Kreuzberg

I've been incredibly lazy and have failed to post to the blog in any significant manner since leaving Southeast Asia. I spent three weeks on the east coast of America visiting friends. I spent much of this time in Brooklyn, but also made short trips back to Boston and D.C. It was strange to be back at Harvard, especially during reading period when everyone was busy studying. I wasn't at all sad to no longer be in that position.

I flew out of New York in mid May to London and took a bus the same morning up to Cambridge. I stayed a night there with Joe, my freshman year roommate, and looked around town and checked out Pembroke College where I'll be living come October.

Next day I took a train to Cardiff in Wales where Jon, who I had last seen in Thailand, picked me up. We spent a night at his house and then flew out of Bristol the next day to Dublin.

In our usual fashion, we checked into a hostel, only to end up sleeping at a friend of a friend's house. Back to the hostel the next morning to pick up our bags and check out. After a few days in Dublin, we set out for the southwest of Ireland by bus.

The southwest of the country is incredibly beautiful with some stunning landscapes and charming towns.




We eventually returned to Dublin and flew back to Bristol. I then made my way back to London where I spent a night with Simona and Jamie. I was heading next to Paris and conveniently they too were going to France, so I got a ride with them. We drove to Dover and crossed the channel by ferry. Simona and Jamie were heading to the northeast of France, so they dropped me off at the train station in Lens and I took the train the rest of the way. I arrived at Steve's apartment in the 20th just in time for a memorable dinner party.

After five days in Paris, I flew to Berlin. Back in Cambridge, I had responded to a few online postings about rooms available for sublet in Berlin. One person responded to my inquiries and I arranged to sublet a room in Kreuzberg for the month of June. I knew nothing about the room, though. All I knew was that it was in an apartment with two German girls. I had paid no deposit. I had only a phone number which I was to ring when I arrived in Berlin.

Arriving at the airport in Paris, I realised I had never made a note of the apartment's address. I shot off a text message to the phone number in Berlin and by the time I arrived at Tegel, I had a response. An hour later I was moving into my room.

My roommates turned out to be incredibly friendly. Isa is a director, while Nadja is an actor. She also fronts a punk rock band.

My third day there, they threw a party in an abandoned brewery in Prenzlauer Berg where I met a number of their friends. One of whom is an actor who was about to start shooting a short film. I ended up assisting on the film, which was a lot of fun and allowed me to meet still more members of the Berlin acting community.

A week into my stay in Berlin, the World Cup started. Jon flew over from Wales to visit. Originally he was going to stay a week, but ended up staying two. Each day was spent waking up late, finding somewhere to watch the first game, moving somewhere else for the second, and once again somewhere new for the third. And then out exploring the Berlin nightlife. We had tickets to one game World Cup game, Spain v Ukraine in Leipzig.

Just before Jon left, Kevin, our mutual friend who we had met in Vietnam, arrived and stayed with us for three days.


Jon and Kevin left just as the tournament moved into its latter stages. At the beginning of July, I moved into a new apartment. Two friends who I had met through my original roommates were going to Malaysia for the month of July and had suggested I stay in their apartment. It is a beautiful place on Kreuzberg's eastern edge close to where the wall ran.


Last weekend Steve came up from Paris to visit. We had a fun time watching the quarter finals of the World Cup and wandering the streets of Kreuzberg.




One can even still see the occasional Trabant on the Berlin's streets.

We of course also saw the main sights in Berlin's Mitte.


On Saturday, we went swimming in the local pool. The hull of an old ship has been turned into a swimming pool, floating in the river Spree. A boardwalk runs out over the water to the pool. The sides of the pool are only slight higher than the river level, so that swimming in the pool, one can look up and be surrounded by great expanses of water.

The World Cup is drawing to a close now, with only the final and third-place playoff to go. The festive atmosphere in Berlin has been great and will hopefully continue after the tournament.

Letter to the editor

John Tierney’s “Kicking the Soccer Habit” (New York Times, June 24) is at times tongue-in-cheek, but he is nonetheless quite serious in arguing that soccer, or football as the rest of the world knows it, is a boring sport and one which America would do well not to embrace. In short, it is a defense of American parochialism.

Tierney points to a Pew survey which shows only 4 percent of Americans name soccer as their favorite sport to watch. Yet, a staggering proportion of Americans play the sport at some level, be it youth or amateur or professional. Is it not possible that the true spectator potential of the sport in America has not yet been realized? After all, the world’s premier leagues, games and players are practically unavailable to viewers of mainstream networks.

It is, of course, a self-reinforcing cycle. With few viewers, soccer attracts few television advertisers. And with small advertising revenues, television networks have little incentive to promote the game. I wouldn’t be the first observer to suggest that mainstream American viewers watch what they’re told to watch by that great monolith, the American advertising industry.

Tierney, sounding like a neocon espousing the need to spread democracy, then suggests that “the rest of the world could learn from us. Maybe they love soccer because they haven’t been given better alternatives.” Is it really likely that the rest of the world just aren’t as sophisticated as American viewers? That while the Americans can enjoy those flowing games of non-stop excitement such as baseball and American football, the rest of the world puts up with the tedium of the soccer game? I’m sure Tierney is aware of the existence of financially viable professional basketball, hockey and American football leagues throughout Europe including European-wide ‘Champions League’ style competitions. And yet Europeans still, in the vast majority, tune into soccer.

Perhaps Tierney’s complaints about soccer are motivated foremost by another peculiar American trait—an inability to accept that this superpower is, when it comes to the one sport of global significance, only mediocre.