International SLAM Revue + expressos + …wait for rain to make a used-bicycle bargain! #Berlin

What a great weekend it's been. Our first as Berlin citizens actually. Yesterday we went to the International SLAM Revue '09 at Festsaal Kreuzberg and experienced 12 top notch slam poets from all over the world. The event was part of the big International Literatur Festival that runs here until Sept 20 (we found out two days ago that we had missed the appearance of Arundhati Roy, who was scheduled for Thursday - darn it!).
The SLAM Revue turned out to be a multi-lingual multi-media experience that had poetry zig-zagged between 5-6 languages through recitation, music, powerpoints (live translations), singing, rap, yelling and everything in between. What talent! - as well as a stunning semi-improvised (or was it fully improvised?) performance by one of the worldwide slam poetry community's founding fathers, Gary Glazner of the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City (which we, btw, visited several times while living there back in '07). Glazner was a honorary guest at the event and surely showed everybody what showmanship really is. Impressive.

Today, Sunday, we went up to the infamous Mauer Park floh markt to pick up old bicycles to use for cheap transportation during our time here. It started raining rather heavily soon after we arrived - and that, we soon found out, caused prices to drop steeply. As a result, we picked up two cool old bicycles for 55 Euros total. A complete bargain. So... lesson to be learned for Berlin n00bs like ourselves: Wait for a rainy day to buy bikes here.

Ended the day in our Kreuzberg flat zipping expresso and watching The Shining. That is just plain nice.

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