Tropical Ai-ai ai

Cafe recommendation: Bilderbuch, at Akazienstrasse 28. It may look unassuming from the street, but inside it has a kitschy, casual charm. Good food too. The back room feels like it belongs in someone's private library or study, making it stand out from every other cafe I've been to.

***

Yesterday was cold, gray, and rainy. That's why a small group of us put on our bathing suits and headed off to the beach. What? No good beaches this time of year in Germany? Balderdash and poppycock! There's always a good beach around when you can go to Tropical Islands resort, conveniently located only an hour's train ride from Berlin!

The whole structure is contained within a giant dome. As I understand it, it used to be a hangar for zeppelins or something like that. Now, it contains a miniature rain forest, two big pools with beaches, and a lot of other nice little attractions including tents that you can rent out for an overnight stay. They had this ingenious payment system where each visitor is given a wristband with a RF transmitter inside. When you buy something, like food or admission to the balloon ride, you simply swipe the wristband, and the cost is added to your account. It seems to me like if you weren't paying attention, you could spend a lot of money there.

Apparently, the material in part of the dome is UV permeable, so it is possible to get a tan (or even burned), even though you're technically inside. Regardless, we swam, had food (the chicken nugget meal has the best quantity/cost ratio, and it's tasty to boot), and saw this dance/acrobatics/magic show, although it was really light on all three, if you can believe that.

For dancers, we had some buff Latin looking guy, an emaciated Aryan looking guy who couldn't have been much over 20, a thin Aryan looking woman, and a normal sized black haired woman. While the other three were perfectly good at what they did, the black haired woman was pretty bad. She was always looking at the Blond for her cues. It was painfully obvious. The anorexic Aryan was painfully skinny. In fact, the whole dance portion was pretty painful (Big Bad Voodoo Daddy? Ricky Martin? What's up with that?)
Magic consisted of this Swedisg guy (or was he Russian?) pouring himself some wine, duplicating the wine bottles, and removing the wineglass, all using two tubes. Neat, I guess.
The acrobatic part was the best. The magician and this other Swedish/Russian woman did some balancing tricks (on each other). The woman also did this routine where she suspended herself from a long red ribbon. Yeah, it was hot.
Here's the real weird thing. The show was pretty short, but the dancers changed costumes for each song (there were 3 or 4 throughout the entire show). However, they didn't change all the way. It was like they ran out of time and had to go on halfway between each costume.

And then the most horrible thing ever struck my ears. The Tropical Islands theme song:

Tropical Ai-Ai-Ai,
Tropical Island.

Repeat ad-nauseum.

Good Gravy.

Later that night the group went to a club, Steinhaus. Good times, with lots of 70's, 80's, and 90's music being played. That's American music, mind you. The Germans love American music. It was cheap, because they had a student discount going on. I think I spent about 2 Euros at the club. The best part of the night? Some random guy told me "nice hat." I was wearing this black felt fedora-esque thing, which means I looked like a badass.

Some of us left around 2:30, and I got on my train at about 3:15 (we stopped for some food). Now, I knew this was going to be a long ride; Berlin is huge, and it would have taken about 45 minutes to get home during the day. At night, well, you get the picture.
I remember getting on the train, and leaning against the window in my seat for the first few stops. Then, I was being woken up by the conductor. We were at Wannsee, 5 stops past where I needed to go. I fell asleep, in case you hadn't gathered. Dragging myself out of the train, I got oriented to the right train, and got home a little past 4:30. I was in bed soon after that.

Then I woke up at 10am today, and despite all my efforts, could not get back to sleep. That's been happening a lot lately. Tonight I'm taking some Nyquil so I can actually get a good night's sleep.

It was a really good day, and I'm glad that I was there to experience it.

Good night, everybody.