Better now!

As soon as my laptop came back from repairs, I started to feel better - being back with 1920x1200 resolution is great! NVidia is much more stable than ATi and Intel wireless is just great!

And then last weekend I was in Berlin for the FFII board meeting and used the opportunity to see the city with my girlfriend. I must say that there is a lot of interesting things to see in Berlin.The things I would recommend everyone are: go to the Zoo (5-7 hours of superb fun), then take bus 100 to Alexander Platz (driving by all the main landmarks), go up on the TV tower, then come down and sometime late in the night go to 'Weekend' dance club.

The Zoo is fantastic - most of the time there are no walls between you and the animals, only deep pits. Most animals can be seen both in their outdoor spaces and in their indoor places. The park is a bit maze like, but the best thing is that you can just keep on walking and you will always have something interesting to look at. Wherever there is a underwater bit, there is a glass plate that allows you to look underwater. It looks almost like huge TV sets. When a family of hippos swims by a long wall of glass, the effect fantastic. And so is the whole zoo.

Going to the 'Weekend' club was another interesting experience. We found out of the club from Wikitravel and went there around 22:30. The place was barely warming up. We easily found the big office building with red "SHARP" ad on top just off the Alexander Platz, but it was fully dark and quiet with no signs about the club, so we looked for people. At one of the entrances there were a couple people with a table that took 5€ from us and waved us inside to the elevators. When elevators came, they had two guys inside that did not ask us anything, but just shot us up to the 15th floor, we followed the small stream of people and came to a wooden roof-top terrace with lots of place to sit, to chat, to drink and a very long bar with lots of staff ready to make us a drink. And there was music - great quality soft disco music that was quiet enough so that people could relax and talk freely. You could see the street below, but not a sound from this roof-top chill-out reached the street level - that is one great way to make a club. We also checked out the small dance room on the 15th floor, but did not stay around for long enough to see the main area on the 12th floor. Again, the sound system was perfect - they were rolling dance music on vinyl and I could really hear the difference in the depth of sound and appreciate how the female DJ mixed the tracks seamlessly. We were a bit surprised by the number of gay people in the club, both male and female. It is very rare to see that in Latvia because of the still prevalent prejudice, unfortunately.

We also went to a great place serving South African food and we ate some ostrich and gnu meat which was cooked flawlessly. It was a place of a slightly higher level than we normally eat, but it was totally worth it.