Hooray! A visit to Berlin for a week! Just what I needed to take my mind off the mundane money-earning type preoccupations I have at the moment.

But first a quick mention of my nephew Ryan's eighth birthday, which we celebrated on Sunday at Emma & Andy's house with a huge roast dinner and lots of cake, followed by a long session of sledging madness on a nearby hill (Tim, Andy & I took Ryan & Charlie & Andy's eldest for a bit of male bonding on the ice).

So along came Monday, and after a manic morning of shopping for bits to try to get Michaela's internet connection working again (it now seems the problem lies with her ISP and not us) I decided to head to the airport in good time for my flight. You never know with these no-frills carriers whether there are going to be problems at check-in.

As it happens, check-in was super easy, and I had lots of time on my hands. The problem only came at boarding time, when they decided to inform us that the our aeroplane hadn't even left Berlin yet to come and get us! So we had 90 minutes to sit around and get mighty bored. I went and had an acupressure massage from a very interesting lady who told me all about her training.

Finally our flight left, and in no time I was at Berlin Schönefeld, Berlin's second airport where I've never been before. Unlike Tegel, this one has a railway station right there, so I could catch the S-Bahn to Frankfurter Allee with minimal trouble - and it only cost EUR 2.10 instead of the EUR 14 from Munich to the airport!!

My gorgeous wonderful bosom buddy Caro met me at the station and we walked to her flat, which is ironically in the same building as the flat I visited her ex Lasse in the last time I was in Berlin! I met Caro's Russian husband Anton and we had dinner together. It was SOOOOO nice to catch up with Caro again!

On Tuesday it was still snowing like it had been all the day before, but temperatures were up above freezing (something I haven't experienced since arriving in Germany in December!) so the resulting thaw was making a mess of the streets. I had to slip & slide my way through the mush to Greifswalder Straße, where I met up with the lovely Emily, my friend from Melbourne, who is over visiting her friend Kiri.

It was bizarre to see someone I know from Australia (well, more accurately from Fiji, but that was so long ago now) in this icy European context. We had lots to catch up on, even though it's only been two months since last we met. So there was barely a silent moment for the rest of the day as we powered our way through many of Berlin's cultural offerings: the mostly boring but occasionally stimulating paintings at the Alte Nationalgalerie; the fabulous ancient treasures stolen and relocated to the Pergamonmuseum; and the architectural splendour of the Jüdisches Museum; with the occasional coffee thrown in to keep us alert.

At lunchtime we met up with Mirèia, my Catalan friend who I know through Lisa in Dublin and who I haven't seen since I was in Ireland in 2004, and a friend of hers Nuria for a sushi lunch just behind the Hackesche Höfe complex. We followed a slightly disappointing lunch with an orgasmic Kaffee & Kuchen at a nearby bakery, before continuing our cultural dégustation at the Pergamonmuseum.

And to complete my nutritional review of the day, I enjoyed a home-cooked dinner of chicken & dumplings at Emily's friend Kiri's house, cooked by her husband Götz, which was followed by beers with friends first in their flat and then in a nice pub around the corner in Prenzlauer Berg, a district of town I haven't been to since I caught up with my friend Caroline from Oxford when she was living here back in 2002.

Wednesday brought more culture, this time in the form of the modern art gallery that is housed in the former Hamburger Bahnhof. This was an amusing visit, because neither Em nor I liked much of what we saw! But - as often happens for me with modern art - there were a few pieces that really gripped me. And Em was loving the fact that she was now standing before pieces that she has studied all about in her art degree but never thought she would come face to face with.

It was also amusing because we got told off by bloke who was dressed top to toe in bright red: bowler hat, shirt, tie, jacket, trousers, socks, shoes, and a little square manbag to match! We thought he was an installation, but it turns out he was a punter!! I was amused and abashed by the way a freakazoid dude in weird clothes managed to make us feel strange!! When it was him who had a go at us for disturbing his viewing - of a silent movie!!!

Our next stop was the natural history museum, which on a content level was disappointing because it is undergoing a major refurbishment and the world's largest complete dinosaur skeleton was out of bounds. But the visit was still cool for two reasons: one, because our late arrival (half an hour before closing time) gave us an excuse for banter with the woman on the door; and two, because we got in for free thanks to my witty repartee. It goes a little like this:

We rocked up and the woman said, "You do know that we're about to close, don't you." To which I replied, "it's okay, we'll just run round the exhibits and come out again." To which she said, "Run? Hm." To which I said, "Oh, do you think that's a bad idea then?" To which she replied, a flicker of a smile playing across her stony face, "Only if you run ordnungsgemäß!" (which means 'according to the regulations' - and it doesn't get much more German than that!)

To which I said, "No, we're going to run about madly and everything will crash to the floor behind us!!" At which point she waved us in without even asking for money. A lovely lady. Many Germans, especially here in the north, appear very fearsome, but I find that generally they are good eggs once you get talking to them.

After a quick bite to eat, Em & I made our way back to Kiri's and then I went home to Caro's, where after another bite to eat Caro & I spent some time together enjoying a fabulous book called "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod", a book about German language mistakes which is in the vein of "Eats, shoots & leaves", that book for punctuation terrorists that my friends out there in the world will know is just so up my street.