Yearly Archives: 2010

Pinguin Club

Pinguin Club is my favorite 1950’s Americana-themed bar in Schöneberg. It also happens to double (in the warmer months) as an ice cream shop called des Pinguins Eisloch („the penguin’s ice-hole“).

This smoldering cyclops car is just one of the uncanny pieces of kitsch that make Pinguin special. The bartender controls the headlight. He is a good bartender partly because he seems to delight in things that must be old to him but are still new to others. Once he pulled out a toy penguin push-flipper for us to play with. Another time he bolted in the front door wearing an complete emperor penguin costume and dashed to the back of the bar. We knew it was him because there was no one behind the bar. He returned tussled. Leaning against the bar he said nothing.

I recommend the Pinguin Special–a nice Campari-gin concoction.

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Livemocha

A professor of mine just sent me this webpage:

Online German Course

Quoting online german course creators:

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Your advantages:

More than 20.000 grammar and vocabulary exercises
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The DeutschAkademie Online German Course is free and has been designed by experienced German teachers“This webpage can help you to improve your German in addition to your classes at the Deutsche Akademie!

“Absolutely New Discovery”

“For the first time in Berlin”! ” The absolutely new and international innovation”! “Fish in bread”! And it’s on sale! Wow, I’m overwhelmed. Delicious fish sandwiches can be had at the Atlantik Fischladen in Schöneberg. An ordinary fish store is transformed into a great imbiss with some tables and chairs.The fish is grilled, baked or fried especially to order. We got salmon and catfish. The bread is a rustic baguette and it is stuffed with rucola, tomatoes, red onions and slices of pickle. This is what the final creation looks like:Mmm…lecker!Atlantik Fischladen

Potsdamer Str. 166

10782 Berlin

030 20 05 14 94

p.s. Thanks Ludmilla!

Berlin nyelviskola

Berlini nyelviskolánk elköltözött és mostantól a Bayreuther utca 8 szám alatt található.

Amennyiben kérdésetek van nyelviskolánk német nyelvtanfolyamairól, vagy bármely más témában, emailben tudtok érdeklődni vagy klikkeljetek a berlini nyelviskolánk weboldalára. Ott megtaláltok minden információt, amit tudni szeretnétek..

Természetesen nagy örömünkre szolgál, amennyiben személyesen látogattok el nyelviskolánkba.

Mielőbbi viszontlátásra
Vera

Die Sonne!

OK! The Sun is back. It is still cold, of course, and nobody will go to the hospital due to a sunstroke… but the sun is here and we all hope it plans to stay.

As a Spanish speaking person it is always funny to observe that „the Sun“ (die Sonne) is a feminine noun in German and „the moon“ (der Mond) is a masculine noun, it is quite the opposite in Spanish. But I guess the Moon and the Sun have no gender (until proven otherwise…)

BVG

Perhaps the S-Bahn was faster, more punctual and more reliable some months ago (that’s what the locals say to everyone who wants to hear it!) but I am still amazed by how accurate the official webpage is:

www.bvg.de

It tells you when, how and almost why you can go from one place to another.

Use it and love it, but hate the S-bahn budget cuts as a local!

Fahrradomatical

This street-o-matic bicycle tube and tool shop might make a positive difference in your life one day.

The streets of Berlin are unkind to bike tires–what with all the cobblestones, broken glass and junk art sculptures lying around. But the kicker is that there is nowhere to buy a tube after 17:00 or anytime on Sundays. Gas stations will laugh at you and the multitudes of corner Spätkaufen (“spätis”) don’t bother stocking them. Although the nice guy who runs our downstairs späti actually gave me his bike one hard luck evening.

So there you sit on a sunny Sunday, in the gutter beside your unpatchable flat. The canopied trails and dappled lakes of the Grunewald are singing in the distance. Your hands are covered in the fluorescent blue goo they put inside tubes here. Suddenly a ray of light strikes something gold behind you. You are saved.

Next time you will buy two tubes. Next time, you say.

In the meantime, however, SchlauchOmat has this handy list of locations. The one pictured above resides at:

Bikecology Wolfgang Kochmann eKBelziger Str. 4110823 Berlin (Schöneberg)

Sound of Yellow

Someone stenciled this cycle signal by Nollendorfplatz. The heart, star, and slime droplet threw me off at first, but I focused on the Helvetica bike and regained my bearings.

This led me to consider the fact that in Germany the yellow light is used ahead of the green light to say, “you’re up!”. The red light—when it comes to walk/don’t walk–changes all of a sudden, without warning. A pedestrian’s only hope for survival rests in the revving engines of oncoming traffic: that is the sound of a yellow light.

Schlitten fahren

I know this is kind of childish but I really want a sledge. Seeing all this kids being dragged by their parents all around Berlin makes me really jealous. I guess that if I get one, I’ll end up in the intensive care unit of a random hospital in Poland due to a bureaucratic mistake but, what is a broken leg and massive physical trauma compared with the joy of having a sledge?

Children of Berlin, take care of your sledges. They are way too tempting!

Street numbering

Are you wondering why do you spend so much time when searching for an address in Berlin? In case you did not notice, the street numbering system in Berlin is quite confusing, as the system the rest of the world uses (odd numbers are on one side and even numbers on the other side of the street) is not valued very highly here and some streets are numbered consecutively up one side of the street and back down the other.

That explains those hordes of tourists staring at their maps and saying: „it… it should be here!“, doesn’t it?

Deutschkurs Blog Berlin

Deutsch lernen an der DeutschAkademie Berlin, German courses in Berlin