Since I started attending flea markets and car boot sales back in about 1993, when my Aunt Rose took me down one Wednesday morning, I have been after owning one object. It has, as far as I know, never been there. Everything else has been sold, including broken smoke alarms, rubbers in potties, and more second-hand underwear than you could shake a nasty gonorrhea infection at.

This particular object is, thankfully, none of the above, it is in fact a 7″ copy of “The Way It Is” by Bruce Hornsby and The Range. Eagle-eyed flickr-ists will notice I already have one copy, but I got that from ebay. It’s easy to get them ebay. There’s no challenge, and no sense of achievement.

Yeterday, I awoke on the sofa at 8AM. It looked like a sunny day, so off I went.

Something which is very odd, is the fact that around near where I live, they’re flattening the old hospital buildings which have been there for years. Lots of years. I’ve discussed on here that I’m glad to see the back of them, as they were very cold and sinister. Not nice places to be in at all, especially when you’re a six year old getting your chest x-rayed in them… ooo, childhood flashback.

Anyway, yes. There buildings, I believe, date back to the days when treatment was more of a punishment. I have heard it used to be a mental asylum of some sort. The surrounding walls actually have broken glass bottles embedded in the concrete. I don’t know whether that was to stop people getting in, or to stop them escaping. I guess I’ll never know. Either way, these buildings have now be reduced to this.

Anyway, I put the camera away, and headed towards the flea market, a mere short bus ride away, which cost me £1.05. Jaysus.

I had no intention of staying a while, or anything over a few minutes, if I’m honest, but it was pretty busy, and there were a good few stalls there, for once.

However, the ones that stood out, were the ones I didn’t expect to be any good. There’s always a few stalls which appear to be full of garbage and rusty metalwork or rusty tools, which nothing worth looking at. I walked past one of these stalls, and saw some random guy flipping through some records. I had been bitterly disappointed by the CD’s on offer from one of the stalls which are normally quite good (£1 each, and I’ve bought some great ones from there in the past.), so I thought I’d take a look. That’s when I found “it”. Its yellow, creased cover, staring back at me. The title, arranged in a semi-circle, in the middle of the cover. It was all there. I was holding it in my hands. For ten whole seconds, I just laughed to myself, and thought “Heh, Cool” as I placed it back in the box along with the rest of the records I was holding.

Of course, I suddenly had a moment of clarity, and it suddenly struck me, that this was the moment I’d waited for since way back. Every single flea market, car boot sale, record fair I’d ever been to, had been all for this moment. I was about to buy “The Way It Is”. I handed my shiny pennies over (well, OK, they were 50p each, and I bought about another 6), and I walked away with a sense of satisfaction, as if to say to myself “I’ve done it. It’s all over. It’s finished”.

The day didn’t just stop there, I continued my searching for other stuff. The next stall along had an Andrew W.K’s “I Get Wet” buried amongst the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck and Pavarotti. Needless to say, I snapped that up. I’ve been after that CD for years too.

I walked around the stalls, to see that Eric has returned permanently. Eric owns one of the good stores, he used to be the one near the Corner House (or whatever it’s called now), but in his own words, he gave up for a couple of years. I did miss his stall, as he always had a good (and varied) collection of CDs. He’s back, but with a smaller CD collection. A few other things are missing too, but hopefully he’s going to be there for a few more years to come. He had a sealed copy of Sandi Thom’s CD (oh, I wish I was a punk rocker, etc) for £2, so I bought that. I’ve not listened to it yet, as I’ve got the Andrew W.K. CD on repeat. His album is only 35 minutes long, but every track is a winner. The longest track is 3:33 in length.

Overall, a fantastic day music-wise.

Technorati Tags: bruce hornsby, demolition, flea market, hartlepool, hospital, Music, Photos, purchasing, record, warren road, wednesday

You might have had a sneaky glimpse of what I’ve been doing on the last Bank Holiday Monday of the year earlier on, as I mentioned I’ve been at High Force, again.

I was there not so long back (August 9th), with Big Phil, Tetlow and Dan from work, so they could test their new cameras, and I could take yet more photos with mine. You can see those original images, (Including Rievaulx Abbey images taken earlier in the day) here. As you can see (assuming you clicked the link), the weather when we got to High Force was pretty overcast, and not ideal for artistic photography. And, although I clicked away like a Tourettes sufferer on Red Bull, I didn’t really get an “outstanding” image. Some really good ones, yes, but not one that would make me weep openly with happiness everytime I clapped my beady little eyeballs over it. With the excpetion of this one however. Amusingly, I didn’t even notice the view in the foreground until Dan left that comment. Ahem.

Anyway, I digress. As I explained in the previous posting, I’d planned going somewhere for the day with Coatesy. It got to after dinnertime, and, after hearing nothing, I thought it wasn’t going to happen. That changed, however, when his car pulled up outside Mercuryvapour Towers, at about 1PM catching me totally off guard. Normally, there’d be a phone call or something to make sure we’d still be on for the particular day, but it turned out he’d lost both my mobile and house number when he upgraded his phone.

It turned out he’d sent an email confirming everything, but I’m still having issues with the bloody spam filter on the webmaster address, so I missed it.

Anyway, I answer the door, looking like I’d been dragged through a hedge backwards (I was in the middle of cleaning the house up a bit at the time), I confirm my acknowledgement of his prescence by opening the large oak door on the front of Mercuryvapour Towers, and announced that I’m going for a shave, and to make myself look a bit more alive. He returned to the car, and I slapped my face under the tap, and attacked it with my Mach 3.

Plans for the day were still a little hazy at this point. We had a car, but nowhere to go. We headed out of town, and pulled into our favourite little resting point - the Wynyard Services. You may remember this particular location from January 29th, as it was where we went after Coatesy told me he passed his driving test. No matter where we go, it’s always the first stop as it has cash machines, food, and plenty of bottled water at reasonable prices. Today it was used for those very reasons, and also, it was used as the point where we discussed where we were about to go. I believe it was also chosen because of its stunning vistas of the A689…

As Coatesy set up the essential equipment (sat nav, ipod containing some quality CHOOONS), we discussed where to go. In my mind, I wanted to suggest High Force, but I considered it a bit too far out…

“Where’s High Force?” he announced, totally unprovoked, as he flipped through the options on his sat-nav. I cheered a little inside.

“Search for Newbiggin”, I said. It was the only place name I can remember from my original journey. It found the wrong Newbiggin. Bugger. However, after consulting a PROPER map, there’s two villages called Newbiggin within 20 miles of each other, so it’d have been close with either of them.

Eventually, the sat-nav accepted our destination, and off we went, leaving Teesside behind, and heading west along the A 689, which is a stupidly straight road. It’s probably an old Roman road, with tarmac over the top of it.

It wasn’t long before we arrived in the stunning countryside between our starting point and our destination. Coatesy sensed I needed the chance to operate my trigger finger, so we pulled over, and took photos of the landscape.

Although I’ve only posted one photo there, I took a hell of a lot more, all of which are viewable on flickr. Christ. How many times have I mentioned that site tonight? Um.

Anyway, we proceeded on with the car journey, and it wasn’t long before the stunning scenery captivated us once again. We pulled over, and as well as taking another load of pictures, I also took one of this little guy…

Awww. So, we left the sheeps behind, and arrived at our destination - High Force. Despite the fact it was the bank holiday, it was still the same cost. I’m quite bemused why you’d need to actually PAY to see a waterfall anyway. It’s not as if it needs to be maintained, or anything.

Once again, the camera came out, and I’m happy to report that the photos turned out better than last time.

We went up the the top of the waterfall. At this point, Coatesy will be expecting for me to call him all of the wimpy names under the sun, but I wont, as he went nowhere near the edge while I hung over the edge and took more images. He was more than happy to stay on terra firma…

It was sort of the reverse of the first trip with Dan and Phil from work. While they were teetering over the edge of the 20-metre drop, I was hanging back, not going too close. However, this time, I was the one with the “balls”, for want of a better word, to be close to the edge. I also seemed to handle the rock “climbing” a little better too. We both came back alive, and I had a card full of photos once again. Of course, the day wouldn’t be complete without something to scran. The nearest village was Middleton in Teesdale, where we stopped off for some chips. And just in case you don’t believe me, here’s the photo…

As you can see, the shop was given the most original of titles. It does exactly was it says on the tin… er, sorry, I mean sign.

Typically, just as I was about to get served, they ran out of bloody chips, so I had to wait about 10 minutes while they fried some more. This however, was amusing, as the woman behind the counter also managed to drop a carton of curry all over the floor, and then make a song and dance about it, as if it was the end of the world. I’m glad it wasn’t a piece of fish she dropped, she’d have been hanging from the ceiling by the time it hit the floor.

That was our last stop, though we did go to a paper shop in order to get some sweets for the journey home. I settled for a bag of Wine Gums, which, coincidentally . In fact, according to Google Maps, we’d passed the very same building where they came from on our way there. The chances, eh?

We headed back to Teesside, and the nice, sunny day disappeared behind mountains of cloud. Coatesy dropped me off, and he hurried home in order to go and play rugby. Oh, and he now has a very interesting job, though I’m sworn to absolute secrecy about it… shame.

EDIT: Oh, I suppose I’d better post links to the full sets, seeing as I’ve deleted the first post on the subject now.

This particular visit can be viewed here

Technorati Tags: chips, coatesy, day out, flickr, high force, Middleton-In-Teesdale, Photos

I’m sorry for not updating this much at the minute. Work has been absolute sheer hell, I have a feeling this “hell” may continue for the rest of my time there… by that, I mean, the time I completely and utterly snap, and end up killing something or someone. I’ve not slept well for the past 4 days because of it. Great stuff. I therefore have complete, and utter writers’ block, as nothing exciting has happened in my life for the past two weeks, at least.

I hope that this will change tomorrow. It’s a Bank Holiday Monday, and I hope to god this will change. I heard from Coatesy again the other day, and there have been plans, as usual, to do “something” tomorrow. Unfortunately, thanks to an over-ripe spam filter, I didn’t see his message until earlier tonight. I replied, and hopefully he’ll get it on time, though I have a feeling that I have once again, messed everything up. Sigh.

One of the reasons my spam filter has been behaving strangely is that I reformatted Beastbits the other week. I might have mentioned it in the last post, I can’t remember, but it’s played havoc with things such as email. It’s one thing I never really took into account.

However, the reformat means that if I decide to do another vlog, then it’ll be a lot easier, instead of having to transfer everything over to the laptop and edit it from there.

In order to fill up space, and to prove I’m not completely dead, here are two unfinished postings from the last few days… this first one, I entitled “Back To Normal”…

Well, this is the first post after my mammoth posting about Berlin. Going by my (probably incorrect) calculations, I’ve typed more here in the last month than I have in any other month, ever. But, I’ve also noticed that the hits on this site went down by a third over the last two weeks. This either means that I’ve had server issues I’m not aware of, or everyone lost interest reading about my Berlin exploits.

If you are of the latter, and got bored with it, I’d like to apologise, but I won’t.

This is my blog. If you don’t want to read about the best time I’ve had in my life, then you’re more than welcome to quit. If, however, you enjoy reading about how I’ll end up in some type of mental hostel by the time I’m 30, then do keep reading.

Yes, I’m back on “terra firma”, blog wise. I’m back doing what I do, day in, day out. I eat curry, I drink Carlsberg (it’s cheap in Asda) and then I shit liquid black stuff.

Today was one of those days which started off badly. I broke a hard drive.

At approximately 1AM, I fell asleep in my chair, clutching a hard drive. Not any normal hard drive, but my Ubuntu system hard drive. An hour or so, I woke up, with said hard drive in my grasp, but seeing as I’d just woken up, I didn’t know it was there. It promptly slipped out of my hand, and hit the floor.

Seeing as I’d fallen asleep in my chair, I was clearly too tired to care, and went to bed.

I awoke at 5AM, suddenly remembering I’d dropped the hard drive, and hoped it would have still been OK. By this time, I wasn’t tired. I’d been a victim of an unconnected nightshift, so I only needed a few hours sleep. I awoke, and looked around the floor for the hard drive. I find it, and… oh, balls.

Yes, I’d somehow managed to drop the hard drive at such an angle that it broke the power connector. It’s not clear in that picture, but I’d snapped the plastic thing which holds the SATA “connectors” in place, apart from the fact the slivers are all over the place. Buggery.

I took this picture, and decided about what I was going to do. This particular drive was manufactured in 2004, meaning that it still had SATA connectors, and the old 4-pin molex power connectors.

What you’ll be glad to know is that despite my over-dramatic and over-detailed write-up there, the drive was fine. I simply snapped the power edge connector off, and everything worked.

This second, and last posting was typed just a few days ago, when things at work started to go horribly wrong…

Oh, Ok, so it’s a little bit of a step down in interestingness fr y recent cntnenta ex-ts, bt yes, a ndeed ty-ng ths fr the nny scatn f the bac yard f erryva-r Tcwers The n s bsazng dwn

…… that previous sentence is what happend when you accidentally switch on the Shift Lock onto a laptop with no number pad. Um. As I was saying, before I was rudely interrupted by my own incompetence….

I’m in the back yard of Mercuryvapour Towers, as the sun beats down on my pasty, yet ample shell. It is indeed a step down from my exploits in Berlin, but the weather is just a nice. Today was a hell of a night, and the next two days at work don’t seem to be any different. But, I digress. The less said about that place at the minute, the better.

I hereby consider myself a cold-hearted killer. While sat, lounging in the midday sun, I felt something on my side. I look down to see two flies mating. They didn’t even attempt to fly off, as I moved them onto my thumb for a “closer look” as these two winged pests went at it like flies on shit rabbits. Then I got that sense of anger… how could they do it so casually on my thumb, while I’ve been searching for a suitable female for months?

I must admit, I felt a little guilty, as I pressed their two conjoned bodies into the wall. I remove my thumb to watch their final movements, both of their twisted bodies now splattered against the bricks, with the last moments of their lives passing through them, as their corpses drip translucent fluid down the terra-cotta paintwork.

Time to go in, as my skin is starting to turn into crackling…

There’s a reason I didn’t post that last one… I can’t quite… oh yes, it was posibly the worst thing I’ve written about in my 6 and three quarter years of doing this blog. I must admit that I’ve been a little concerned about the traffic coming here recently. Maybe I’ve crossed that line between “humorous and jolly blog” into “just another blog”. I notice everyone at work has stopped reading, or at least stopped commenting. The size of my log has also decreased (sigh… for once I’m not being childish), it almost halved last week. OK, there are many reasons for that… I know a lot of my images get linked to on myspace, etc. which all count as a hit, but you can only count those for so much of your traffic…

Week ending 12th Aug 2007… 29,505 hits
Week ending 19th Aug 2007… 20,844 hits
Week ending 26th Aug 2007… 17,508 hits

So, it’s not looking good, is it? OK, I’m only looking at the numbers, and the size of the logfile itself, and yes, I have been proactive in invalidating the links from myspace hits, etc. but, could this be the beginning of the end? Am I really boring you all that much?

Technorati Tags: bank holiday monday, broken, busy, hard drive, hdd, stats, swear, work

Judging by the lack of comments on the last few posts, I guess that by this point, I’ve completely bored you all to death with my ramblings of travelling to a far-flung land. Normal service will be resumed my the end of this post. You’ll all be reading again about how much I hate work, how much I like streetlights, how much curry I’ve eaten, and how much of it flies out of my bowels at a shocking rate of knots. I bet you can’t wait. In fact, I’ll even try to cover all of them in this post.

So, anyway, it was a sunday. I awoke to see the worst weather in the whole of my time there. The building site across the road from the hotel was one big puddle. It wasn’t a nice day. Now, you’ll remember my 72-hour ticket? Well, it was used up…. and there was no point getting a travel ticket for just one day. by the time we’d got ready, the rain hadn’t let up at all… it was still lashing down.

On our way out of the door to begin the last day, Chris asked the guy behind the reception desk if they had any umbrellas. But they didn’t. The hotel was “all out of umbrellas”. I did, however, successfully manage to order a taxi, to pick us up from the hotel the following morning. Or rather, I just asked the guy behind the reception desk to do it for me.

We decided to give the outdoor cafes a miss, and instead headed off to a Starbucks nearby. I can’t see the fascination with coffee, personally, so I settled for a croissant and a bottle of water. Chris also had a croissant, and some fruit smoothie thing which just looked odd. As we weren’t going to travel around much, we decided to stay in the vacinity. The tour guide Jonathan had picked up from the hotel showed some good museums, and Chris remembered a few places he wanted to see from that very first bus trip, all of them were in the same general direction…

By the time we’d finished eating and drinking, it was getting a little bit brighter… the rain had stopped, and the place was drying out nicely. Chris wanted a closer look at this building…

… and also to find out why it had a big V painted on the front of it. I think it was adverising some exhibition or another. Anyway, turns out it’s one of the Humboldt University buildings, therefore it was locked. And that book sale wasn’t there either. We crossed over the road, in the hope of finding something open, and while Chris and Jonathan took care of the map, I took photos…

Unsuccessful, we crossed back over the road, and noticed a sign saying “Kunst”… First of all, I thought it was a strip club for dyslexics, but it turned out to be an arts and crafts market, though, it didn’t take me long to be in my element…

I didn’t buy anything at this point, because there was no way they’d survive in the suitcase, and I didn’t fancy carrying LPs all the way through on hand luggage. I’d already had that Herbert Groenemeyer CD, so I was more then happy to spend only a few minutes looking through these, especially as they were expensive. Chris found joy by searching through some old print stamps… one of which he’d pay €20 for later in the day. The craft fair ended after about 20 stalls, and we followed the road round until we came to something more like a traditional flea market affair, selling CDs for cheap. €1 each. Happiness! I ended up buying the Gladiators (yes, GladiatorS) soundtrack, and a song called Highland, by Swedish band “One More Time” (Wiki), which are of no musical relation to Swedish band One 2 Many. Apparently.

Another stall sold 7″ singles, by far my audio format favourite. I picked “I promised Myself” by Nick Kamen - a song which I’d heard originally in the Hartlepool shopping centre, at about 8AM in the morning before the shops even opened. But that’s a story for another day. I also bought two others which aren’t really worth mentioning, as they were simply ro replace scratched copies of records I already had.

Either way, I bought these records, and it looked like it was about to piss down, so the next step was to find a cheap umbrella that we could all share. And, there was indeed a store that sold umbrellas. Wooo. So, for €6, we ended up with the shoddiest looking umbrella you have ever seen, with holes in to complete the job. Ironically, about 30 seconds later, the rain stopped, so it wasn’t much use anyway. We returned to the hotel, and I dropped off my musical delights.

Within seconds we were back out of the door, and heading back in the same direction from whence we came, but this time omitting the KunstMarkt, or whatever it was called, and headed over the bridge to the other side of the river. We had a quick look around the Berliner Dom, an architectually stunning building….

The next stop was the DDR museum - a museum showing the way of life in the old East Germany, including a real-life trabant…

Chris was more than excited at the sight of an old model kit he used to have as a kid. I also managed to get a shot of the traffic lights which are all over the city. For some reason, they’re a lot more “jolly” than the ones we have over here. The green man has a hat on, and he looks like he’s all set off for a bloody good stroll…

Classy. By this time, it was mid afternoon so we headed back out, in the search of some “luxury” items to take back. I ended up getting a pen, a t-shirt, and some…. strange thing with little gold coins in it. It was all a terrible waste of money, but it was better than lots of useless Euros bashing about in my wallet.

It was getting on, so we returned back to the hotel, and began the tedious task of packing our belongings away. This was relatively straightforward for me… everything liquid based went in the bin. Everything else went in the case. I travelled light in all honesty, so I was finished within an hour or so. Chris and Jonathan took slightly longer, as Chris had to work out how to pack two boxes of chocolates without them getting shattered or melted.

Eventually, we were finished, and headed off out just one more time. Unfortunately, it looked like it was about to absolutely piss down….

This was around the same time that the last of my electrical items went back in the case, so I’m sure you’ll all be glad to know that there are no more big photos to look at.

So, we wanted somewhere not too far away, under cover… Have a guess where we went. Yes, of course… the INDIAN. I just had to have one more German curry. Even Chris went for the Madras.

Before the main meal, they left these poppadom things I’ve never seen before. They weren’t just normal poppadoms, but they had some stupidly hot flavouring to them. I was in *love*. Unfortunately, I don’t know the German for “What were those hot poppadom things?” so exactly what they were will remain forever a mystery. Bugger.

The meal was consumed, and I was as happy as a pig in shit. I’d somehow survived a week where I didn’t know the food, didn’t know the language, and more importantly, I learned that there was more to a trip away than just finding the nearest Gregg’s….

The finale of the night was spent back at the Berliner Republik…. the place where we’d spent most of our mornings getting stocked up on pretzels and Currywurst. This time, we sat inside, and tried out something which wouldn’t be allowed in England… beer trading.

To put it bluntly, Beer trading means the prices of the different beers change every 6 minutes, up or down, depending on some unknwon factor.

I was down to my last few Euros, so I was taking this beer trading thing seriously, sipping my pseudo-pint slowly, until the price of the beer I was drinking changed. I watched the screen… Oooo! My preferred tipple had went down from €3.70 to €3.50… GREAT! I quickly call a waitress over (easier said than done), point at my glass, she takes a note and then disappears off to fetch the beer.

The clock slowly counts down, with no sign of the beer…

4 minutes left before the price change… then two minutes… one minute… thirty seconds… five seconds… DING! The prices change.. aaaand, my beer’s gone up to €3.90.

Seconds after the price change, out pops the waitress… surely, I’d only be charged the €3.50? No ‘king way. The receipt said €3.90. At that point, I just totally lost interest in “beer trading”, which is clearly just a rip-off. I didn’t feel like drinking anyway, as I was completely stuffed from the wonderful curry I’d eaten earlier. It was about 10:30 by this point, and we decided to move on… except everywhere else was shutting up. It was like a ghost town. The bad weather had held off, so that wasn’t to blame. It was just all very eerie and quiet.

We walked back to the hotel, crossing the River Spree one final time, and we headed into the hotel bar for one last drink of authentic German Pilsner, knowing it would be one hell of a long time before I would ever come into contact with it again. Sob.

We left the bar, and returned to our respective hotel rooms for one last time, knowing that there was a 600-mile journey back to blightly in front of us the next day… I awoke, at 4AM, with the biggest case of the shits I’ve had in years. I have no idea if it was the curry or the beer. I’ll steer clear of the details, but this went on for two hours. It did give me a chance to take some last photos out of the window. It was amazing how quiet and still everything was at 6AM in the morning.

Eventually, I got back off to sleep and awoke at 8AM, to find one of the machines on the building site completely ruined….

Chris said there was one hell of a bang as it went over. Somehow, I slept through it.

The last of the packing was done, I double-checked, and triple checked everything, and jumped into the taxi for the journey back to the airport. The taxi driver was the most miserable bastard in the whole history of the world. The only words he spoke (with the exception of expletives and horn-sound) was “AIR BERLIN???”, as we approached the airport. Not understanding him, we all nodded politely and said “yes”, suddenly realising that Air Berlin was the name of one of the departure gates. But it was too late. The driver huffed and puffed, like I’d just taken his toys away, and eventually dropped us at the airport. The total cost was €18. I gave him 20. The bastard didn’t even give me any change.

The airport was the same rigmariole as before, only I knew what to expect, so it was even more boring. We get a drink, then check in. Our bags disappear to places unknown, and we sit around, waiting for the plane to turn up. Oh, and I bought some duty free, namely a box of Dime (I refuse to call them Daim) bars, and a 500-gram bag of Haribo cola bottles. Larvely. No alcohol, though. I was disappointed in myself.

Eventually, the plane turns up, we board, and the journey starts. I didn’t have a window seat, so I studied the on-board literature. A lot. Though, there could only be so many times I could read about fastening my seatbelt before it came tedious. Sandwhiches were passed around. they had a wonderful choice of two (count ‘em! TWO!) types. Salmon and something, and Cheese and something… I passed, but did take up the opportunity of having a nice, cold refreshing can of beer. After all, it was 11AM by this point. Erm.

So, we land in Amsterdam. The weather was better than it was on the journey there. No chance of any delays THIS time. Once again, we go through the usual security checks… empty pockets, take off belt, blah de blah. Now I’d managed to get through three of these things, surely I’d be able to get through the fourth…. No.

It beeped. The whole thing lit up like a christmas tree. what the fooch?

“Step to one side, sir”… said some balding, middle aged bloke.

“Do you mind if I search you?”.

“No, of course, not”, I reply. After all, what were my alternatives? I really didn’t fancy the ol’ “rubber Glove” treatment, so I let him do his thing. Thankfully I was free to go, though I was still unaware of what made the machine squeal. Maybe the can of beer I’d drank contained a shiny penny? I will never know.

The journey from Amsterdam back to Newcastle was even more boring. Chris and Jonathan were on one side of the aisle, I was on the other. I couldn’t even see out of the window, without looking over everyone else. Shite. The only reason it’s worth mentioning is that I had another can of beer.

Upon my return back to the UK, I switched on my phone, to find that Daddykins was picking me up, and waiting in the car park, which eventually cost him £6. the final stupid expense of the trip. The A1 back home was completely blocked by an overturned lorry, which shed 18 tonnes of cable over the carriageway. This led to a detour around the suburbs of South Tyneside, and getting lost about three times.

And that, is it. The end. There is no more. Actually, there’s lots more, but I thought that after three weeks of typing this holiday up, I’ll draw the line here and now. I shall conclude by posting Youtube links to the video I made while I was there….

Day 1… http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=fJRuIbhX260 (Incomplete due to a tape fault)
Day 2 part 1… http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=MIbDSfEkrIg
Day 2 part 2… http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=fYhQZ95Vw78
Day 2 dart 3… http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2Tg6gE1EQjo
Day 3… http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=1k4ozi1bcTc

The rest of the days coming soon, including the zoo footage…

Now I can get back to talking about other stuff. Wooooo.

Technorati Tags: beer, berlin, chris, cloud, euro, germany, holiday, jonathan, Music, Photos, rain, records, video, weather, youtube

Yikes… it was a weekend, though it didn’t exactly feel like it. We had 24 hours of our “City Tour” ticket left, and there were still so many places left to see. This day was a relatively early start for me, with the first image being taken on the camera at 9:20 AM.

Now knowing that my wallet was running on vapours, my task for the morning was to find a working cashpoint. This was a city, so it couldn’t have been hard. Jonathan mentioned there was a cashpoint on the station a few yards away. Great! That’s that sorted. I look, and I look, and couldn’t find a thing. I did, however, find a supermarket selling the necessities (drink, but not of the alcoholic kind.. apple juice and coke). I decide to walk in a northerly direction up Friedrichstrasse, in the hope to find a cash point. I fail miserably, on my first visit. On my way back down to the hotel, I notice some woman walking into a glass fronted building. I have no idea what it was, but it looked like it might have been a bank.

I had nothing to lose by following her. I walk into the building and fall to my knees. SEVEN CASH MACHINES. ALL THE COLOURS OF THE RAINBOW. Ok, that’s not strictly true, but there were indeed seven of them. I was delighted.

I watch some guy finishing up with his transaction, and I decide to use his machine, as it appeared to be working correctly. I insert my card, and… nothing. It wouldn’t even take the card. Surely, there was some mistake. I push that little harder. Nothing. I was ready to cry, but then I look at the little diagram on the card reader… it needed to be inserted strip-side-up. How odd is that? This time, the card was accepted, and thankfully, I was able to get some funds from it. I return to the supermarket I’d found earlier, and purchase the apple juice, and some strange cola drink. It was called Vita-Cola It’s totally uninspiring. Sorry, I really didn’t like it much at all.

By the time I returned back to the hotel, I knocked on Chris + Jonathan’s door. They were already awake, so I told them of my great discovery - cashpoints and reasonably priced soft drinks. With only two days to go, they were hardly enthusiastic, but I was happy anyway.

Anway, the plan was to go to Spandau to see the prison. There was an unknwon delay which meant we didn’t set off until around Midday. Maybe we went for breakfast, maybe we didn’t. I have no idea. I don’t think we did.

Anwyay, by this time, despite our problems with the trains over the last couple of days, we had got the hang of it, and even knew the station where we needed to change to get to Spandau. This, however wall Chris and Jonathan’s doing, as I still didn’t really have a clue. We boarded the train, and I spent the next 20 minutes in geek filled heaven. Actually, no, this is more of a nerd thing. Skip this paragraph if you’re not interested.

Inside the carriages are scrolling LED display boards which tell you where the next station is, so you know where to get off. They don’t appear to be anything special. 5×7 font, green LEDs. The one above where I was sitting would begin to show the station, then crash, resulting in a SELFTEST message being displayed. It struck me later on in the day where I had seen it. Someone else (a total stranger) on flickr had posted an image of an identical display doing the same thing. Woo!

OK, so onto Spandau. We get off the train, and land in a market. It was just a normal market, however, with nothing special on offer. Just the usual fruit, vegetables, meat, etc. The whole point of the trip was to go and find Spandau prison. Except it wasn’t marked on any of the maps, so we didn’t know if we’d even be able to find it. We walked up a row of shops, similar in appearance to the ones we experienced in Potsdam.

This photo was taken at the end of the road, where again, there was a church. It must be a common feature, main shopping parades have churches at the end of them. Odd.

It appeared there was a wedding or something happening at this church, as there were a lot of people roaming about, all dressed up. There was a display of some sort in the church, but we didn’t go in incase it was cancelled because of whatever was happening. Instead, we walked around for a bit again.

At this point, I spie a Woolworths! Or rather, just Woolworth. We couldn’t resist a look in, to see just how different it was. Naturally, I went over to the CD section… basically, about 1 foot of shelf space. They didn’t seem to be big on music over there. I spied one CD there, which I just had to buy… Through the Barricades, by Spandau Ballet. I can claim to be one of the few people in the entire world to have bought a Spandau Ballet CD from Spandau. I will now wait until the fateful day, years down the line, when someone flips through my CD collection, spots it, and asks where I bought it from. I shall reply with Spandau. And they shall go “Wow”. And I’ll be like, “Yeah, I totally did”. And they’ll be like “NO WAY!” And I’ll be like, “WAY!”… And, I appear to have gotten stuck in a 1990 loop.

Other things purchased at the Woolworth store were a packet of Big Red Gum, which I talked about briefly in another post, two Daim bars, mainly to see if they tasted any different over there, and some spare batteries for my camera, just in case I needed them.

We walked back up the street towards the station, and passed underneath it towards a large and impressive looking shopping centre - The Spandau Arcaden, which looked like it had just been built 15 minutes ago. There wasn’t exactly a wide range of shops in there, but at the end of one floor was a stupidly large supermarket. I forget the name of it, but it was enormous. Outside the store were boxes full of CDs for sale. I couldn’t resist a flick through them. One thing I don’t think I’ve mentioned, is that I also travelled to Germany to purchase a song. Just one song. “Manner” by Herbert Groenemeyer. After viewing every CD on sale, I didn’t find it. Shite. There was only one day to go.

I didn’t go home empty handed, however. I purchased the greatest hits of Albert Hammond for €3, for the song “The Free Electric Band”. We all had a Maccy D’s to see if it tasted different over there. Apparently, the burgers were greasier, but the chips… sorry, fries, were just as acceptable.

We had seen the sights of Spandau, and so we headed back. Two things I learned while typing this entry is that “The term Spandau Ballet referred to the spasms of the Nazi war criminals as they “danced at the end of the rope”, when they were hanged at Spandau Prison.” (source: wikipedia, so that’s probably wrong), and that Spandau Prison was demolished after Rudolph Hess died. So, no matter how much we searched for it, we’d have never found it. It was just over a mile from where we were anyway.

The trip back was interesting. The train seemed to be full of beggars and vagrants. This seemed odd, as we’d hardly seen any in the whole of our time there. Some guy hopped from carriage to carriage, changing each time the train stopped at a station. Unlike most of the trains here in the UK, you can’t walk between carriages. There were also beggars at the station, and a pack of cheeky beggars on the bridge near the hotel…

The mad looking one standing up with the mohawk attempted to intimidate people by walking right up to them and asking for spare change. He tried it on Jonathan and got told to fuck off not-so-politely. What isn’t in this picture, however, is that there were another load of them on the other side of the road doing exactly the same thing, all part of the same gang, as they would both put their ill-gotten gains into one kitty. This was the only time they were there.

At this point, Chris wanted to head off back to Checkpoint Charlie to get his passport stamped. If you pay €2, you can get it stamped with the Checkpoint Charlie logo. I was a bit tired, so I retired to the hotel for a bit of a lie down while he went up there and got it stamped. He returned quite a bit later, but with his passport successfully stamped. I’d have thought that would be illegal, but nope, it isn’t.

I livened myself up rather unspectacularly. I’d taken a huge swig of apple juice before I laid down, which only seemed to ferment in my stomach, making me feel like I was about to throw up for about half an hour. Unfortunately, this half an hour consisted of a ride on the underground system, and then 15 minutes, in he hottest train I have ever been in my entire life. The sweat was dripping off me, but luckily, this caused the fermeting apple juice to be absorbed into my body so I didn’t feel sick anymore.

Our destination was the KaDeWe - the German version of Harrods, though we didn’t know it at the time. We walked through the doors into a marble hallway, with watch manufacturers either side, with prices ranging from €1,000 to €WTF,000. I felt a little out of place, walking around in my £4 Matalan T-shirt. We started on the top floor and worked our way down, as it was about 6PM, and the store closed at 8PM. The top floor was a restaurant / bar. No interest there, so we moved down into the food section. It had everything. And when I mean everything, I mean it even had a fish counter that I could actually walk around without borking my ring up. It’s the first place that sells fresh fish where I could actually breathe the air. Now that’s a sign of a good shop.

Of course, there wasn’t just the fish counter, there was everyhing else from bread to ornemental bottles of rice vinegar. We did spend a bit of time here, especially in the confectionary section … Chris bought the sugariest cake of all time (more on that later), and I bought some pressies. It came to something extortionate, but at least they allowed me to use my card.

The floor below it was the technology section. Large CD and DVD selection. Obviously, the DVD’s would be in German, but the music section should have that CD I was looking for. After about half an hour of searching though the G’s, I finally strike gold…

The store had a very interesting computer system which allowed you to scan a barcode, and hear the appropriate CD via email, just to make sure it was the one you wanted. A quick scan later, and there it was… Manner…. Track 2.

I don’t know why I like the song so much, as I can’t understand a word of it, but I “knew of” it, thanks to someone in #speccy. While at work, months aro, the German language speakers were streaming some unknown German radio station via the interwebs. All of a sudden, ‘Manner’ came on. I jumped out of my chair, stood upright, pointing at the speakers, shouting “I KNOW THIS ONE!”

I don’t know whether this made me like it more or not, but it certainly didn’t harm my opinion of it. As far as I was concerned, I was holding his CD in my hand. This was my biggest wanted souvenir of the trip, and although I knew it would cost €18.99, I knew that if I put it back on the shelf, I’d be horribly disappointed in myself. Therefore, it was bought, and although it was probably in the top 10 of the most expensive CDs I’d bought, it would be money well spent.

We walked around the store, mainly gasping at the price of everything… my personal favourite was €300 for a 1Gb USB stick… it was clear, anyone who bought that must have a very small cock.

The last main stop was the men’s clothes section, just in case there was a bargain or two to be found. There wasn’t anything close to being a bargain. I think the cheapest thing I saw in there was an ugly green polo shirt for €25. Eveything else was closer to the €100 mark. There was no way I was even coming close to spending that amount.

After that, we left, and decided to head back, so we could get something to eat. We remembered how bad the underground was, and luckily, I noticed a signpost, pointing to the zoo, some 800 metres away. This was good, as we knew the station. We set off, and begin to head off into the suburbs. This wasn’t looking like it was the way to go. Eventually, we turn back, and come to the conclusion that some jokers had turned the signpost around. We complete a full circle, and end up back where we were originally. Walking was for losers, and seeing as our train tickets were also allowed on buses, we got the bus to the station.

This time, we knew exactly where to go, and boarded the train back to Friedrichstrasse. The beggars hadn’t let up, and were still roaming the carriages. Dark clouds were beginning to form overhead. Could this be rain?

We get back to the hotel, and begin to devour Chris’s cake, and found it more sugary than any of us had possibly imagined. I devoured the licorice bits on top, which weren’t really licorice, they tasted like cherry cola. I think I was the only one that liked them.

The main cake itself wasn’t made out of marshmallow as originally thought, instead it was made almost entirely out of sugar. Hard sugar. Chris began to attempt to eat it, but didn’t even break the surface until the sugar rush was too much. We headed out for some fresh air. Chris noticed, that while he was wandering around the hotel, it had a terrace…. or rather, a roof section that was accessible. I have no idea whether we were supposed to be on the roof or not, but opening the door didn’t set off the fire alarm. Naturally, I used this as an excuse to take more photos.

It started to rain, so we headed back inside, and got changed for the night. The penultimate night saw us back at the Argentinian steak house, where I had burger and chips. Jonathan had the same (I think), and I have no idea what Chris had. We all enjoyed our meal, and had a couple more back at the Kartoffelkeller, before retiring to the hotel, and having one or two there. Jonathan didn’t join us, however, so me and Chris stayed and had a couple more, before calling it a night.

Only one more day to go.

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