and to Berlin

You may be tired of me writing about Berlin.
I don't care.
I've written about Berlin before but it's one of my favorite places and I'm going to write about it again. So there.

We wrapped up our trip with Luke and Jackie in Berlin. Our days of cathedrals and quaint half-timbered houses and Christmas souvenirs were over. We stayed in East Berlin hipster-ville, where grafitti is part of the landscape, where buildings are Stalin-esque, and where the hardest ethnic food to find is German. In Berlin we ate Sri Lankan food, rented bikes to ride from east to west, visited the 1936 Olympic Stadium where Jesse Owens triumphed over Hitler.

And while there were hundreds of bars and restaurants and dark thumping techno clubs to visit, it was the end of our trip. Our friends had been on the road for three weeks. We had been traveling hard for one. So on the last night we went back to a familiar place. There's a Cuban bar that made Brian and I feel warm and welcome one February night a few years ago. It offered live music and cigar smoking and bar tenders who wanted to talk baseball. That's where we took Luke and Jackie. We'll save the techno club for next time... maybe.