♥ Berlin! ♥ Kreuzberg! I'm here!

I've landed! I actually landed on Thursday but the internet connection's been wonky.

Which in a way was a good thing, since it meant I could spend most of these days running around town ^___^

The Good
My landlady seems really nice, my room is larger than I thought and the house is just wonderfully placed!

The window faces the garden, a lush half-wild little oasis (where, I just found out this morning, a goshawk moved in not long ago!) and the front of the house faces a mini-plaza. Which, honestly, mostly works like a parking lot but it's rather still and quiet. So, surrounded by our little isle of calm, we sit in the middle of Kreuzberg: Oranienstrasse round the corner, nightclubs, bars, restaurants, quirky shops, second-hand stuff, hairsalons that advertize their skill with punk styles, street art and lord knows what else. I ♥ it.

Have mostly spent the days running around shopping and exploring the area, which is totally neat. Also sleeping and reading, because I think a bit of pre-travel jitters loosened themselves by making me super tired. But today, I'm feeling quite perky and since it's saturday, I won't have to spend a couple of hours on the other activity that I've been doing since coming here. Which leads us on to...

The Not-So-Good
What is less smiley and more :( is the fact that I, despite two visits (and a lot of waiting) to two different Burgerämter (Citizens Office aka The Dread German Bureaucracy) I still haven't managed to register myself as a person living in Berlin. Which I must have to be able to enroll in school. You are seeing my problem, yes? Well, the first time they were stupid and couldn't find my landlady in their records. Of course, when she called them not 40 minutes later, they found her in a tick. I mean, what?

Then I tried another office, on her recommendation, and whaddya know, due to lack of personell they only had pre-booked meetings that day. Which they've apparantly been doing for all of August, a fact that none of the three people we talked to one the phone saw fit to mention even as we said the name of that office to two of them. *sigh*

On Monday, I'm trying the last of the three offices in this part of the city and if that doesn't work I'll go to the student union to ask for a native backup.

Henry IV @ Görlitzer Park, with guest appearances from Orson Welles and Harold Bloom

Phew, tired & happy! I've walked around above Alexanderplats today, looking for the comic shop Grober Unfug which I thought was somewhere by the subway station Weinmeisterstrasse. Turns out they'd moved up a stop (I suspected as much when I began to see the very fancy stores that are all over the area now, not the kind of neighbours comic stores can usually afford. Alas). But! They'd left a sign behind and with some luck and a few helpful locals, I found them again. Larger store, but quite small manga department. There was many more titles in the Thalia bookshop in that big shopping senter at Alex.

I also had to stop at restaurant Transit for a somewhat too expensive, but amazingly tasty lunch. I honestly only gave them a second look because the waitresses were standing and giggling in the open window, they looked a bit too preppy for me. But, happy waitresses? And Asian food, of some kind of izakaya/tapas variety?
Weeell, I took the chance and don't regret it a bit. 3 small dishes, a bubble tea and a bowl of rice came to about 12 euro and it was among the best modern Asian I've had. Ever.
It was also plenty filling - each small dish cost 3 euro and I could honestly have skipped the rice, except as mouth soothener after the spicy beef salad. I warmly recommend it, and you can get every dish vegetarian too.

Today I also got myself a Tip magazine, which contains info about events in Berlin. (On a side-note, I'm always positively surprised by how much actual written content German magazines have. Even Tip carries several editorials and a couple of readable articles)

Anyway, tonight there was apparantly a free Shakespeare play in a nearby park. ( Probably one of the more unusual Shakespeare versions I've seen, but a damn good one )

The play was entertaining, more engaging than I would've thought and the only downside was that it was a bit hard to hear what happened sometime, especially when prince Harry spoke, but otherwise I count is as a most successful experience.

There's another show tomorrow, same time and place, if anyone thinks it sounds like fun. And is in Berlin, ehe ;)