Videos up on YouTube.

More to come! Including a world premier video for Winstons. Check out my YouTube Channel.

Oh man! Its been a while. I know. Here are some things.

So...quick life update:

I currently have sweet german health insurance. As a language student I was able to get pretty cheap health insurance from this student insurance company. For only 43 Euros a month I get to experience the joys of health care in my non-native tongue. Of course I've only really been to the ear doctor - but man was it sweet! Sometime on the train to Rostock in late May my left ear just stopped working. It sounded like I had a finger in it. By the time I got back Rostock I was used to always attempting to direct people's voices into my right ear so I wouldn't seem like a complete idiot. Imagine both barely knowing the language and barely being able to hear! Sweet combo. The ear doctor fixed it with a really sort of scary looking set of tools. He spoke passable English, but his nurse was in the office the whole time as well for any words we couldn't figure out just the two of us. His tools all looked like dentistry tools. Sort of scary, but he had a light, German touch and it turned out I just had an insanely huge wax buildup in my ear that he easily took care of.
To hear in 3D once again, to feel the sonic fullness of my voice and everything around me was pretty great. I hopped on my bike and everything was almost too loud. But I did feel a lot safer.

Also, Gabe and his sister Tasha visited at the end of June. They stayed for a week in my extra room. Yes, that's right. For the low, low price of 200 Euros/month I have two rooms, each with its own bed. Of course both rooms aren't too huge, but its pretty nice to have that space. I believe Todd, my friend from Portland will be grabbing one of those rooms in the not too distant future for a few nights (if he ever gets back to me about his arrival date).
So they visited and we really did up the town. I became tour guide (Reisefuehrer) for the week and we saw most of the sights in Berlin...well, a lot of the sights. It was raining all week (as it has been for the last month at least), but we had Bahn passes, so managed to stay relatively dry. The coolest part was finally going up in the Fernsehturn (TV tower) in Alexanderplatz. I'd been waiting for a touristy friend to visit to actually go up and it really was cool. You can see the whole, flat, flat city.


There's a bridge with two red towers toward the back, that's the Oberbaumbruecke (my favorite in Berlin.) To the right, in the middle is a pointy church steeple. My building is directly behind this church at Gorlitzer Park. The Spree river is separating Kreuzberg (r) from Friedrichshain (l). You can tell by some of the architecture that F'hain used to be the East. The East Side Gallery (a still-standing stretch of the Wall) runs along the Spree. You can kind of see it to the right of the blue tent thing at left. You can find a bigger version of this picture at my Picasa site.

We went to Teufel Ecke 2x ("Devil Corner" a death-metal bar with skulls and skeletons on the wall...also with a foosball table), Wild at Heart (a hot smelly rockabilly bar around the corner from me on Weiner Strasse), Balkan Tripps (a pingpong social club bar only open Tuesday and Friday nights featuring round-robin ping pong tourneys and good djs ( a where gabe tried to take a photo of a guy who looked like someone we went to Oberlin College with, and lo and behold it was the guy), and a farewell Italian dinner party for my buddy Fellippo.



I realized with Gabe and Tasha hear that Berlin could be the perfect city if I only I could import friends from Portland. I miss my friends way too much. But the truth is, even in Portland, some of my friends will be gone. Gabe's leaving for Honduras in August for 10 months and theknowledgist is roadtripping back east permanently in October or so. I've met cool people here as well, and I see them a lot. In fact, I'm pretty excited about a trip I'm going on with one of those people in a few hours.

You may remember Christina from the post about the carnival in the park with Germans covering CCR songs. We're headed to Prague by Deutschebahn from the Hauptbahnhof at 4:45 today. I'm excited to see the country by train and also to leave Germany again, if only for a brief time. We'll be in Prague tonight then leave Wednesday morning for Dresden where we'll stay for the whole day before jumping back on the DB for the final leg of the trip. I should be back in Berlin by midnight Wednesday. I'll post pictures when I have them. Prague should be great. But hot. Oh well.

If I'm not too tired Wednesday when we get back, Jeru tha Damaja is playing is playing over in Friedrichshain for 7.50, so I might try to catch that. Shows here start late, so it might work out. I need to see a show here. I haven't seen anything since The Blow played at an old Turkish Wedding Hall (Kreuzberg Festhalle) way back in April. I skipped seeing Talib Kweli and Jean Grae this past week. I too expensive and I've seen Kweli like 4 times already. It would have been nice to see Jean Grae, but I haven't heard anything new from either of them so....Well, time to pack for Prague. What does one bring? It seems I've forgotten 'Metamorphosis' in Portland...