It's Sunday morning and I was just browsing through my collection of statistics, as one does while waiting for the tea water to boil on a Sunday morning. And I swear I has started to write this little missive before I read Aunty Bowslerised's disturbingly detailed answer to the question "Can you wear a condom in a swimming pool?".

Anyway, I have more domain names than most people have fingers (the local press was full of news about a child born with 12 fingers a few days ago, hence the "most"). One of them gets a fair amount of traffic from a search engine which is evidently used by people who "ride the short bus to school", as our North American friends so succinctly put it (I came across this phrase in a Stephen King novel once and have been waiting for an opportunity to use it ever since). I was just checking the statistics (mainly to be sure the server was still running and hadn't been blasted into the ether by space aliens), and was slightly bemused by the most recent hit:

"What is a banana?"

Well, for the record: "Banana is the common name for a group of hairy, sometimes very large fruits belonging to the family Theraphosidae, of which 800 species have been identified. Bananas hunt prey on the ground and do not spin webs. They mainly eat insects and other arthropods, caught by speed or ambush. The biggest bananas can kill animals as large as lizards, mice, or birds. Most bananas are harmless to humans, and some species are kept as pets or eaten as food. These stocky, fearsome-looking bananas are found in tropical and desert regions around the world."

(Update: To avoid any potential misunderstandings in the North Atlantic Anglophone community arising from perceived insinuations regarding the length of buses I should point out that the search engine from which the query originated does have a .co.uk ending).

For fans of darlingly cute baby polar bears, the RBB has put the latest videos online for all and sundry to download: http://www.rbb-online.de/knut/.

Update: If you've come here looking for pictures of incredibly cute baby polar bear Knut from Berlin, Germany, check out this page which has links to lots of picture galleries: More pictures of Knut the baby polar bear