Der Himmel über Berlin

So, the decision has been made as to who gets the honour of living with the Ramposaurous Rex. In the end, it was really rather easy.

Candidate #3, the absentee, didn't show up for his viewing appointment. His loss.
Candidate #2, the pretty Italian, decided she wasn't interested.

So, I am now living with Candidate #1, the pleasant football fan (and fellow Football Manager addict, as I discovered last night), who might even be able to furnish the apartment with a washing machine (really provides a mildly disturbing insight into my mind when I consider the purchase of lots and lots of maps to hang on my walls to be significantly more important than having clean football jerseys clothes).

However, there is even more good news. I was pretty relieved when the Italian pulled out of the running, as I didn't want to have to tell her that I wasn't going to choose her (shock, horror, the prevalence of reason). So with that little complication out of the way, I was free to ask her to go out with me 'to practice my Italian'. And she was free to agree.

Being single doesn't suck nearly as much ass as it did three months ago.

Location: Berlin

Capacity: Five

Facilities: Slightly cramped sofas crammed into a living room. Bathroom, complete with bidet for washing feet. Small kitchen with fridge for storing beer.

Surrounding area: Turks. Lots of 'em. Therefore lots of Turkish food. Plus loads of supermarkets for buying beer. Also U-Bahn and S-Bahn for bringing guests to locations that sell beer.

Potential Recreational Activities: Sampling of various German wines and beers. Meeting German bloggers. Meeting the blog team and visiting the blog office. Boozing with aforementioned blog team. Sampling of the infinity of great food in Berlin (the proprietor of l'Hotel du Rampage is very anxious to show his guests all his favourite places to eat). Sightseeing of cool stuff, like TV tower, walls, Jewish memorials, Potsdamer Platz, Olympiastadion, etc.

Prices: €0 per night, including breakfast. Contributions of cheddar cheese and Guinness welcome.

Availability:For the night of May 12th, one advance booking has been accepted, leaving four of the five places are available.

So what are you waiting for? Book now!

In an attempt to avoid anything vaguely resembling work, I am sub-letting my bedroom for a few weeks to supplement my income so I can afford to climb Mont Blanc in September.

This will allow me spend even more time drinking beer, going to football matches, buying football jerseys on ebay, blogging, being hungover and watching zombie movies without feeling like I'll have to sell my body at the end of every month in order to pay my rent.

The dilemma, however, is this. I have to choose who I want to live with, and I have narrowed it down to the top three candidates.

Candidate #1: German. Male. Student. Mid 20s. Slightly nerdy, but big football fan. Will be absent from the apartment for most of the day due to study duties. Seemed a pleasant chap, and football fan is a very big plus. Would definitely help improve my German.

Candidate #2. Italian-Swiss. Female. Student. Very attractive. Really pretty. A hottie. A Hottosaurous Rex. Italian. Hot. Very aesthetically pleasing. Speaks Italian and very good German. Good looking. From Sicily. Oh and did I mention that she's very beautiful?

Candidate #3: Erm, I don't actually know anything about candidate #3 since he hasn't come to see the place yet. In his email though, he promised that he would only be in the apartment for a maximum of seven days per month, while still paying the full rent. But he also mentioned that he's a non-drinker, and I think he's a native English speaker. Two very big cons in my book. Still though, an absent roommate for three-quarters of every month? Sounds good to me.

So this is my dilemma. I just can't decide.

German-speaking football fan, hottie or absentee?
German-speaking football fan, hottie or absentee?
German-speaking football fan, hottie or absentee?
German-speaking football fan, hottie or absentee?

From BBC:

Tottenham are poised to sign Brazilian utility player Gilberto from Hertha Berlin. (Press Association, 1210 GMT).

and

West Ham and Fulham want to sign Hertha Berlin striker Marko Pantelic. (News of the World)

So Hertha's two best players are off.

Hello Mr. Dustbin, meet my season ticket.

Watched all three Back to the Future films the other night. When watching them seperately, one never gets a real idea of what a shitty time the Doc and Marty had with that cursed machine - I for one never understood why they wanted to destroy it. Until the five hour BTTF marathon, that is. I kinda wanted to destroy my DVD player afterwards too.

However (and not wanting to make anyone feel old or anything ), there are just seven more years until 2015, the year that the Doc and Marty visit.

That means that there are only seven more years until:

• flying cars

• hoverboards

• lawyers are abolished

• Jaws 19

• self-drying and automatically fitting jackets

• fax machines all over the house, including the bathroom

• all teenagers wear their pockets inside out

• food being cooked by hydration

I, for one, am excited about the comeback of the fax machine. This internet thing was never going to last.

You know those unusual proactive days where you get lots of done with miminal effort then go get blazing drunk to celebrate? I'm having one of those.

0800: Bounce out of bed

0840: Arrive at gym

0930: Finish registration procedure (it took 50 mintues cos this is Germany and they love their beaurocracy, not cos of any lack of proactivity on my part)

0940: Start training, guided by intimidatingly muscly German called Frank, who insisted on chatting to me as I was sweating like a bastard on the running thing, concentrating desperately on not falling and smacking my nose open on the little screen that was happily telling me how slow I was going (while also resolving that if I did smack my nose open, I would tell people it happened rescuing a kitten from four rabid rottweilers)

1110: Finish training and walk home

1140: Start cleaning my fearsomely filthy windows

1150: Realise this will take a heck of a lot more time than expected, especially since the filty black window-water is now leaking all over the floor

1230: Finish windows and wash filthy black window-water off me

1250: Cook (yes, cook!) and subsequently eat lunch

1400: Arrive in blog office for an afternoon of bloggy fun

1630: Blog about proactivity and think about how much I deserve a truck of beer.

I'm sure this period of activity will wear off soon. Actually, I hope it does - I don't want to be one of those irritating fuckers who get up off their asses to achieve things.

I was in Genova at the weekend, continuing a four-year long-distance love affair since I left there in 2004. An affair with the understated and enormously unappreciated beauty of the city itself, and a much longer and more intense affair with their main football team, Sampdoria.

It bothers me to hear people ranting and raving about horrible tourist-trap, money-sucking, dirty, polluted and unfriendly Italian cities like Florence, Milan and Venice when Genova has everything that those places have, and more. Well, it doesn't have the Uffizi, il Duomo or stinky canals, but you know what I mean.

That's fine with me though, the longer the tourists stay away from Genova, the more often I'll go back there.

Have some snaps:
An ariel view

Piazza di Ferrari (I'm amazed at how nicely this one came out, as I was severly under the influence of Birra Moretti when I took it )

And on to the main event, Sampdoria v Palermo. For my year there, I always went to the stadium via this enormous set of steps that bring you down from atop one of Genova's numerous mountains. As you can see, there is a running battle between Samp fans and Genoa fans for control of them. Samp, just like in the league table, are currently winning.

The match itself was one of the best Samp performances I have ever seen, with our star striker Antonio Cassano running the Palermo defence ragged with his seemingly endless supply of tricks. He was involved in every one of Samp's three goals and had the crowd chanting his name almost the whole ninety minutes through. It ended 3-0 to Samp, a wonderful game.

All in all, a rather fantasic weekend, despite the 0600 start this morning, for which the aforementioned Mr Moretti was very, very grumpy man indeed.

Oh man.

I'm really sick. I just had the worst night of my life. After spending the afternoon bouncing around like a hyperactive puppy, my body just gave in but my brain wouldn't let me sleep. Spent the night watching DVDs and hoping for death, as it would have been an improvement on my current state, hallucinating horribly and twitching nervously at the slightest noise.

If only I had had internet at home, I could have assuaged my fears that I was about to die slowly and alone from caffeine poisoning. According to wiki, it's almost impossible to do from drinking coffee alone. I had every single one of the symptoms of caffeine intoxication though:

It may include restlessness, nervousness, excitement, insomnia, flushing of the face, increased urination, gastrointestinal disturbance, muscle twitching, a rambling flow of thought and speech, irritability, irregular or rapid heart beat, and psychomotor agitation.

Especially the rambling flow of thought and speech.

Man, it was torture. How do you people drink the stuff? Fecking poison is all it is. Never again.

Can't focus on anything! Coffee! Don't normally touch the stuff but I accidentally drank four mugs of it this morning! Fuck! Why does real life move so slowly?! This chair is too small for me! Gotta move! Look at that! Wow! This keyboard is fucking...er...something! Small! I think! I can't believe it! Wow! Exclamation mark!

Yup, I actually made some this year.

Well, I have two regulars, which are:

• to visit at least one new country every year (this year will be Switzerland, and possibly Sweden as an added bonus)

• to see my favourite football team, Sampdoria, in action (this will happen on Sunday, hurrah for January trips to Italy!)

To those two regulars, I have also added one that will be a regular from now on:

• Hit at least one country's highest peak (as defined by the amazing CIA World Factbook). This year it will be Mont Blanc in September, and I have my eye on either Poland's highest or Slovenia's highest for some summer training.

And so, the resloutions for 2008:

• Join a gym to facilate the achievement of the Mont Blanc desire (tried to do this this morning, but got terribly intimidated by 1. the prices and 2. all the hot people in there who could smell my gym virginity and were therefore sniggering at me from the depths of their heaving six-packs)

• Become a happy single young bachelor again (due to the fact that I'm not sure I'm single now either means this one is either going really badly, or it went so well that my hot singledom was irresistable as soon as the 2008 countdown was finished)

• Improve my German. In the last weeks, people thought I was Finnish, Dutch, Spanish or *shudders* Australian while speaking German. The first three I can accept. The last one, however, indicates that a large amount of work needs to be done.

• Translate more. This is looking good, as one of my favourite teams in Berlin, TeBe, now has their very own mini English version. Thanks to yours truly.

And, of course, to blog more. Yup, 2008's gonna kick ass.

*Note: this optimism will wear off by February at the latest, and I'll be back to whinging about everything.

Some snaps from Teufelsberg, the highest point in Berlin. It's actually a man-made hill of war rubble. Went on a little jaunt there last week with my guests from Ireland.

I'm more agile than I look.

There's an abandoned American radar station at the top, a relic of the Cold War. We snuck in, of course. It was really very creepy, would be a perfect setting for a horror movie. It's a huge big complex, but now falling to pieces.

Even though it doesn't seem as marvellous an idea now that I'm sober, I still picked out three of my favourite posts of the year. They're in no particular order, apart from chronological:

March 29th: I found this one to be significant as it was the first time that I turned to my blog for solace when sad about something. It was something trivial and quickly forgotten, but I think that it is for that reason that this post is important.

May 4th: A quick moblog when out cycling. Warrants its position here as it sums me up rather well - a twit who takes infinite pleasure in silly things.

June 14th: A post that makes me rather sad, since I am no longer with the missus mentioned therein. Still, I'd be lying blatently if I said she didn't utterly dominate my 2007 and so I think this post nicely portrays the fun we had together.

So, who's with me? A little ego trip down memory lane anyone?

...my wonderful sister, her wonderful boyfriend, my wonderful best pal from Ireland and my three lovely Finnish friends for coming to Berlin to celebrate the new year with me
...the throngs of people who turned up for my allegedly low-key new year gathering
...The Turkish shops below my apartment that stayed open all night, making sure we never ran out of booze
...The people on the roof across the street with whom we counted down to midnight though my open living room windows
...The people on the street who gave us our very own fireworks display
...The fecking hot Romanian girl for restoring some of my self esteem and respect for females and for forgetting her bra so I get to see her again

Happy New Year!