Café Kreuzberg

After dinner last evening with a friend, we decided to carry on with the adventure of discovering new places, like we do a lot in the city. This time, not far from the restaurant Nansen, I had noticed a nice place behind some trees, at Ohlauer Str. 37. And it is a real jewel: The owner paid attention with a lot of love that the old atmosphere of lounge of the café bewares. This nice bar is the point of meeting for the neighborhood. Many people who were there last evening just opened the next door to go back home. You will find there a large choice but selective alcohols (whiskeys, brandy, French Armagnac and Calvados) below certain rarities. Besides, there are openly chosen red wines and white wines. And the music always magnificent. We were so happily surprised with the choice that we really thought we were back in our country in some exclusive bar. Even the prices are low regarding the offer. Outside last night was fabulous until the wind started. A wonderful place to recommend.

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C3

Beginning of September took place a very interesting festival in berghain. It was the C3 : club contemporary classical. C3 is dedicated to innovative mergings between classical music and club culture, presenting high-quality contemporary works that fit a club interior both aesthetically and aurally. Throughout the history of Western music, “serious“ music has been paired by composers with popular material, thereby pushing forward the development of the art form. This tradition continues today through composers utilizing techniques and aesthetics common to club culture and electronic music such as repetition, sampling or the integration of visuals. As an important location for classical music and the current world capital of the club scene, Berlin makes a highly suitable location for what is perhaps the first festival to exclusively showcase only music that blurs the boundaries between these two, usually very separate, worlds. C3 aims to open the ears of club and classical music fans, widening the audience-base for both, and to promote creative dialog between both scenes. Connections between art forms is also a focal point of the festival location, the berghain, considered one of the world’s top clubs. The artists featured in the C3 program were selected to reflect the wide variety of approaches underway internationally and are but a small representation of activity taking place in isolated pockets worldwide. Their work is presented in short, live sets of approximately 45 to 60 minutes accompanied by visuals. On the final night, DJs take over where the live performers leave off, building a purely electronic bridge from contemporary classical stage to dance floor.

My life without me

This is probably one of the saddest movie I ever seen. It's not that I particularly keen on sadness but sometimes It just makes you realize how lucky you are in life, having a simple life without troubles. How would I manage in the case that the event would happen to me ? I don't know. What I am sure of, is that I will not get the strenght of this little woman. It's worth seeing My life without me but please be strong ! The plot is about Ann, a hard-working 23-year-old mother with two small daughters, an unemployed husband, a mother, who sees her life as a failure, and a jailed father whom she has not seen in ten years. She works nights as a janitor in a university she could never afford to attend, lives in a caravan in her mother's backyard, and has no aspirations. Her life changes dramatically when after a medical check-up she is diagnosed with cancer and told she has only two months to live. Deciding not to tell anyone of her condition, using the cover of anemia, Ann makes a list of things to do before she dies.

The giants in Berlin

Royal de Luxe

It is a shame that the weather today is not that good, rainy and cloudy, because the french theatre company Royal de Luxe is in town and will help to celebrate the national day of German reunification. "Bonjour Mademoiselle" Perched on the balcony of the city hall, the mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, greeted in French a five metres high's doll which answers him by a graceful movement of the hand. Animated by about twenty puppeteers supported by a gigantic machinery, the " small giant " of wood and steel woke up, stretched and even took a shower in front of the crowd. According to the instructions received by loudspeaker, the puppeteers removed its pink nuisette to dress it in a green dress and in a fisherman's yellow oilskin. Hoisted by a crane, the mega-doll floated a moment in the gloomy air before embarking on a boat made rusty to search for its uncle from whom it was separated by an incomprehensible cataclysm. After a parade in the city center of the capital, the puppet is going to find its uncle, a giant of 15 metres, on Saturday, anniversary of the German Reunification 19 years ago and National holiday, in front of the Brandenburg Gate. They will be welcomed by Mr Wowereit and the French Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand. The show, symbolizing the separation and the reunion after the opening of the Berlin Wall November 9th, 1989 will end on Sunday with a big festive parade of both marionettes finally together. In this occasion, tens of thousand censored letters, symbolizing the years of separation, " will be returned to the population " by means of artillery firing at the crowd.

Ben Klock - OK (Feat Elif Bicer)

To die together

I always said myself, that the most difficult, in the death, it was the solitude. We go away and everybody stays. Moreover, we ignore where we go. And people who stay do not know it either. It is a goodbye on a platform. We are alone in an empty train, the destination of which is indicated nowhere. Neither on the car, nor on the ticket. We are conscious that the persons to whom we make a small movement of goodbye, will join us some day in this place of which none of us knows the name or the place, which does not maybe exist, but they do not seem urging to make it. By diverse subterfuges, they will delay at most the moment of our reunion by reducing their consumption of alcohol and tobacco, rolling less faster with the car, wearing a helmet on the bike, eating 5 organic fruits a day, jogging. These deaths that we loved, who wait for us and that we apply to make dawdle. I would soon have more dead friends than irritated friends, it is about it that we recognize that a Leo has just celebrated its 43rd birthday. The only possibility not to be alone the day of its death, it is to be among the victims of an air crash or a wreck. There is also an bus accident. Or the collective suicide like with the Solar Temple but it is difficult to find fifteen or twenty friends crazy enough to kill themselves the same day. There is also the war. Is it not this craze of people for the war, from prehistory to our days, due to the perspective not to die alone ? Few places are less sad than a military cemetery filled with dead boys together. They give the impression to live together. Their youth and their good-companionship seem to have been preserved in their grave. The drama of Titanic fascinates us because, during two hours, a community of several hundreds of persons built up itself : the one who had not found a place aboard lifeboats. She has just died, the last survivor of the Titanic. On April 15th, 1912, she was 2 months old. There are never survivors. I dream about these deaths, not separated from the flight AF447 and crashed in the Atlantic. What feelings had they any for the others in the minute when they died together? The fury? The condolence? The tenderness? Was there a moment, in the death, where the fear is crossed and where we arrive at the other place ? The passengers of the Airbus A330 are more united between them than they had been with the other human beings throughout their life, they share with 227 strangers the non transmissible experiment of the death. Every time I go in a plane, I look at the other travelers and say to me that I shall end maybe my life with them. I try to find in all of them something special and it works, because everybody has something special, even me. I think of the sense of guilt which the parents of the flight Rio-Paris had to their children whose ticket they had paid. In the last crazy love glance of the husband to his wife that he believed not to love any more or to love less. In the smile of the friend to the friend. The millions of split concerns : health, house, taxes, examinations. All these modest, careful and attentive existences destroyed in one minute as it will be ours in some seconds, if we live old. The biggest human community is the community of deaths, because the living human is in perpetual disappearance. There is no morality in this, it is necessary not to do any morality.

Elzef - Tchaka l'arracheur

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German cousin 1

I have a couple of friends from Austria and because they were in Berlin for some days, the question was asked, what distinguishes the Austrian of the German. It is said : the first one laughs, the other one not. Another peculiarity is that the one eats Wienerschnitzel, the other one prefers Currywurst - this last one is unmistakably a part of the German identity, a museum in Berlin is moreover dedicated to it recently. "As said Karl Valentin, a German humorist, "what separates the Germans of the Austrians, it is the common language". "The Austrians are Germans without sense of the Nazi guilt. They are more cheerful and politically more incorrect than the Germans. They annoy the Germans and laugh at them permanently. They are, in general, more creative and have a more pronounced humor. But they do not build cars, what makes that the Germans cannot take this ethnic group really seriously. "Another Austrain friend said that "The Germans are lazy. Their humor is very different from the Austrian one. They have no "schmäh". For your knowledge, "schmäh" is this attitude facing life, this funny disposal of the Viennese that allows him to resolve the conflicts between persons. "The Germans are very bureaucratic, very dogmatic. They submit themselves to the authority with happiness. They look towards the Prussia, us, towards at Italy. " The Austrian inherited this monarchic bureaucracy, which is a bureaucracy of theater with which we can always settle. The severity of the law is eased by a certain negligence. "Regarding the Nazi past, the Austrians arranged themselves to make guilty the Germans.

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German cousin 2

The German answers that we surely never tried to make Austrians enjoy themselves at a birthday party. They sit at the table and drink a beer after the other one, at best you obtain some sighs punctuated of " ah jo " when the Germans know how to have the alcohol exuberant, likely dancing. The Austrian - It is only my feeling – is depressed, an effect " east block " doubtless: neither ever very happy, nor ever very unfortunate, still to grumble or to complain. He did not besides clean its collective consciousness of the 2nd World war and feels even today an ambivalent feeling on this subject, contrary on what took place in Germany. Generations of young Germans learnt the mistake and forgot the national pride, that did not take place in Austria, where the extreme right and the racism is showed more openly and "legally" than in Germany. The Austrian has a complex with the German to whom he refers himself all the time (while the German ignores the Austrian - what has to annoy for sure). Doubtless he does not digest that for the rest of the world, Hitler is German and not Austrian, while it was its main export product (while discarding on the so-called German "invader" when that arranges him). And doubtless it is also heavy to be constantly reduced to Sissi and Franz-Jo, who, without Romi Schneider, would have sunk into oblivion since a very long time … The Austrian also suffers from the complex of the former empire became a big village and can’t stand Germany is so crushing. And Vienna, disproportionate capital regarding the country, is certainly creative, but it is not Berlin and the Austrian capital is not moreover representative of the general mentality.

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Berlin wall

The renovation of the fresco of the Berlin Wall, presented as the biggest outdoor gallery of the world, is in progress. Berlin offers itself a new dye. The authors of the fresco which recovers a piece of the Wall, in ode in the reunification of both sides of Germany, put themselves at work. They repaint their works, which must be ended with the aim of November 9th, 2009. Decorated in 1990 by 118 artists from about twenty countries, this so-called fresco "East Side Gallery" spreads out on 1,3 km along the river Spree – don’t forget sandwiches and water to visit it. Situated on the east side of the "antifascist protection’s wall", virgin of any inscription before the opening of the borders between east and west Germany, it becomes the support of works carrying a message of peace and hope. During these twenty years, the weather and the absence of maintenance contributed to its degradation, and it is even difficult to distinguish the graffiti which mask the paintings. 86 painters have already answered positively to the invitation of the association, but others still refuse to come to Berlin to restore their work "of former days" if they do not receive 15.000 euro of fees instead of 3.000 planned. Roughly, adios the “free” artistic production for peace in 2009...

music for one apartment and six drummers

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Let’s eat a Greek ? you mean a Turkish ?

Our ancestors or non-French would not have understood the metonymy : “eating a Greek” is eating a sandwich. But what disturbs is not the cannibal allusion but the vagueness around the origin of the sandwich. Most of Greek look like Turkish kebabs. And certain Turkish restaurants propose Greek. If you do not understand if "Greek" is Greek or Turkish (and you ask, besides, if the shawarma could not be added to the list of these sandwiches which are alike all), here is an explanation of the big confusion. Why is it said "Greek" even when many distributors of the sandwich in yellow punnet are Turkish (or Arabic) ? The naming was certainly retained in French because the first salesmen in France were mainly Greek. The Turkish immigration, particularly entrepreunariale is more recent. Then the sandwich is called "Greek", even sometimes at the Turkish restaurant owners. Why to say that your sandwich is "Greek" if you know that it is Turkish? A restaurant owner answers: " When we settled down, everybody already called this sandwich "Greek", thus we gave it the name which people here know. But "Greek" and döner are different originally: "Greek", it is some minced meat then trained altogether and burned(blown) out, while the döner, they are fragments of meat stuck together, and then burned out. "Before being a sandwich, the döner kebab is a dish. Now, this dish is originally Turkish ("döner kebab " significant "to turn" and " burned out meat "). Its inventors would be Turkish soldiers of the Middle Ages who, in Anatolia, used their sword to burn out fragments of meat by turning them above a fire. The Ottoman Empire sheltered a large number of nomad communities. During the dates historians debated of the food, the döner gained a Greek equivalent, the "gyros", of Greek "to turn", and an equivalent in the Arabic regions, the shawarma. The date of the passage of the horizontal brooch in the vertical brooch is badly known; however, a Turkish family of Bursa claims the invention, in the XIXth century, of the " vertical barbecue ". Gas grill and automatic brooch then replaced coal and crank. The migrations of the Turks, the Greeks and the Arabs towards the western countries in the XXth century spread the dish up to the papillae of western urbans and with its Turkish community of about 124 000 inhabitants, Berlin became the capitable of the döner. Lover of the döner kebab at the exit of disco, which defies the dietical correct by claiming this moment as the best to appreciate the sandwich, please thank Mehmet Aygun. Turk immigrated in Germany, he worked in the restaurant of his uncle in Berlin and thought, one day of year 1971, of putting the meat burned out in a Mediterranean bread. The key of the success was in the passage of "in the spot" to " to take away". And to add a yoghourt sauce, also called white sauce. The difference of preparation of the meat, the accompaniment and the sauce gives two very different sandwiches, to compare of authentic gyros and kebab. If we said "Turkish" for döner kebab and "Greek" for gyros, we would fight a little against the standardization of these sandwiches, which stop by all being alike.

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