OTHERLAND READING

Dear VanderFans,

Hallo again from Berlin! Another missive to tell you what Ann & Jeff are up to over here. Yesterday they continued their tour of the city, visiting the museum isle and the famed Pergamon Museum with the incredible »Pergamon-Altar«. Then they walked all the way to »Hackescher Markt«, which used to be a haven for artists in Berlin Mitte but now is way to expensive for most of them. Still it's a beautiful area with lots of shops and cafés.

In the evening we met at the Otherland bookshop where we were already busy preparing for the night's reading. Around twenty people turned up, which is ok, but not spectacular. Jeff first read a small part of the King Squid section, a longer part from Martin Lake, and »Bookman Old Style« from the font pages.

Our good friend Harald had downloaded the first five minutes of the Shriek movie and organized a beamer, so we got an advance look at what promisies to be a very interesting art movie (nice to see our friend Liz Hand as »Janice Shirek«, by the way).

Afterwards we - Ann & Jeff and half a dozen of people from the shop and the attending masses - moved on to a German restaurant around the corner where we could still sit outside comfortably from 10 pm 'til after midnight, drink beer, eat some typical German food (well, some of us did) and talk about the internet, literature and lots of other things that came up in such a pleasently mixed crowd. As has become a bit of a tradition, we cooled off later in our living room watching one of our pet rabbits, Eliot, hopping about and begging for bits to eat. Ann & Jeff seem to have taken to her - and her sister George, who is a bit shy - quite a bit.

Today we intend to meet in Kreuzberg in the afternoon and climb the famed hill which gave that part of the city its name, which will take roughly ten minutes. Ann & Jeff are hiking aruond quite a bit, so it might be a good idea to give them some time to relax - we'll see. And tomorrow we'll be off to Potsdam to visit the famed gardens of Sanssouci, but that's for another blog to tell.

Again, more tommorrow, and cheers to all of you!

Hannes Riffel