November 13, 2007

My trip to Berlin in 10 little items

berlin semaphores

  1. Berlin first impressions: it's great to be a walker there;
  2. 15 Portuguese people on Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, that I know of;
  3. Berlin's public transports are great, but it's somewhat hard to get used to them;
  4. The idea that Portuguese hospitals are a lot worse than other European countries isn't quite true: they are worse but not that much;
  5. You have to love Berlin's traffic lights;
  6. German people have something against double beds, maybe it's something that comes from Jewish traditions?
  7. I hoped that music there was cheaper, but that's not quite true: average price at 17.50 €. On the other hand, every store is better than any music Portuguese music store I know of regarding stock quality. Plus, they have quite a lot more percentage of stuff in vinyl;
  8. Movies and Books, specially books, are obscenely cheap there, comparing to Portugal. And their bookshops' are awsome. And it seems that adiobooks is the next big thing there...
  9. If you're to go there, remember: go to the DDR museum and the cinema museum. If to choose one of those, choose the first.
  10. It was great being there, and mind-thrilling too. There's a lot of new stuff gereminating in my mind... You might see the results sometime.

5 comments:

  1. I thought "weird!" when i read "semaphores". The correct expression would be "traffic lights".

    Don't take this as an attack, it just sounded weird to me.
    BTW, they are cool. Love the little-green-man :)

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  2. Fixed, thanks :-)

    Both are preety cool, the lil'green man reminds me of Jacques Tati (don't ask me why), and as for the red one... I'll show here a picture soon, and you'll see what's so funny about it ;-)

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  3. Anonymous11:24 AM

    Hey you mentioned that books were much cheaper there in Germany... how big a difference are you talking about? BTW, what's the ratio for English vs. German books? I have the idea (I might be wrong) that they're not quite fond of foreign language books...

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  4. We're talking about non-technical books all for less than 10€, with lots in the range of 5-7€... And I'm talking about imports (english books). They all have an "english books" section, but it's not about technical books. The dimension of that section is quite big comparing to those sections in a Portuguese FNAC, for instance, but it is porportional to the complete size of the store, of course. They have the books better cataloged too, and good sections of everything, with both classics and recently released books. Audiobooks were only in German (or almost only).

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  5. Here's the image that makes me smile when I think about the red light: http://paulasimoes.org/gallery/200711berlin/dsc02468_jpg.jpeg.html

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