thought we were in for balkan techno dance music

Instead we got this last night, in a smoky basement club that was exactly what I expected from Berlin--brick barrel vault ceiling, men with silly hair, and rampant drunkenness. He ordered an "Extasy", which was apparently all fruit juice and no alcohol; I had a Cosmo, which was almost completely alcohol in a very large glass, with half a pineapple balanced on the rim. We watched three girls act out the faces of inebriation--one who sat at a table with her head in her hands for most of the night, a second sporting a cigarette and a very tight and unforgiving light blue sweater who wove precariously on a raised section of floor, and a third in red attempting to swing dance with a relentless fella who found that he had to sort of toss her from position to position.

The band--I had a brief moment of hoping they were Ukrainian and thus would be singing in my target language--are in fact Croatian. Sort of Croatian frat-rock. A couple of brilliant songs, one with a Madness/Specials edge, another with more of a Russian thing going on, but otherwise...a "where is my lighter?" experience. I guess we'd missed the dj dancing part while we were out eating tapas with an old family friend of his, but from the looks of things when we came in, nobody had been dancing. So we sat, and sat, and eventually left. I am falling behind already on my stated intent of dancing myself silly in a city known for dance clubs...sigh.

I think I'm finally over my jet lag. So far everything I've ordered by myself in a restaurant has been the thing I thought I'd asked for, so I'm not totally incomprehensible. There is chocolate in the muesli and graffiti everywhere. The shelf toilets are not as weird as anticipated. There are lots of birds in Mitte and it is wonderful to hear them when one is wandering around at five a.m., trying to adjust to the time difference.