Ich bin Californian
As you may or may not know, Kennedy should NOT have told the world that he was a jelly donut, which is what ‘ich bin ein Berliner’ means. What he should have said was ‘ich bin Berliner,’ as I learned on my recent trip to Berlin. The trip explains the lapse in my writing and I am taking a hurried moment to catch up while in London before I head home.
Berlin was very interesting from a historical standpoint and I enjoyed the trip, but oh the grimness, oh the lack of humor, oh the bad food, even sadly, oh the mediocre beer.
The highpoint of the trip food wise was some turkish street food in the form of a halfway decent chicken doner kebab and also some quite nice spicy mushrooms and onions with bread. The low point was also street food in the form of the ubiquitous and deadly and aptly named ‘curry wurst’ which doubled as the wurst food in Berlin and the wurst use of the word curry ever devised. A curry wurst is a sausage served with curry flavored ketchup. Unfortunately the next wurst food was at the fancy restaurant I ate at and the only slightly less wurst was the extremely cheap but terribly authentic local bar/restaurant. To be fair, that one was at least value for money…
The only laugh I heard from a Berliner was from my cab driver after he drove off with the trunk of the cab unclosed and the hotel doorman still holding my bags. He laughed again when he reversed back around the corner and picked them up along with a huge lecture from the doorman and he laughed again after we got to the airport and openend the trunk and did a double take pretending the bags weren’t there after all.
Food in London has been better with two decent curries – one Goan chicken with okra and one standard saag ghosht.
Got to see a cracker of a Fulham-Bolton game with plenty of drama, good buildup, terrible defending and mostly poor finishing, but two cracking Fulham goals within a minute of each other.
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