Das Schliefen Broktor Zurt!

Das schliefen broktor zurt!

I'm sorry, I don't speak any German.

Das - You speak only English?

Yes.

What? Why are so many people using their computers here?

It's free wireless.

Oh!

This is my life. The SonyCenter, in Berlin, is exemplary of a fairly horrible breed of shopping center/office building with very little in way of actual shopping to be done, but it does have free wireless, so here I am, sitting on a surprisingly uncomfortable - surprising because I did not think it was possible for a bench to be this uncomfortable - bench under the Mt. Fuji-resembling dome, typing away.

So far Europe has been a lot of fun. Paris was more charming and beautiful than I had expected, and my complete lack of French-language less of a problem than I had feared. I spent a day at the Louvre and one at Musee D'Orsay, did a bunch of walking along the Seine and up Montmartre, and caught evening mass at Notre Dame. All pretty boring tourist stuff, but I'll try to be more adventurous when I swing back through the city on my way home in a couple of months.

The night before I left Paris was Nuit Blanche, a four-year-old street festival that takes over much of Paris all night, unleashing some truly horrible and excitingly free modern art on the arguably horrible-modern art citizenry. A guy I met at the hostel wandered around until four AM or so, when the crowd had turned a scoch rowdy - we witnessed an inexplicable fist fight between a guy in a white van and someone he had apparently almost hit at a pedestrian crossing, with the pedestrian reaching into the van to slap the driver around. Interestingly enough, the police were a complete non-presence during Nuit Blanche - order was instead turned over to a security company.

Okay, I have to go. More later.