Birthday in Berlin

Well, its now getting closer towards the end of January, and that always means its time for my birthday! I didn't really do anything too crazy (does sitting on a couch watching home videos of me throwing apples at ducks count as crazy?). Today was a bit more exciting - I went to the "Gruene Woche" aka the "Green Week" here in Berlin, which is apparently the world's largest agricultural/food/home products expo. It was pretty fun. Basically, the rundown went like this: There were huge halls with all sorts of stuff, but the main attraction was a lot of countries had sent some folks who were slinging out loads of their traditional foods. Its actually quite easy to talk about traditional foods. It sort of went like this:
Germany: sausages, cheese, and beer
Austria: sausages, cheese, and...sausages (I bought some wild deer and mountain goat sausage, and stinky mountain cheese!)
Switzerland: cheese, cheese, and cheese
Belgium: chocolates, chocolates, chocolates (apparently Germans don't care for Belgian beer)
France: sausages, cheese, wine
Italy: sausages, cheese, wine
Spain: sausages, tapas, wine
Hungary, Slovakia, Czech, Poland, and the rest of the East Bloc: sausages, beer, and vodka
Russia: caviar, beer, vodka....OH and one of the most interesting things I sampled: reindeer ham! Of course, followed by a shot of vodka.
Norway: little slices of bread with fancy looking caviars and meats and sprigs of dill, vodka, and aquavit
...basically, there was a trend there: everybody had sausage (there was one single stand at the entire place which offered only vegetarian food) and everybody had booze (beer, wine, vodka, aquavit, sherry, champagne, schnapps, uh...). Most folks also had cheese.

And to show off my awesome photographic skills, I made sure to take only one single picture.....

...of a chainsaw with a HUGE bar!

It only costs 1700 Euros!


Other things I've seen in the past few days include the Frauenkirche in Dreseden:

And I also went to the Czech Republic, which as earlier mentioned, is known for sausages and beer, so I had to try some ACTUAL Budweiser. Yeah, the stuff from Budvar, not St Louis:

Oh, and the thing that the Czech Republic (sadly) didn't mention at the expo was that they also have such things as:

Yeah, kinda weird I guess...



Just so you know, early next week I'll be going here:

..and it's been snowing there.