Max Kuehn & The Attack Of The Incredibly Productive Saturday

Hello friends and family, this is Max “Firebolt” Kuehn reporting live from Prenzlauer Berg in beautiful Berlin! Actually Berlin is not particularly beautiful today—as you may notice in the cold cloudy slew of photographs to come—but remains a nice place to be in general. My post-run shower was not the warmest standing bath I’ve ever taken, and for whatever reason I’m still having a hard time warming up. I type in a sweater and a hat and wool socks, and I’ve got a blanket wrapped around my shoulders as well. Brrrr.

First: let’s go baaaaack iiiiin tiiiiiime! To all the stuff I never told you about last weekend, specifically:

1. Mensa Fun
Look at that pretty ol tree outside the Mensa! This photograph also features friends reclining in the lower left hand corner. From left to right, the three ladies are Lucy, Leia (sorry if I spelled it wrong I just assumed you were named after the Star Wars character), and Mariana. They are in my exchange program and I got some lunch with them at the good ol’ cheap ol’ cafeteria, because that’s what friends do.

Special feature: guest photography by Lucy! (Who also has a blog that I enjoy reading! Hopefully this plug will temper her anger at my unauthorized use of her picture.)
This is me looking skeptical about something. Before me sits a typical (for me) Mensa meal: a plate full of steamed potatoes, rice, and whatever vegetable is looking least slimy that day, with three or four scoops of the day’s sauce over the whole mess; a roll; and a couple of hard boiled eggs. It is not the tastiest sort of meal in the world, but its got plenty of protein and carbohydrates with very little fat and sodium, and its rare good ballast for an empty belly. Also it costs me about 2.50, which is impossible to beat.

One more Mensa Nord photo and then I promise we’ll move on. I just noticed these benches the other day, after walking by them for weeks:Cool.

2. Pre-Move/May Day Fun
I had to clean my room the day before I moved out. As I am not a very dirty person, it wasn’t too bad, except for this super-stupid, ultra-dusty CD rack:I appreciate the fact that some people still do own CDs, but it seems very unlikely to me that any of the exchange students staying in this room over the past 5 years or so have brought even a single CD along to Berlin, thus making this thing less of a CD rack and more of a Difficult to Clean Dust Collector. And the partly-dusted portion in the photograph represents less than half of the whole construction. (It is pointlessly modular.)

Anyways I had to clean it, so I improvised a dust mask out of the most defiant piece of cloth I could find:Even with most of my face covered in American pride I think I’m still looking appropriately pissy here. However, the really outstanding feature of this photograph is that stray lock of forehead hair that’s sort of angling off, up, up and away towards the upper left. I thought maybe it was like lifted up by a sudden gust of wind the moment I took this photo or something, but this earlier, less successful attempt at the same picture reveals that it really is a bizarrely stiff little spit of hair:
Once finished I went on a farewell tour of my beloved Volkspark Friedrichshain with my excellent (and now, sadly, former) fellow Mollstraße 16 resident, Johanna. Johanna brought with some very pretty strawberries that we ate in the grass by a fountain.
The next day, Saturday, post-move evening adventure: my camera is useless in low-light, so I didn’t even bother trying to photograph all the nutso demonstration/proto-riot action. Instead, I took photographs of my friend Chris’s bathroom decorations, because they’re awesome. Exhibit A is this Tom Waits poster on the door:Exhibit B is this really fine Elvis:And my closing argument is this (unfortunately kind of washed out but still quality) little montage of Clint Eastwood Through The Ages:I can’t decide if I like upper-left Dreamboat Clint or upper-right Lounge Lizard Clint more.

3. Post-Move Kitchen Scrounging Fun
The Committee For Making Lemons Into Lemonade would like to present to you my first Sunday night dinner in photographic form. Background: I moved on Saturday (May 1st), so I only brought with real basic-type food to lighten the load, and every single grocery store is closed on Sunday for irritating reasons. So, real hungry and not wanting to go out after having purchased 3 (THREE) meals at restaurants the day before, I dug around in the pantry and came up with—THE TRIPLE DECKER FRIED EGG SANDWICH:This thing was so tasty. I went crust to crust on it in about 2 minutes. It was like eating some hideous promotional blockbuster tie-in special edition sandwich at a Burger King, except it didn’t contain my weekly ration of fat, salt, and Yellow 6. No, the salt on this thing was sprinkled on sparingly by yours truly, and all the fat came from a teaspoon of olive oil and the natural oils of big brown eggs laid by honest German chickens. Mmmm.

Aaaand I think that is enough for right now. I took a lot of pictures of my cool new neighborhood on my run today, but despite a full morning of labor I still have an unreal number of things on my to-do list, and P-Berg really deserves a post all its own. For now I will post this, drink some black tea, and pick out my classes for my SENIOR YEAR at Northwestern University. Terrifying—wish me luck!

P.S.: Sneak Preview: Check out this extremely well-lit cross walk outside my house. It is so bright I could even take a photograph of it.
Neat, and effective...so far.