The days seem to pass so quickly. I think I am beginning to understand why travel blogs are updated so infrequently.

This past Monday, I tried to get up early to go to the Reichstag. It opens at 8. And I managed to get there at 9:15 in the A.M. That I was up so early is, as you all know, a minor miracle in and of itself. But at that hour, the line was actually longer than the first time I went by in the late afternoon. There were a bunch of tour busses outside and huge gaggles of old people filling the line, so I may just have been unlucky.

So instead I took a bus east and walked through the crypts of the last of the German Kings. Their sarcophagi lie under the Berliner Dom, a massive church built in 1905 by Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last of the Hohenzollerns. Thirteen years later, in 1918, his reign and his dynasty would end with Germany`s defeat in the First World War.

The crypt is filled with row upon row of sarcophagi. They come in pairs. The first has a crown resting on a pillow on top of the sarcophagus: the King; the other has no crown: his Queen. They fillthe basement. There are a solid three hundred years of German Kings.

Upon exiting from the crypt, I saw the open space south of the Dom. A century ago, the palace of the Hohenzollerns stood there. A half century ago, that palace was destroyed and a concrete and steel building was constructed to take its place. This was the Palace of the Republic, which housed the parliament of the East German government. A few years ago, this was in its turn destroyed. Now nothing stands. It is now just a grassy field.

I do not know what they are planning to build in the space. From what I hear, the Berliners don`t know what they are going to build either.

Then I walked a few blocks east to Alexanderplatz, the shopping center of Berlin, in search of decent coffee from Starbucks. And found it. It's in the bottom of the Fernsehturm Berlin, a massive television tower which was built by the East German government to be the tallest structure in Berlin and a symbol of the city. And now a Starbucks, the quintessential symbol of American capitalism, sits in the bottom. Ah, irony.

Alexanderplatz was the site of the largest protest in the revolution of 1989-1990 that brought down the government of East Germany. There is quite a cool exhibit now that commemorates the 20 year anniversary of the "Friendliche Revolution" (Peaceful Revolution) as it is called. It tells the story of the activities of various protest groups that started in the late 1970s until the formal, legal reunification of Germany in late 1990.

Then on Tuesday I loafed around all day. Went to cafes, studied a bit of German, read some Goethe, ate a döner, chatted with people. Then Tuesday night I went and met up with Lisa, a friend of Marty's who lives here in Berlin. She showed me a very cool beer garden and Lebanese restaurant. She recommended a sandwich made with "Halumi," a type of sheep cheese. It was quite delicious. I had stayed up in her part of town for three days and had walked by both of these places many times without ever stopping by. Knowing a local makes all the difference.

Marty asked me what my daily routine is like. And I suppose it might be of general interest. So here it is, at least for today.

9- Wake up. Go to a cafe. Drink coffee and study German. Today it was all about comparitive and superlative adjectives. Like good, better, and best. Which in German are gut, besser, und best. But it gets more complicated than that very fast because German grammar is a pain in the ass.

If I say "A better man is here." Or "I talk to a better man." Or "A better woman is here." Or "I talk to a better woman." In English, you just use the word "better" every time. In German, you have to use a different form of the word "besser" in each of those four sentences. (Nominative masculine/dative masculine/nominative feminine/dative feminine.)

10- Walk around, look around. Stumble upon a free-to-use ATM (Deutsche Bank).

11:30- Eat the best döner I have yet had in Germany. It was cheap (2.30 euro) and delicious. Walk back to my hostel. Ask if they have a bed available for the weekend. Answer: yes. My response: fuck yes. I really like the neighborhood (Friedrichshain) I am living in now. More on that later.

1- More coffee. Study more German.
2- Go to internet cafe. Check email. Write a blog post. (i.e., what I am doing right now.)

Then for the rest of the day it`s going to be:

4- Shower and take a nap
5- Eat dinner. Indian maybe? Or Lebanese. Or Pizza.
6- Go to Museum district. From 6-10 PM on Thursdays, most all the museums of Berlin have free admission.
11- Return home and sleep.

Friedrichshain: so Lisa lives up in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, which I stayed at when I first got to Berlin. And for the past few days I have been living in Kreuzberg. But yesterday I moved on to the Friedrichshain neighborhood. It is definitely my favorite part of town so far. There are lots of young people, lots of cafes, lots of trees, lots of döner shops, and just a general feeling of energy. And everything is much closer together than in the part of Kreuzberg I was staying at before.

The hostel I am at is very low-key, unlike the chain hostel I was staying at in west Kreuzberg. And it is uh . . . cool? I don't know how else to describe it. It is a little bit rough around the edges perhaps and a little bit dirty, but I don't mind that. And the people are very friendly.

Some English girls I had been staying with at the hostel in Kreuzberg thought Friedrichshain was a bit dodgy when they got off the U-bahn. And so they fled back to clean, normal west Kreuzberg.

Part of this is valid. I witnessed my first crazy (maybe Schizophrenic?) Berliner today. He was staring at the sidewalk and yelling at it.

But I think a part of their sense of the dodginess of the area came from an insufficient understanding of the uh . . . aesthetic culture of Berlin? In the States (and presumably in much of England), an area with lots of broken glass on the sidewalk, lots of trash on the ground, and lots of graffiti denotes a dodgy, unsafe area of the city. But in Berlin, pretty much the whole city has lots of broken glass, lots of trash on the ground, and lots of graffiti. There is less the farther west one goes, but even in the nicer districts there is still quite a lot of it by American standards.

But there are tons of moms pushing strollers about and kids playing in the park. So it's not the red-light district of Berlin by any means.

Speaking of which, I am amazed at the laissez-faire way in which Berliner parents deal with their kids. The four year-olds walk in sandals along a sidewalk covered in broken glass. I mean, a lot of broken glass. Which I suppose they have to do, otherwise they couldn't walk anywhere in Berlin.

The physical distance the parents allow between themselves and their kids on the city streets is also quite striking. I saw a six-year-old riding along the sidewalk on her little bike and her mother following on her own bike. The mother saw something in a store window and so stopped to look at it. The kid kept going. The mother looked at it for awhile. The kid was almost a city block away when the mother stopped window shopping and started riding forward again. All the while, neither mother nor kid seem concerned in the least. This is so utterly normal. I see stuff like this all the time.

And in the parks here, there is a fenced off kids play area and then the main park area. So in the evenings, a bunch of adults sit in the park with a joint in one hand and a beer in the other. And a large number of kids play in the adjacent playground. The area that separates them is all of five feet.

Oh yes. The possession and public smoking of pot is legal in Berlin. I hear it is legal to have up to an ounce. But I have seen a number of shops that advertise "legal drug sales" and a number of dealers sitting in the parks, nonchalantly selling it. And they both definitely have more than an ounce. So I'm not sure how exactly what is legal and what is enforced with respect to pot in Berlin.

And when I say graffiti is everywhere, I mean graffiti is everywhere. At least in Prenzlauer Berg and Friedrichshain. The residents seem to tolerate it, and many seem to have done their own on the front of their shops and houses. I watched a documentary on graffiti once. (Or "street art," if you want to sound classy). I guess there are districts in Barcelona where it is actually legal to do graffiti. In Berlin, I imagine it is illegal, but the laws against it are just not enforced very much. No one seems to mind.

I speculate that this might have something to do with the fact that East Berlin didn't have freedom of the press in the 1980s, and so messages scrawled in spraypaint at night on the sides of houses was probably one of the safest ways to make political statements that were critical of the communist regime. But that is pure speculation on my part.