Berlin FAQ Blog

Well, the twice-a-week swimming plan has hit a small snag. It hasn't, like many good intentions, become a surfacing material for Hades-bound roads; but the ambitiously-named Europa Sportpark is closed during August for repairs. That means the only indoor pool which is open during the school holidays and is within reasonable commuting distance of Penguin HQ is the one in Ernst-Thälmann-Park. It's actually closer to Chez Penguin than the ESP, but memories from long long ago of it being in some way a little, hmm odd, have not hitherto encouraged me to go there. However, the penguin wings need training, so off I went.

It looks like - should I switch on my laptop, and the wireless thingy is running, picks up an open access point and connects automatically (as is its wont) - it would be grounds for the local bobby to come plodding along and arrest me for hacking.

Man arrested for stealing broadband

Good thing the bloke in the article wasn't sitting within sight of a primary school, otherwise he'd probably have got life for paedophilia or something. And if they'd found containers of liquid larger than 100ml on his person, no doubt he would have been put away somewhere very secret for a very long time.

Meanwhile, in presumably unrelated news, record numbers of people are leaving the UK.

From the Penguin Box of Random Photos: a building in Berlin. Where, or more precisely what is it?

Good news for residents of Prenzlauer Berg for whom closing times of 9 or 10pm are still too early - the Kaisers in the Schönhauser Allee near Milastraße (not the one in the Arcaden; it's about halfway between U-Bahn stations Eberswalder Straße and Schönhauser Allee) is open every day (except Sunday) from 8am until midnight.

If midnight is still too early for you, there's also a Reichelt somewhere useless like Wilmersdorf or Tempelhof which is experimenting with round-the-clock opening (I suppose you could say 24/6, due to the still-compulsory Sunday closing).

Anyone else remember the good old days when "late night shopping" meant until 8pm on Thursdays only? And on the first Saturday of the month, shops could open right through until 4pm, instead of 2pm?

If you've ever worked in IT, "never change a running system" is the number 1 mantra for saving unnecessary trouble. Unfortunately the kind of people who work in IT are the kind who like to tweak and twiddle. Such as myself. You see, recently I've been vaguely worried by a WLAN identifier in my apartment block which announces itself as "Finanzamt" (tax authority), and while I assume it's someone's idea of a joke, I thought I'd better check my own rickety setup to make sure it's not transmitting details of my many bank accounts on palm-infested islands in plain text to all and sundry, or offering free net access to drive-by pedophile surfers.

Everything seems to be AOK and hardened enough to keep Mr. Schäuble from sticking his nose where he shouldn't (note to self: must take the bomb-building instructions off the other website). While I was checking Mrs. Penguin's computer however, I noticed there was a system software update available, and being the efficient, helpful person I am, I installed it. After the compulsory reboot - tada, the wireless access failed to connect to anything. Turned out it was still working, but only after replugging the USB thingy and manually entering the connection data - after every reboot - and I had absolutely no recollection of how I'd installed the damn thing in the first place (apart from the fact that some slight trickery was needed). Grrr. Fortunately Mrs. Penguin was out, and after a while it occured to me I could try reinstalling the driver, and thank all the relevant deities, it worked again.

So, there I was with a laptop in hand and a few minutes to spare, and I thought it might be fun to see just how far the PenguinNet extends into the surrounding ether. 2.5 stories down is the answer, which is about what I expected. What did surprise me though is just how many other networks I was picking up - apart from the 'F' one, there must be two dozen available from the respective fringes of Chez Penguin, and holding the laptop out on the balcony, I was surprised to see a network (abeit quite faint) evidently belonging to the shop on the other side of the (quite wide) street, five stories down.

Anyway, no particular point to this, just a mild expression of my wonderment at about just how much stuff is floating through the airwaves.

What with Mrs. Penguin being from the Japanese archipelago and all that, I quite often find myself being expected to be an expert on Japanese cuisine in Berlin, which is always a bit of an embarassment because for whatever reasons we very rarely venture into the relevant establishments. I think it's because Mrs. Penguin has worked in too many and can't stand the sight of them. And the annual-ish Japan trip gives me ample of opportunity to eat more than twice my bodyweight in fish, before swimming several hundred miles through icy seas and standing on top of an egg in sub-zero temperatures all winter.

No, sorry, wrong train of thought. Anyway, it's the middle of August, which in Japan is the season of the O-bon festival, which is a festival of Buddhist origin to honour one's ancestors, or more prosaically a time to visit one's Heimat and generally eat, drink and be merry. Or if your Heimat is really too far away, just to eat, drink and be merry. Such was the idea behind smartdeli's O-bon event today, a place I'd never heard of until Mrs. Penguin stumbled across it on the interwebz.

It's in Friedrichshain, a little way east of the Boxhagener Platz, and while the website gives the impression of an ultra-cool designer location, it turned out to be the kind of place someone terminally uncool such as myself can feel at home in. It is run by genuine Japanese people (i.e. not one of those Vietnamese-run Thai-Sushi places) from, as a general impression, the alternative-arty end of the spectrum. The menu looks very nice, although today slightly more Imbiss style fare - served on cardboard at lower prices was on offer, such as this yakisoba (fried noodles) with chicken for a very reasonable EUR 3.50. Very nice - just like in Japan (though a little short on the pickled ginger), and not at all greasy. Definitely worth a return visit.

One of the joys of being a free agent is having to deal with health insurers directly, which in my case means having to complete the odd form every now and again. Now, as you may have noticed, there's this thing called the internet, and my insurers are very keen on promoting their website as the place to go for all your needs which don't actually require direct human contact, e.g. for downloadable forms, which you can download, print out, fill in by hand and entrust to the Deutsche Post so that some minion at the health insurers can input the data back into the system.

If only it was that easy. However, they seem to change their login system every 9 months or so, which means every time you want to access something, you have to fill out another online form before I can get any further. Then you get to the area with the forms and discover you need an extra "Freischaltcode" which they send by dead tree mail before you can get hold of the forms themselves, which are presumably extra top s1kr3t. Hah, thinks I to myself, they sent me such a Freischaltcode last time I went through this, and by a miracle I had actually filed it in the health insurance file, rather than the round one.

Did it work? Of course not. Grrr. Time to vent some spleen at an innocent hotline worker (hey, at least the calls are free). Turns out my login doesn't work because I haven't logged in since the last time I logged in, which was too long ago, and the Freischaltcode is only valid for 30 days anyway (not that it says so on the letter, of course).

To their credit at least, it's a very quick-to-answer hotline (none of that "Bitte warten Sie - pleaz holt ze lain" muzak which makes you want to pump sub-machinegun rounds into innocent bystanders, and let us be thankful that German isn't a language widely spoken in e.g. India), and it appears they're used to this kind of thing, and after some soothing words I was put through to the Department of Sending Out Forms To People Who Can't Download Them, who promised to pop one in the post today.

No, it's not my birthday. Last time I was 24, Helmut Kohl was still Kanzler.

That's actually 24 x 50 metres. You see, I've taken up swimming. You see, I've been suffering from the curse of the contemporary desk worker, viz a lack of movement in the upper body, apart from intensive but minute movements in the general vicinity of a keyboard, which have been bringing on the old RSI.

It's not even that I'm particularly unfit. Regular intensive cycling has given me legs like treetrunks and buttocks of steel, but leaves me with stickman arms and an abdomen which is showing signs of reverting into its natural, penguin-like state.

Something Had To Be Done. The obvious answer was of course swimming, an activity I've been studiously avoiding since I was about 14 because it's an activity I associate with loud, noisy pools filled with a mixture of chlorine, annoying small children, even more annoying large children and also annoying and irritating teenagers, all guarded over by cryptofascist whistleblowing Bademeisters.

So, off to the grandly named Europa Sportpark in the Landsberger Allee it was. This is a complex built as part of Berlin's chronically unsuccessful bid for the 2000 Olympics (and be glad it failed, because if you think Berlin is poor now, imagine what it'd be like if it had had to pay for an Olympics as well. We'd probably be lighting the streets with candles).

Unfortunately, without my glasses I'm as blind as a bat which had its sonar ruined by spending its teenage years in techno clubs, and it took me a while to navigate from the changing area to the pool itself. Partly because I had the impression the swimming was taking place in the actual Olympic pool, which is on one side, but there's a 50m pool on the other side which is where the hoi-polloi such as myself are permitted.

It turned out to be quite nice. Fairly quiet - lots of serious people doing serious swimming, no teenagers burning off their excess hormones or whatever it is teenagers like to do these days, and you can barely taste the chlorine. Even the Bademeisters are cool and laid back, sitting around their little glass kiosk for the most part, except for the occasional emergency massage.

The only problem remaining was the actual swimming, as it occurred to me I've never actually learnt to swim. I am well acquainted with the art of not drowning though, and I can wave my arms and legs around in a manner which propels myself through the water in the general direction of forwards, but that trick where you pretend to be a whale on acid has, up until now, eluded me. So I tried my luck in the lanes reserved for the elderly, infirm, obese and anyone else who likes to keep their head above water all the time. The first time I managed a whole 7 lengths before various extremities started failing in differing, alarming ways, and was constantly being overtaken by people who can probably still remember the war. It would probably be more efficient, from a transport point of view, to just walk.

However, every time since then has, to my delight, been a slight improvement, and last Friday I was not only overtaking people as young as 55, I also managed a record 24 lengths. Although by the time I got to the last two, I believe I was wheezing and gasping, but that was alright because it was late in the evening and all the types with the Moses complex (i.e. who seem to take it personally that the waters fail to part before them, and attempt to make it do so by imbibing half of it and splashing the other half over the side of the pool) had gone home.

Some rough and ready calculations show that if this rate of improvement keeps up, I'll be breaking the sound barrier by 2013 or so. So if any time you see a wet and dripping penguin suddenly flying past, it might be me.

I suppose it's one way of breaking it down into smaller pieces...

Seen in a fishmonger's window in the Schönhauser Allee.

Dontcha just hate it when you're waiting for One of Those Phone Calls That Might Change Everything, and have no idea when it will come (or if in fact the people on the other end have forgotten about you completely). Time... goes... by... very... slowly...

I couldn't take the suspense any more and risked dashing off an email - formulated with extreme caution in a "terribly sorry to disturb you but I'm running out of fingernails to chew on" sort of way - to the person I'm supposed to be hearing from. Turns out the wheels on the other end are grinding far more slowly than I was initially given to understand, but they did actually remember me, which is a Good Sign.

Must put some mustard on those nails.