September

Now that the Opera Challenge is over, I'm looking around for something interesting to do on this blog in the month of September. To that end, I will be posting daily pictures of Berlin, with a little description. They won't all be music related, although many of them will be, but the idea is to share my adopted city with the world in a way that isn't like a guidebook. They will be pics of buildings, street musicians, people, stores...basically anything that catches my interest.

And so, today, I give you soup.


I bought this utterly delicious lentil soup (lensilsuppe auf Deutsch) for three euros at a restaurant called Knofi on the Bergmannstrasse in Kreutzberg. The Kreutz, as it is affectionately known, is the closest thing Berlin has to a Latin Quarter. It reminds me of downtown Santa Cruz in that it is filled with ethnic shops, vintage stores, funky fusion restaurants, and artsy-types. There's a general air of excitement there: it's slightly grubby but very colorful and alive. The air smells like incense and cigarettes-not an unattractive mixture. I bought some really nice bowls and dish towels for my apartment there, and spent a fun time collecting business cards from local stores (I really like business cards; they're a kind of pop art that I use to decorate mirrors). It's definitely a place I'll visit again.