Nov 8, 2007

I spent my morning wandering around Berlin, visiting the DDR museum, eating at a crappy American diner (I know, I know, but it was the only place I could find that was open), and finding out that the 2 € all you can surf told of in the lonely planet guide was no longer.

In the afternoon, after checking into the City Stay hostel (quite a nice place) and enjoying a much needed shower, I checked out the tourist flyers spread out in the basement. A magazine immediately caught my eye with headlines “Sustainable IT”, and “Preloaded Open Source PCs”. It’s a magazine put out by the newthinking store. I had to check it out.

I walked for about a 20 minutes north of the Friedrichstrasse S- and U-Bahn station through a universityish part of town to find a modern open space divided into a presentation space and a store. The store sells T-shirts, stickers, various linux distros on cd/dvd (burned on the spot), coding and open source related books, and pcs preloaded with linux. I bought me a new knoppix livedvd and a stylish GPL t-shirt - I so wanted the “I’m a LaTeX fetishist” one, but I knew I’d never wear it.

I talked for a while with Frank, who was manning the desk for the evening, about open source and linux. He told me that I had missed their first girl geek dinner by one day. Gah! Must get on inventing that open source time machine! The dinner was apparently a huge success, with over 70 people in attendance. Hopefully I’ll be able to come back to Berlin and make it to one of these.

It was much fun, and I managed not to buy /too/ much stuff… On my walk to supper I passed a really awesome looking comic book store which unfortunately (fortunately for my back) was closed. No more books for me!

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Stadtmitte U-Bahn station reminds me of Blackberry Subway Jam. The ceiling is divided into livingroom sized sections with simple purple and white tinned roof patterns.

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Berlin is definitely NOT the place to go to practise your German unless you’re much more confident &/ skilled than I am. I managed to get train tickets in German, but pretty much all of my other conversations quickly turned into English the moment I looked confused. This frustratingly usually occurred when they quickly asked if I would like anything else - a very predictable question that I should have been ready for. Ah well. Hopefully I’ll do better at the farm.

Posted in Techie Stuff, just one more eurotrip blog |

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