The Daily Parker

Another big walking day in sunny weather took me up to Bernauerstraße and the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall Memorial):

That's a mostly-preserved but partially-reconstructed section of the wall at the corner of Bernauerstraße and Ackerstraße, near the site where the first person trying to flee over the wall was killed. It's hard to imagine that the place I'm sitting now was once in East Berlin, just a few hundred meters from the place by the Wall where Reagan gave his famous speech in 1987.

I ended the walk at the DDR Museum, which outlined what life in East Germany was like from 1945 to 1990. In between I walked down Big Hamburger Street Große Hamburger Straße, in the old Jewish quarter, and stopped to check email (and have some non-German beer) at Sophie'n eck:

This is just a few meters from the monument to all of Berlin's Jews killed during the Holocaust. More grim history.

It's also fairly close to Museum Island which—wait for it—is an island on which sits nothing but museums (and the occasional cathedral). Here's the view looking downstream from the northern tip of Museums-Insell:

Upstream a bit is the Berlin Dom, which is not a BDSM maneuver but is still big, intimidating, and German:

Note that all of these photos are from my mobile phone. I have a few hundred on my real camera, but they're inaccessible right now because I forgot the proper cable. I aim to have some of those photos up by Wednesday or Thursday.

Tomorrow I'm off to my second-favorite city in the world, where I have set aside time and calories to park at Southampton Arms for a couple of hours.

Tonight, though: I've got another 6,000 steps to go. I missed 20,000 yesterday by just a handful, but I have over 100,000 for the week, putting me almost up to 80 km. (I've yet to hit 15 km in a day. Maybe tomorrow?)

Nobody, I think, visits Germany for the food (or the UK, for that matter), but when in Berlin, one does as...a tourist to Berlin. And that is why I got suckered in by this guy:

And ordered this:

That is (literally) a hot mess of grilled pork and chicken (though which bits no one can say) in a cream-of-mushroom sauce with some fried potato bits on the side. You think yesterday had surplus calories? I am actually shocked that Germany isn't as fat as the US, on average. Fortunately, I walked another 14.5 km today—er, yesterday—and plan to walk at least 20 km today. (Once I wake up, of course.)

Also, their website promised:

Wir haben Leberkäse, Lammstelzen, „Kasspatz’n“ und weitere Spezialitäten, für die unsere Küche geschätzt wird. Alles wird in Handarbeit hergestellt und frisch zubereitet. Hier können Sie bayerische Küche genießen und sich dabei wie Gott in Frankreich fühlen.

Which I believe means, "We have meatloaf, lamb stilts, 'Kasspatz'n' and other specialties for which our kitchen is appreciated. Everything is handmade and fresh. Here you can enjoy Bavarian cuisine and feel like God in France." (Google might have influenced this belief. Though why one would want to feel like a God in France is a little beyond my understanding of German cuisine.)

I get back to Chicago on Sunday, and I think from Monday morning until I can't take it any more, I'm going to eat nothing but raw spinach, carrots, and maybe a slice of cheese.

For just a few euro and an hour each way by train, I visited my 24th country this afternoon. Here is the heavily-guarded border between Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany and Słubice, Poland:

Seriously, though, if I hadn't had a phone with a GPS and cached Google Maps I would not have known exactly where the border was. It's not marked; there's just a two-lane bridge with sidewalks. The border is about 100 m from the German bank of the Oder, with no indication that you've entered Poland until the roundabout on the other side.

The trip started at the newish (1998) Berlin Hauptbahnhof:

And on the way there, I passed through the center of German government, including past the Reichstagsgebäude:

Despite spending a whopping €3,60 on a Bockwurst mit Brot und Bier at the Frankfurt (Oder) train station (ugh), I'm going to find some real food in a bit—food that involves walking some more. Later tonight I'll report on some seriously good Fitbit numbers.

* The question came up after posting this: which countries? So here they are, in order of my first visit, excluding the United States: Canada, the U.K., France, Switzerland, Germany†, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Sint Maarten/Saint-Martin‡, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, India, Japan, China, Finland, Estonia, Russia, Korea (ROK), Korea (DPRK), Norway, and today, Poland.

† I'm old, but not that old: I first visited Germany in 1992, which was close to reunification, but sufficiently after the even that no one thought of it as "West" Germany anymore. And I'm writing this from a hotel firmly inside East Berlin as it existed when I was planning my first trip to Europe in the 1980s.

‡ I'm counting the island as one country, even though it's a territory inside two other countries. I feel this is an appropriate compromise, since neither the Netherlands nor France recognizes their bit of St. Martin Island as an independent nation. So: Both Sint Maarten (Netherlands Antilles) and Saint-Martin (French Overseas Collective) are, on this list, counted as one country.

Fitbit says I've gotten 10.4 km in so far today, over to the Brandenburg Gate, through the Holocaust Memorial, down to Mehringplatz, then up Friedrichstraße past Checkpoint Charlie and back to Unter den Linden.

I might have some more walking in me yet. One bonus (at least on that front) is that my hotel room is not only one of the furthest from the hotel entrance, but it's up one flight of stairs and down another to get there. Nice room, though, with windows that actually open, which is unusual these days.

As it's just noon in Chicago, and possibly due to the walking, I'm a bit hungry, so I'm off to find some Schnitzel. Photos later.

With a little more than five days until my next international flight, I'm stocking up my Kindle:

• Richard Florida looks at youthification instead of gentrification.
• Cranky Flier talks about Korean Airlines code-sharing with American.
• American Airlines, meanwhile, is becoming the sole Chicago Cubs airline sponsor, displacing United.
• Should we migrate JavaScript to TypeScript?

UAT release this afternoon. Back to the galley.

Getting out of a snowy parking space is tough. Getting into one can be tougher. Boy, do I like my car's all-wheel drive and manual transmission:

I'm actually far enough from the car behind mine that, should he manage to dig himself out fore and aft, he'd have no trouble getting out.

And, wow, has this weather been hell on my Fitbit numbers.

Chicago officially got 450 mm of snow yesterday; here's Lincoln Park this morning:

Fortunately, my car is parked on a stretch of street that acts as a wind tunnel during typical Chicago blizzards, so I'll actually be able to move it today:

The car has all-wheel drive and the "winter package," and handles beautifully in snow. Unlike this poor Beetle just a few meters away:

In other news, Punxsatawney Phil saw his shadow, which means mostly that there is a very irritated rodent in central Pennsylvania.

There have been interesting developments in two stories I've mentioned recently:

• Exploding Kittens continues to, ah, explode. They have 122,900 backers and have raised over $4.8 million—with 20 days to go. They're going to be rich in about three weeks. Nicely done, guys.
• Fallows has video from ABC News from the SR-22 ditching off Hawaii that happened last week.
• The Atlantic has a note about Andrew Sullivan, who announced he's quitting his blog soon.

Otherwise, it's just work work work. But fun work.

I may have time to read these over the weekend. Possibly.

• Chicago Public Radio is grading Rahm.
• The Atlantic's CityLab says never host the Olympics and public transit can't be free.
• After 11 months, the search for MH370 has been called off and the crash officially declared an accident by the Malaysian government.
• TPM Media's Gaby Dunn is legit friends (but not um-friends) with adult actor James Deen, so she went as his date to the AVN Awards.

In other news, J's Lincoln Park will close Sunday night, the owner having sold his lease to Bank of America. So our dog-friendly Euchre nights will have to move uptown a bit. I'm happy for the owner, but kind of sad that one of the last dog-friendly bars in my neighborhood is closing.

Back to creating a separate code repository for contractors...and other things...

Via Fallows, video of a small plane ditching in the South Pacific with no injuries:

Fallows explains:

On yesterday's flight, the pilot discovered that a valve from the extra fuel tanks was jammed or broken. So he was fated to run out of gas before reaching Hawaii. After several hours of debugging and discussion with his flight-managers by radio, as the fuel level dwindled he decided to fly as close as possible to a cruise ship (which was alerted) and then pull the Cirrus's unique whole-airplane parachute and come down to the sea for rescue by the ship.

This incredible video, shot from a Coast Guard C-130 that was monitoring the whole process, shows what happened next.

The plane, I expect, did not survive. But the pilot did, which would not have happened even 20 years ago in similar circumstances.