Today, Yesterday, The Day Before...

I'll say right off that today was a good day. Yesterday was not a good day. The day before was a good day...

The day before yesterday was the day Randy and I went to the big record fair at the Velodrom on Landsbergeralle in Prenzlauerberg, an area I had never been to previously and, due to work on the tracks, took over an hour to get to. This was annoying as it seems you can get most anywhere in Berlin on transit in 30 minutes or under if you have your shit together and have no children with you as we did. The area looked kind of like Surrey and later when I saw that Billy Talent are playing at the same place the record fair is held I felt my superficial judgement held true. When we arrived there were a lot of records but not too much I was interested in. It's amazing how you can spend hours flipping through records until your fingers are encrusted with filth and still not find anything that makes your mouth drop open. I almost bought Supergrass-I Should Coco, an album that I didn't even know came out on vinyl but I walked away and while I was deciding they packed up and left. Just like gypsies, or ghosts, or gypsy ghosts. Que sera sera. I ended up with The Smiths-Strangeways, Here We Come on grey blue vinyl and The Constantines-Shine A Light because it's out of print and it rocks, but what made my jaw drop was the difficult to find and hard to acquire first LiliPUT album which I now possess. Nothing was really cheap except the records Randy got, which impressed me because well, he's an impressive dude who knows what he likes. By the time we left and made it home it was late in the afternoon and I was hungry but when I arrived home Veda had picked me up a falafel...and, well, that's why I love her.

Ugh, yesterday. I'm not sure what makes a day go wrong but for me it was a bad sleep, gum on my pants and buying really expensive turkey by accident. First the bad sleep, Anders is teething like crazy and has four teeth now all within a two week period so he has been up a lot during the night which in turn means Veda and I are somewhat underslept. Under this influence I went grocery shopping while Veda was at her piano studio and Saoirse watched Anders, but I got flustered at the meat shop due to a line up behind me and my Germglish fell apart, resulting in the purchase of two small turkey breasts for 10 euro. That is expensive here. We just bought a similiar amount of chicken for 1 euro 50 last week so I was annoyed with myself for not being prepared enough. Anyone who knows me at all knows I hate grocery shopping, I get too distracted and what should take 10 minutes takes 2 hours and the truth is I just don't get excited about food in the same way Veda or Doug or Rashid or Loree do. When Veda goes away and I am home alone I eat nachos or pizza and that is pretty much it. On tour I tend towards hotdogs as Nick and Julia have witnessed on more than one occasion.

K.I.S.S. is my motto.

Due to this grocery fiasco Saoirse and I missed out on the Jewseum that Veda and the Gatzaenkers were meeting us at and when we finally made it out into the day I sat on some gum and I finally said out loud that this day was a shitty day.

But then today we went to the zoo! Well, not all of us. Anita and Emery stayed home to chill a bit and Saoirse thinks zoos are wrong on a philosophical level but Randy, Charlie, Veda, Anders and I think zoos are rad. We saw hippos cavorting underwater, rhinoceros in the dusty dust looking happy to have outlived the dinosaurs, and monkeys, monkeys and more monkeys (seriously, there were a lot of monkeys.) We were there during feeding time and the lions were roaring and munching on rabbits, actually all the big cats, jaguars, tigers, etc. were munching on rabbits. They were dead already but Veda thinks it would be better if they were alive so the big cats can at least pretend to hunt. The monkeys ate veggies and the mongoose ate mice and fish. Perhaps the coolest part next to the penguins swimming underwater (it's outdoors but if you duck down to Anders level you can see below the surface) was the night mammals. You have to go downstairs and there are lighted dots that show the way to the aardvark, some odd jumping rabbit mice things whose name I've forgotten, and bats (of course). There was a sign saying we had to be extra quiet but Anders was squealing a lot so I took him outside and didn't get to see everything down there but that's just the way it goes, you want to see the night mammals but you don't always get to.

(Note: most, if not all of these blogs are written under the influence of alcohol. What can I do, it's relatively inexpensive and I have no job.)

After the zoo we met Saoirse outside the gates where she was waiting after a very bad day where she couldn't find the photo museum, was chastised by the politzei for sitting down on a curb and couldn't find a cool refreshing beverage to ease her pain. In an attempt to make things better we went for ice cream on Kurfurstendamm, where we witnessed the grossest ice cream eating ever by Charlie Wilfrid Gatley. Man, that kid likes his ice cream, and Ved's and Randy's and anybody else who will give up the i.c. Nearby was a fountain that foreigners were letting their kids walk around in so I suggested as a cleaning measure that we should go splash around in the fountain. Soon Anders and I were in as well and it was super fun (it was really hot today, 29 or 30 degrees) and refreshing. One of the statues in the fountain was of a little naked boy and although I wanted to join Charlie and Anders in their frolicsome nudity I spared the other parents my "last turkey in the shop" moment.

Eventually the Gatleys had to leave and we went to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church which is bombed out and left that way. Inside they were having a service and the bright blue stained glass and MASSIVE GOLD CHRIST FIGURE were really impressive but not impressive enough to Anders who seems to turn into a baby eagle when we stop anywhere, ignore him or are in the dark so we left and took the U-Bahn home. It was time to go anyway...