Berlin weekend

I had a great weekend in Berlin. When I arrived it turned out that the hostel where I was staying was having a "birthday" party, celebrating one year of operation. Then the next day I ended up meeting up with cheeseparade — but it was via Facebook so at first we weren't aware of how we actually knew each other, until we made the LJ connection! We were LJ-friends back in our Berkeley undergrad days when we were both co-opers (me at Wilde, her at Davis and Castro).

I met up for coffee with her and her friend Sarah, a Berkeley grad student (and co-oper! - at HiP, aka the house formerly known as Chateau) in math currently studying in Berlin. Then Rebecca (cheeseparade) took us to this very unexpected hippy Christmas market on the roof of a shopping mall, where we found ourselves in a wood-fire-heated yurt packed with people, drinking hippy chai tea, and listening to a band playing brazilian music.

I also got to see Mathias Rust's Cessna 152 in the technical museum (story), visited the c-base (again) (although it was closed and no-one was there this time), and also the coffee shop at the center of the Berlin startup scene, St. Oberholz (which has an amusing blog).

Berlin trip: success! I'd like to make it a regular thing - maybe once a month?

Right now I'm hosting yet another couchsurfer, Shobhana Karim who is crazy about ice cream and really seems to have traveled almost everywhere (she's French but lived in India for 10 years and is currently studying in England but right now she's on her way to visit her family in Réunion, a French-speaking island off the coast of Madagascar).