‪live music is so cool i wish musicians were real‬

‪can't believe i got treated to two and a half hours of excellent live music from two different three-person bands just by standing outside a train station, this city amazes me? amplified guitars and drumkits are not my stereotype of buskers‬

26. berliners say a word other than kiez challenge [impossible]

27. travelling back in time to like 1972 to show a bunch of West German CDU politicians photos of how the Ampelmännchen has spread to West Berlin in future, and deliberately letting them believe this means the Soviets did eventually take it, just to see the looks on their faces

28. i love the clicking that the street crossing things make. makes me think of swing…

29.

> promised an „u-bahn“
> purchase ticket
> overground

🔎🐱

30.

(steps into mitte for like five seconds) HAVE YOU GUYS HEARD OF THIS THING CALLED CHECKPOINT CHARLIE??? DID YOU KNOW BERLIN USED TO BE DIVIDED BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND THE SOVIET UNION

31. i love it when the train falls out

32. ooh germany also has legally mandated write-only storage devices on cash registers, like sweden has had for a long time. but the swedish ones don't print stuff like „Algorithmus ecdsa-plain-SHA256“ on receipts, ehehehe

33. i love it when something is labelled in a way that, at least superficially, says completely opposite things in each language. „entwerten“ literally means “invalidate”. (but the use of “validate” here is a weird one that effectively also means that)

‪34. wait if you live in germany dhl will not only actually deliver stuff to your door, but they'll give you real-time tracking to the level of which stops on the delivery route the van has already been to???? are us non-germans subsidising the better experience for germans…‬

‪35. love to exist in the totally normally named DACH area: Deutschland, Austria und Confoederatio Helevetica‬

36. cursed atms update: i found another e*ronet one and this one refused to accept my n26 card but would accept my new bunq card (replacement for one that was eaten) and didn't charge me! now that's… what's even going on here. are they treating me different now i'm “german”

36½. you see, this bunq card was issued after telling bunq i moved to germany, so it might tell the atm i live here. the previous one was issued before that, so it might tell the atm i live in sweden. both are eur cards issued by a dutch bank. so that might cause discrimination

36¾. my n26 card is a eur card issued by a german bank, but that one was also issued when i was in sweden, so that might explain why it was rejected. though this is extremely strange. that atm seems pretty sus to me

37. wait there's… laugencroissants? simultaneously croissant and laugengebäck? nobel prize material

‪38. okay you want an actual berlin observation? i just walked past a … book store? where all the books are in english? the second labelled category of books i noticed was gender studies. also they sell bagels‬

39. i have now gotten a youtube ad from a THIRD company offering a coding bootcamp fully financed by the Bundesagentur für Arbeit (the pitch is always: “you can get the skills to become a highly paid software dev for free!!!”) that's actually absurd i've only been here a month

39½. wait fuck is one of those companies the same one that does that annoying “there are not enough programmers in sweden” ad also? i'll have to keep an eye out…

anyway uh. hmm. shovelling unemployed people into coding bootcamps when the tech job market is already Bad is. hmmmm

40. einsteigen bitte

zurückbleiben bitte

41. i've been told the brandenburger tor is the symbol of berlin or something so here it is, the picture you've been waiting for, it's brandenburger tor (u)

42. at 00:00 CET on 1 January 2021, after the end of a transition period, the island of great britain and a substantial part of ireland disappeared from the north sea, replaced by dashed-line boxes around miscellaneous colonial legacy posessions

‪42½. (this is the eu information centre thing in berlin, „erlebnis europa“)‬

43. okay so berlin has a huge russian embassy right. that's nothing so surprising though i didn't realise it would be so big, it's an entire goddamn 300m-wide city block.

anyway the entire street in front or it is cordoned off! all the way to the edge of the pavement!

43½. so now if you want to walk past that side of it you actually have to walk on the adjacent lane of the road passing by it, which is where i took this picture from. incredible.

the street on the other side is still accessible though.

43¾. a lonely german cop stands and guards the cordoned-off public street in front of the russian embassy in berlin. behind him, the embassy stands lifeless. outside the cordon, berlin continues as lively as ever

44. this is not a photo of the brandenburg gate, it's a photo i took of the sky behind it because, as always, the sky captivates me in a way nothing else can

45. there's this little garden, or lawn might be a more fitting word, in front of the american embassy in berlin. it's mostly grass, but there's a ring of flowers around the outside, and in the centre a huge water fountain spraying, like, at least three times a human height

45½. i don't think it's actually part of the embassy, it's just part of the street in front of it. but, seeing it in the bright sunlight for a moment earlier, that bright green lawn, the fountain, the flag in the background, it just felt quintessentially american

‪45¾. truly, is there any sight so american as a lawn?‬

46.

Notausgang
Emergency Exit

(read the alt text)

47. everywhere i go, i see her face (the swedish state)

48. i am outraged… it cannot be accepted that the flag of germany is defaced by the addition of symbols of this illegitimate „republic“, this is secessionist and a further obstacle to reunification

49. here we find a sacred german shrine: the DB cube. travellers come from far and wide to make offerings to it, in the hope the cube will bestow upon them its favour, and bless their travels on the DB Netz. those who disrespect it are believed to be punished with “fallings out”

49½. what elevates this seemingly humble shrine to such great status? the answer is hard to see in the image, but inescapable in real life: the great DB tower in the distance overlooks this tiny DB shrine. one dare not disrespect the gods when they can see you do it