I’ve always understood granola to be a more or less healthy type of breakfast cereal rather than a brand. “Choc-Blop”, by contrast, is like a generic term of derogation my parents might have improvised in the supermarket aisle. As in, “I’m not buying you any ‘Tootie Frooties’, or ‘Choc-Bloppers’, or ‘Count Flatula’. That stuff is junk.”Anyways, if I was a child of today you can bet I’d be referencing that Granola logo and imaginary quality award (Choc-Blop wins every year). Then I’d show my mom that the box is written in German on one side and Italian on the other, and explain that it’s really a question of cerebral enrichment.

Here is our local bulk wurst counter. The bold scent of sour pork permeates the entire market hall in which it is housed. The women running the place, who look like addled car hops, are normally either frazzlin’-out behind the counter (pictured above) or smoking cigarettes in front of it. Who can blame them for improving the wurstie air with tobacco smoke? If baristas come to despise the smell of their daily drudge, God save the wurst frauen.While the smell of the wurst counter is all too realistic, the iconography is anything but. Here we see a few scenes from the merry lives of meat products. This probably gives you a feeling like, “würstchen are not so different myself and other people I know”.True, the curvature of a wurst is similar to that of a jaunty human torso. Also true that the nub of cinched sausage casing bears an uncanny resemblance to a shock of hair, or some such thing. And of course the wurst hue is pretty much spot-on normal human color.However, this misses the whole point of the piece: wurst are not like us; they are not created equal.The top two sausages pictured above, while probably very nice, are clearly defective one-offs. No wonder the one at the top is so shy, he’s more orange than tan and his arms are completely white–likely the result of some chemical cover up for a lack of naturally occuring gloves. The next one down has shed his acoutrements altogether and gone completely AWOL. He’s not even trying to be eaten anymore and will most likely end up rotting in a crawlspace whenever he runs out of steam.But how about those dapper chaps down below? They reek of class. Their easy grins connote a bullion-backed confidence that is beyond reproach. You could hate on them, but why not instead commence a mutually rewarding consumer-consumee relationship with your new trusted friends?By the way, the hat-tipping wurst in the top picture walks just like Avon Barksdale from The Wire. Who’s gonna step to that?

Mo-Fr 9:3o – 2o.oo Uhr und Sa 9:3o – 2o.oo Uhr

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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