Friday, July 23rd, 2004: Berlin, Germany

A beautiful, perfect, summer day. We should have done laundry yesterday and gone to Potsdam today, but we do laundry today – once we find a laundromat, which is easier said than done, as the first 2 we find have gone out of business. Fortunately, a call to Alex gives us the information we need, and we spend the afternoon doing our chores.

We hook up with Derek for dinner, our last evening in Berlin. He heads off at about 8:30 to meet up with a friend, so we say our goodbyes. About 30 minutes later, the skies darken, lightning starts to flash, and we move inside off the patio to avoid the rain. Inside there are more people than there is room, and we start chatting with another patron, Kai, who turns out to be visiting from Norway. We compare notes about Norway, and Kai tells us that the average worker in Norway makes what sounds like a huge amount of money to us – the only way they could afford to live there.