Ich bin ein Berliner

Goodbye London, hello Berlin! This week I moved to Berlin, Germany, after 6 months of living in the UK. While London generally treated me well, it was a nightmare logistically and a frighteningly expensive city to live in. With money pouring into real estate from the world's millionaires and billionaires, and hedge fund investors cashing in their fortunes, London is officially now the world's most expensive city. Yes last winter was very mild, but this summer has been oppressively wet and awful - the sun hardly ever appeared! London is also WAY overcrowded and too obsessed with terrorism and security - they have CCTV cameras everywhere, even in public bathrooms! Hopefully things will change under Gordon Brown but it will probably take some time to undo the paranoia created by Blair and the big brother society. I'll miss my friends but was very happy to leave (ecstatic even). I took a bus from Victoria station and 16 hours later I was in Berlin, where I am now updating my blog.

The quick report from Deutschland: I love my new apartment, it's fabulous and CHEAP and I don't have any flatmates! Berlin is HAPPENING! I start German classes today and looking forward to being settled here for a long period. I have a great couch, come and visit!

London Update and a Weekend in the Adriatic

London Tube

Summer has finally arrived in London! After an incredibly warm and dry April (the driest on record in the UK) and an unbelievably wet May (the wettest in 20+ years, and freezing to boot!), we're finally starting to get some sun and warm weather here. It's still not a real summer, but at least I've stopped wearing a jacket most of the time. Those astute readers who've been reading my blog for a while may have noticed the trend over the last year or so in freak weather. This continues to be the case!

In April I also started an electric bass class at the London Music School and I'm really enjoying it! The bass is a relatively easy instrument to play, and although the class is quite difficult for a beginner like me, I'm the only student so I get a lot of personal attention. Bass really suits someone like me who's always been more rhythm oriented, but still wants to learn to play melodies. I bought a Yamaha RBX170, Yamaha's lowest-end bass guitar, but it plays great and has proven to be a great beginner's tool. It's a cool electric blue color too and was really cheap. I'm also taking a keyboard class for the second time around and continue wrestling with the 88s. I am finding that both instruments compliment each other pretty well though and look forward to being able to play both bass and keyboard before too long. This whole musical journey has been incredibly rewarding and it's the culmination of a life long dream for me - I love it!

My Yamaha bass

Aside from music, I've started salsa dancing and it seems that salsa is quite the rage in London. Besides being fun it's a great way to meet the opposite sex and there are plenty of places to dance. Right now my favorite is Salsa, near Leicester Square, which is open every night of the week. There's a good crew of people from my Spanish intercambio meetings that go there at least once a week to shake our booties. It's great!

While I am keeping busy socially, I have found Londoners to be a bit uptight and I lament the fact that very little happens in London nocturnally. It's just not a late night town. Most places close at 11pm and the clubs mostly close at 2am, at which point a vast stream of drunken revellers packs into the night buses like an army of disoriented sardines caught in a fishing net. It's also a town full of people who seem completely wedded to their day jobs and don't have much time to do anything other than work or drink. When most folks are not working they are too tired to do anything and on the weekends go to a pub or crowded nightclub to drink themselves into oblivion. Sad that so many people will spend their lives like this... They might make lot's of money (London is awash in cash these days) but they are enslaved to their employers and don't lead any kind of life other than one of excessive material consumption. Funny how modern people always assume that our agricultural ancestors had no leisure time and only worked from sun up to sun down; I'd say the opposite is true! But that's just my social observation about big cities and financial centers like London or NY. Thank god I'm self-employed and don't have to slave away to the man or punch a clock. So many of my friends I rarely get to see because they are so caught up in this rat race of materialism and credit card bills which forces them to work all of their waking hours. I think the old farm workers lived much happier and richer lives than we assume. It's modern man that is the slave!

Boats in Venice harbor

Speaking of happier, richer lives, the Italians know how to live! Last week I took my first trip to Italy, to visit a friend I met through couchsurfing.com. My friend Cole lives in Padova and I stayed there and for a few days at his parents house near Venice. I got to see the wonderful city of Venice as well as Padova and even went on a side trip to Slovenia and Croatia with Cole's parents. Italy was just an amazing experience: wonderful food, wonderful people, and wonderful art. They have all their priorities straight too: food, art, sex, music! Work, punctuality, etc. are near the bottom of the list where they belong ;p

One of the highlights of my trip to Venice was a visit to the Venice Biennale, a biannual art exhibition that draws thousands of art revellers from all over the world. Each country has its own pavilion and displays various "modern" art works. Cole and I managed to find someone to give us free tickets and we spent a few hours checking out the art and very happening "scene". One of the better pavilions was the Austrian one, not because of the art, but because they had free food and drinks, and it was a huge affair that even drew the Chancellor and President of Austria. I met loads of interesting people there and afterwards went to the Austria party, a night time beach bash with more free food and drink. It was a great day and night in Venice! Ahhh, I love Europe!

Party goers at Venice Biennnale

Austria's party drew lots of interesting folks

The trip to Slovenia and Croatia was great too. The Slovenian border is less than 2 hours away from where I was staying, via Trieste, and made for an easy day trip. Cole's parents, who work at the Aviano air base, drove me there and we hit a few of the coastal towns, making it as far south as Umag in Croatia, in the northeastern Adriatic sea. The former Yugoslav provinces are quite fascinating and each has it's own distinctive culture and history, even though they all share a very similar Slavic language. Now with Slovenia and Croatia on my list of places visited, the only former Yugoslav province I haven't been to is Bosnia (and of course the disputed province of Kosovo).

Village dancers in Izola, Slovenia

Croatian fishing boat

For more photos of Venice and Slovenia/Croatia, check out my galleries at Zenfolio.

View from London

Well it's been a long time since I posted to my blog, almost 3 months in fact. In that stretch of time a lot has happened. I moved to London in the beginning of January and started music lessons at the London Music School. Learning to play at least one melodic instrument has been a lifelong dream of mine and the short keyboard and Midi Technology courses I took from January to March were enormously rewarding! Despite having attempted a couple of times many years ago to learn either piano or guitar, I never really caught on. Chalk it up to a good teacher this time (thanks to Gary Baldwin), but I finally got it! I mean I really understand how the musical scale works now and how to read music, construct chords, etc. I'm at a basic, basic level, but I understand the theory, and can see the path before me. It's all about practice, practice, practice.... I also used Cubase and Reason a lot in my midi class so looking forward to eventually laying some tracks down.

London itself has been quite interesting. Aside from being one of the most expensive places I've ever lived, I've found it very stimulating. Living in cheap cities like Prague and Budapest was great, but there wasn't a whole lot going on, I didn't speak the language, and at the end of the day I didn't do much other than drink beer and soak in baths. In London, I've actually been more inspired to get more work done, mostly out of necessity (ie, the need to survive economically!) To give you an idea of how expensive London is, I went to see a movie a few weeks at a theater near Picadilly Square and the ticket cost £9. That's $18 US at the current exchange rate! I thought $7.50 was expensive!!! BTW, the movie I saw was David Lynch's new drama "Inland Empire". I really liked this movie, which seems more like a museum installation than a commercial release.

So anyway, my US$ income is worth less and less, even though it continues to grow. I've been getting new clients for my SEO work and haven't been having any problems with working remotely. Thank god for the internet! Now I'm going out and seeking work and it seems to be coming in, so things are moving once again I'm somehow managing to keep afloat financially. Interestingly enough, I've found a great circle of Spanish friends here in London so it turns out I'm practicing my Spanish even more than I did in Barcelona.

London is an amazing potpourri of languages and cultures. It's also grown to be Europe's largest and most important city, surpassing even New York in economic clout. It now stands to take the reign as the capital of the 21st century. Much like New York at the turn of the last century, immigrants have turned London into a vast melting pot and brought with them the wealth that will drive the economy into the next century. It's amazing to see the change that's taken place here over the last 20 years, but this place is really booming. I often times wish it were more British though; too many times I feel more like I'm in Bangalore, Warsaw or Moscow than in England.