I finished the run in one piece (which was not a certainty due to v. little running before the race!). It was great fun running through the city (under the Brandenburg Gate was cool) although it has to be said the Irish are better cheer-er on-ers than the old Germans. They seemed more in to just looking on with their arms folded… (except that one old lady in Charlottenburg who did a great lot of cheering from her balcony. Danke lady).

and also this lotsa times today:

(you have to hit play on the RHS when you’ve got to the link):

Loudon Wainwright III – New Paint

Guess it’s Country Music day in Berlin!

“Ich bin die Kaiser von Berlin” said the man in the trench coat as he handed Brian a large old fashioned bicycle horn to hoot.

He showed us a large badge on his collar as ID and yes, it did indeed proclaim him to be King of the city.

Brian duly tooted the bicycle horn, and then the Kaisir said:

“dingdingly ding parpparp, kaiser kasimir, Valentines”

and blessed us both on the head with a homemade heart made out of cardboard and red paint.

Then he gave me a rose and charged Brian 2 quid.

Now that’s my kinda Valentines.

p.s. The Kaiser is pretty good at marketing: here’s his website: Kaiser Kasimir – which came wrapped around the flower along with a short story © Kasimir 2007.

And then the other side of it is , that once the dust has settled on the move, well, life just kinda goes along…! We like it better here, true, but we do not have Extraordinary Adventures daily.

And so I thought I’d just post a post about what we do all day.

I clearly know more about what I do than what Brian does, so it will be a wee bit Layla-tilted, but there you go.

I’ve written a few short stories, which are still works in progress, but can be read here. An excerpt from one of them is also going to be published in an e-book called 100 Stories for Haiti, which will be published online in the next week or so, with all proceeds going to the Red Cross’s work in Haiti.

I’ve signed up to online yoga. Check it out here. It’s great because it keeps my ass in line, but also because it’s filmed in the sunshine.

There isn’t much of that here. As Derek Scally said in his Berlin Diary: “Every October, a heavy, low-hanging cloud carpet is rolled out over the Berlin sky. For the next six months, the sun vanishes and a watery grey light drains the cityscape of its colours and sharp edges”

But you do get to build these:

I’ve also signed up for the Berlin Half Marathon on 28 March…. so if there is anyone out there wants to join up, Brian promises to cook us up a feast and half the night before!

But mostly me and Brian think about The Wire.

It has been a fair old while since last post – moving house, Christmas, New Year’s and just settling in has taken up more time than one would think!

But we’re in, we’re settled and Berlin is now home!

We had a great time over New Year’s with 14 people for dinner and visitors in the form of Ruth and Liam and Fiona and David, and Paul and Amy and Sam. Thanks guys for coming all the way over to see us – it really did make our house feel like a home to have you all hanging out with us in it.

So… what news?

Well, things we’ve learnt in the past few weeks include a number of snow-related lessons, that, as Irish peeps, we had to learn the hard way (Ireland’s ability to deal with ‘weather’ leaves alot to be desired it seems!)

> It is not a good idea to wear heels of any sort in the snow. Even small ones. You just fall over.
> Falling over is remarkably amusing.
> Don’t cycle your bike on the ice.
> Falling off your bike when you cycled it on the ice makes you feel like a 3 year old. Getting a plaster with a cartoon character on it helps.
> Minus 16 is really cold. It hurts.
> When the sun comes out go out and stand in it. You might not see it again for a while.
> You can ski on the flat in the park.
> You can walk on the river and the canal when it freezes.

Here are some photos of our new place, some very badly taken pix of our new years celemabrations, some snow pictures and some photos of Brian building a wardrobe, and some pix of everyone’s favourite baby Sam, for you to take a peek at if you like:

We went to see if for the first time since we viewed it for all of 10 minutes about 6 weeks ago.

We remembered it kinda like this:

When in fact… it’s kinda closer to this:

Well, slight exaggeration, but our MANSION, it actually just a nicely proportioned 2 bedroom apartment!

Amazing what the mind can do…!

But we’re going to be very cosy and happy there, I have a good feeling… more to follow I’m sure.

So when you are buying a massive bunch of vintage-pink roses, and the lady in the shop tells you they are fünf und dreißig euro, that means that they will cost you €35, not €3.50. And when you hand her €5, thinking “by golly Berlin really is stupidly cheap, I can’t believe that 10 stunning roses are going to cost me only €3.50″, she will look at you funny and say some things in German that you don’t understand. You’ll then enter into a long and involved game of charades, the result of which is that you realise you are going to have to pay the lady your very last €35 and that Berlin is not as very very cheap as you thought and your German is, well, definitely in need of some work.

Here are the culprits, I thought I should get my money’s worth out of the bloomin things by at least getting a post out of them.

This is one of the best so far:

Useful, eh?

These ones are cool though …

It was dark and wet and 7.30pm by the time we started to make our way down towards the Brandenburg Gate. There were rumours that Bon Jovi was playing, which had Brian nearly beside himself as you can well imagine. We hopped on the S Bahn from Hackescher Markt heading towards Unter den Linden. There had been no real signs of any celebrations around our hood during the day, besides alot of Polizi vans with flashing lights driving around, so we weren’t sure what to expect. The train didn’t stop at Unter (security I guess), so we got out at the next stop and followed the crowd up and out through the very modern Potzdamer Platz train station.

The whole concourse, complete with 10-story ads for Mini Coopers and Jimmy Choo at H&M, and all the way down towards the Brandenburg Gate, was jam packed with people (100,000 of them they say). It was impossible to see anything even on one of the large screens constructed on the side of the street. Most people were under 40 I’d say. It was raining. We could hear what was being said a few miles down the road, but it was all in German, which is still not up there on the list of languages we really, well, understand! I was open to standing around for a while, imagine we could see something and then pretend to everyone how awesome it was to be part of such a historical celebration, but Brian said that if there was no sign of Bon Jovi he really didn’t see the point, plus he really wanted a sausage,  so we decided to cut our losses and head home.

We watched the whole thing on the telly instead. It all looked very exciting indeed.

These snaps were as good as it got!:

New York Times photo gallery to mark 20 years of the fall of the Berlin wall

And some Then & Now pictures