my new salsa machette band

a few weeks ago a found a new band that lets me sit in with them sometimes. they're a little stiff, but once they warm up you can bend them a little. from left to right we have Tito on the fiddle, Rico playing the strings off the paper guitar, on the top is Zorro playing some brass, his brother Guapo spanking the paper flute, then you have Sanchez, and Grandma. Sanchez doesn't really play anything. he just stands there alot and almost starts singing every five minutes. Grandma is their manager. she's kind of mean. no, she is mean.

raw meat eating, bier drinking, and bier making

that stuff on the bread is raw pork with some onions and spices in it. i ate it and it's really pretty good except the part where the fat gets stuck in your teeth. this was on the first thursday in feb. our pilot brewery has a sort of social every first thursday in the brewery with food and bier. there was a big 10 pound bag of the raw pork just sitting on the table with a spoon in it. yum. the last 2 shots are from the eschenbrau brewpub the next night. this guy makes a monthly special bier and we went to try it out. the first one was good. but then he switched over to another keg that was full of diacetyl. none of us could drink it. had to send it back. the foamy shot is his open fermenters. i can't believe he let us in the room with them. sorry it's been so long since i've posted anything, but our connection has been down for over a week and i also was studying for exams. found out today that i passed all of them! more pictures soon.

bunker shots

these aren't the greatest pictures in the world, but it turns out bunkers are not so cool looking. this is from a few weeks ago when a few of us went on a bunker tour. the first shot i just put in cause it looked the coolest. it's just some jump suits they used when going down in the sewer. the next blurry shot was taken in the air lock room you have to go in before you can enter the actual bunker. we went to 2 bunkers and this one was not really going to help you in a nuclear war. our guide told us these type of bunkers were built only to make people think they had a chance. the other bunker was nuclear proof or whatever, but only for 2 weeks. then you had to go out and die. the 3rd shot is of the door to the air filtering system in the first bunker. behind

the blocks on the right is a room full of sand and maybe some charcoal the filter chemicals out of the air. problem is this filter only works for 48 hours. the next one is a photo of this model one of the history buffs made of the bunker. looks good when you're standing in front of it, not in this picture though. and the last shot is room full of beds that you had to put together yourself and then sleep on in shifts. there were 3 shifts. the rest of the time standing around getting pissed off. there was a bunch of cool pictures that were hung on the walls we could look at, but they didn't want us to photo them. oh well.

that's me in the corner

last weekend i went to this weird interactive art showing with my roomate and one of her friends. the first 2 shots are from there. this guy had somehow made these different tv screens film you as you are looking at them and broadcast your image in diferent ways. in the first one my head is in the upper left corner, and i'm in the center of the other one. the rest of the art there was not that good, so i didn't take any more photos. the last picture is a bunch of lamb heads i saw at a grocery store the other day. ummmmmmm. also, i typed the wrong address for my buddies blog site. it's supposed to be brewschool.blogspot.com

Carnival at Lowenbrau

well.... a group of us went out sat. night looking for the Lowenbrau (probably not spelled right) brewpub, or at least that's what we thought. turns out it's just a pub that sells alot of Lowenbrau bier. they like it large here as you can see. those are liters not half liters like all the other girlyman pubs serve. the first photo is finally a picture of me. before now you might have thought that someone else was posting all this crap, unless you have found your way to my fellow American wannabe brewmaster's blog site. some of me on there I've noticed. you can see his site at brewschool.blogspot.com Yes, his name is also John. anyway the first shot is not only of me, but also has my five favorite girlfriends with me. they told me not to write their names on here because all of them are married. don't tell. as I said, this is a carnival sort of. in Germany they celebrate a thing called carnival. one of our teachers said they don't really do it justice here in Berlin, but in south Germany they dress up like this and drink, sing and dance all weekend. sounds like fun. we danced with them a couple of times around the room then sat down and drank a few liters. also, this is for mom, that sausage that you thought was so weird, it's pretty damn good. called weisbraut. I've had it at 2 places now. the first place you had to take it out of the casing because it was actually intestines. luckily they told us before we bit it.

stupid fun after cta lab

i think these pretty much explain themselves. Erica, Felipe, and Simon molesting a piece of cardboard. what's got into these people?

shots from the lab

we had a lab on friday where we were supposed to analyze a malt in a few different ways. 3 ways, actually, all at the same time. the first shot is the other John from America, sporting his brand new Rayban safety glasses. then there's Simon, our only German, who is wearing his Stevie Wonder safety specs, and our Swede, Goran with 2 dots over the "o". i think he made those shades himself. then you have my favorite guy from Thailand burning down a buffering tablet and some ammonium sulfide along with a few grams of malt. exactly two grams, nothing more, nothing less. his name is Songsak I believe and in the last shot the him checking for saccrification in our mini mash.

One chromosome too many

this chick is singing Mongoloid by Devo. this was taken last Wednesday on a boat in the Spree river. My roomate and I went there. It's called a language party. this guy from Seattle started it a few years ago. pretty fun. it only costs a euro to get on and they have free bread and homemade hummus and of course bier and wine for cheap. basically, you go in and tell them where you are from and what languages you can speak and what languages you would like to hear. I say I speak English and would like to hear English. Most people do speak English there, but some want to speak French or something. Last week we went also, and a few people came with me from the brew school. A girl from Canada and a guy from Brazil. he ended up talking with this German dude that wanted to speak Portuguese. think I might have spelled that correctly. prost!

nice hair dudes

# 1. possibly Charlie Watts mixed with Dave Grohl or how ever you spell his name. #2. I think that may be Joixkene Phenix, I know that ain't spelt right. #3. Believe that's Eddie Vedder and Mick Fleetwood. #4. Two dudes named Santos and Lenny. They are not gay, they just like to comb each other's hair. #5. That's Lenny's brother who is also named Lenny. He is gay.

memorials

The first one of these is from the Berlin war memorial. It's the only thing in the building. It's a women holding her dead son who was a soldier. The original is only 6 inches tall. The next four are photos of the Jewish memorial made by an architect from New York. It consists of 2711 blocks rectangular in shape. Each block is a different height and put into the ground at a different angle. They represent the 6 million Jews killed by Hitler. Our tour group walked through it on a diagonal from one corner to the next. It was pretty amazing. In the middle it slopes down into the ground so that the columns are very tall. You only see in one direction and can't see what's around the corner. Makes you fell like your underground and getting closed in. It was a weird felling. Some people are pissed about this memorial, but I think it's great because it's interactive. Maybe that will be all for the depressing shots.

hitler's grave site

I know this picture looks like some dirt, grass, a few parked cars, some trees, and some apartment buildings. Well, where I'm standing while taking this is on top of Hitler's personal bunker. It's buried 15 or 20 meters down. This is where he killed himself. Along with his wife and dog. His wife took syanide ( probably misspelled ) , but in orderto make sure it would kill her, they gave it to their dog first. The dogs name was Blondie by the way. Then she took it and Hitler may have too, but he blew his brains out also. After that his posse took the bodies out of the bunker and put them in a shallow grave between those 3 trees that you can see there. Then they poured something like 240 liters of petrol on them and fired them up so no one could do anything to the bodies. They know it was Hitler because of the dental records. Our tour guide said it wasn't unusual for someone on the tour to go over and piss on the spot after he told them this. How do you like them apples?