Killing Batteries

In clothing optional areas, inevitably it is the people that you would least like to see naked that go the distance. Double goes for Germany.

[See the full "What I've Learned" list here. Start at the bottom and read up.]

In the timeless, venerated tradition of writers reusing their own material when they’re jammed with work, super hungover or just don’t feel like it, I’m rerunning a short but popular series from my travelogue entitled “Don’t Go There.”

Chapter One, “Don’t Go to Berlin,” was written after a disagreeable visit in the summer of 2003.

I realize that any travel writer with even a shred of integrity wouldn’t title an article “Don’t Go to Berlin.” It seems as if doing this might be a sweeping, unfair summary of one of the largest and important cities in Europe and indeed the world. A city with huge and important historical significance. A city of countless ethnicities and cultures coming together. A city with a shameless level of admiration for David Hasselhoff. Well, if you are thinking these things, to that I say have you ever been to Berlin? If not, then with all due respect, shut your pie-hole.

Berlin is a city full of drunk, ornery, rude, tourist-haters. It is a city that boasts countless, expensive tourists sights ostensibly catering to people from all over the world, yet not having gone through the trouble of printing any information or literature in any other language except German. It’s a city where the ongoing, open competition of Let’s-Give-the-Tourists-Wrong-Directions-on-Purpose has been honed to a fine art. It’s a city that has been abandoned by all dedicated and talented map makers. It’s a city where authorities target tourists for minor, laughable offences like J-walking. In short, it’s a city that will take your money and dignity and give you nothing in return.

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I apologize for not posting anything substantial this week. This MSN gig is wailing on my ass so hard that I’d have nothing left if my ass weren’t already so perfectly firm, devilishly curved and indestructible.

I have some serious doo-doo in store for you next week that should both entertain and bring on the hail of hate mail that never arrived from my ‘A Keyhole into Burma’ series.

In the meantime, a bit (more) of shameless self-promotion…

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Never take directions from a drunk person.

[See the full "What I've Learned" list here. Start at the bottom and read up.]