Long time no bloggable activity. I’ve been settling down into a nice routine here in Berlin—one that involves delicious sandwiches, good coffee, and some cool, interesting people who like to talk about intriguing and/or stupid things. People seem to be more willing to just go sit in parks in Berlin. I can’t exactly put my finger on it. I tried to partake, but was quickly ostracized for taking pictures on hallowed hipster ground. Still, you get the idea.

I’m known now around this one bar as the guy that demolished all other competitors on Music Quiz night. It was the stuff of legend; the kind of performance people will be talking about around these parts for decades after I’m dead. Think Reggie Jackson’s 3 home run game or Joe Montana in the 80s. The tide of the evening turned when I successfully nailed this classic:

This, of course, was part of the Soundtrack portion. After shocking the crowd there, it took me about 1/2 of one note to recognize this one. It was a bit predictable, and I could feel it coming, but as anyone who knows my affinity for LoTR can attest to, this was a free kick on an open net:

Today, I decided to take the long train ride out to the Olympic Stadium. This was the site of the 1936 Olympics, where Hitler managed to hide all of the disastrous evidence of things to come with the eye of the world squarely on him. As is the case with most National Socialist architecture, the stadium had a bunch of features that bore no practical significance, and were instead designed solely to honor the “master race” and to make Hitler feel big and strong. I likened it to a child who has a set of crayons, a lot of paper, and the task of designing the house they would like to live in when they grow up. “And over here is going to be the place where I keep all of the ice cream used to fill my swimming pool. Over here is the house where I’ll have a thousand dogs that love me and want to be my best friends and want to play with me all the time. And this little thing here is a movie theater that only plays The Sandlot and the seats are going to be made of candy.”

I got off the train and was immediately impressed by the fact that the street that runs around the stadium is called:

Jesse Owens was, of course, the American that walked into the Games and treated Hitler like the punk bitch that he was. While winning 4 gold medals, he simultaneously told Hitler to take his “Aryan race superiority shit and shove it” (Citation Needed).

In what is most likely going to be the first of many skyline shots from elevated vantage points, I made the trek to the top of the bell tower that overlooks the stadium.

The original bell was removed for obvious reasons, but those obvious reasons still remain. Someone had somewhere else to be in my only guess:

Anyway, here is the view overlooking sunny and completely not gloomy in any way Berlin.

Pretty good.

It got to raining, so that got me to thinking about one of the aforementioned sandwiches and a nice, hot Internet. 

Going to take it easy tonight, most likely. This may include one of those beers that I trashed in an earlier blog post. The ones with Sprite in them? Remember? Shut up. They’re refreshing.

Shut up.