Day 18: Leaving Weimar > Leipzig > Berlin

Packed up and shifted out of our TARDIS room at Hababusch and made some boiled eggs for breakfast. Visited Robin in Hospital, a 2km walk south of Weimar which was good for circulation and my ongoing bleak mood. Robin's doing much better after several tests and procedures. Since he hasn't been able to eat for the past few days he's looking very thin, though he hasn't lost any of his good humour. Before leaving Weimar we managed to prolong our stay by an extra hour when we took the wrong bus which dragged us a few kilometres from the train station. Deciding to walk to the station was useful for us to vent our frustrations at this town and its indecipherable bus routes.

Since we hadn't reserved seats for the trip from Leipzig to Berlin we had to stand for the two hour journey amongst some friendly backpackers and a couple of huskies.

Upon arriving in Berlin, we navigated ourselves to Neukolln - one of the main multi-cultural districts of Berlin. Asadeh (who we're staying with) said that this place has been getting a bad reputation in the media - practically forever - and is informally known as 'the ghetto' or the 'Gaza Strip'. Asadeh agreed when I suggested to her such tags are mostly the result of a media beat up based on class/race/cultural prejudice combined with unemployment statistics and drug problems. The community here is predominantly Arabic with lots of smoking lounges, doner kebabs and people playing backgammon on the sidewalk. There are also contingents of east Europeans (Polish, Serbs, Hungarians, Russians), African refugees and a smattering of native art students. The more appropriate tag for such a place would be alternative, since this is one of the major areas for outsider art, public art, and interesting art in general.

On our first evening in Neukolln we were invited to a dinner party hosted by one of Asadeh's friends. I always enjoying dinner do's where you eat sitting on the floor amongst others and get to spend the evening discussing all kinds of philosophical things (chief topic: do animals have a 'langauge'?)