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A Quick Trip to A Classic Fave: Berlin, Germany
When we arrived in Berlin, we took the U-Bahn to Friedrichshain, the epicenter of the vegan food takeover in the city. Since we’ve been to this city several times and didn’t need to be near the most museums or sites or anything, we decided to be near the vegan food. One of our best decisions.
Except there were more enticing flavors taunting me from the display. So after I finished my cone, you know what I did?
And then it was time for a lovely sleep, with a very full tumnus, the last sleep in a strange (but nice) bed, the last one before I’d be back in my own bed! Man alive I slept in some wacky places, and I’m happy I had those experiences (no really I am). But I was excited to get home (as long as our house-sitter left me some clean sheets…).
The next morning, we went to the truly cool bookstore Shakespeare & Sons because we are yuppie nerds who love bookstores (y’all do too, and are). We were greeted with this wonderful surprise inside the shop:
As it turns out, we did make one important touristic visit. During our day in Berlin before our nighttime flight home to London, we strolled all over the city, including down Karl Marx Allee, once considered the “Champs-Elysees of the GDR”, the German Democratic Republic (or East Germany, the socialist part). We stopped in the famous Cafe Sibylle, an institution in its time, and now home to a functioning little cafe as well as an exhibition to the GDR, honoring the events that happened in this neighborhood before the wall fell. Named after the GDR women’s magazine, Cafe Sibylle was the home of artists, intellectuals, and others who discussed culture and politics. It was closed for about a decade after German reunification but reopened in 2000s. Supporters and frequenters of the cafe said that the exhibition to local history made sure that the GDR was remembered for more than just the Stasi. It remembered the ideals of socialism while recognizing the faults of the GDR. Unfortunately, it looks like Cafe Sibylle shut its doors a few months ago in April in, of course, the capitalist sweep that turns meagerly profiting landmarks of its type into fancy clubs and lounges. Yet if my ability to read German news articles can be trusted – and it cannot, because all the German I know I learned from Nena and her 99 Luftballons – it looooks like the Cafe may be set to reopen soon, so I hope that is true and I hope more people go to explore its history.
I leave you with the most beautiful sight: a huge bag of cheap Manner. The end.

Eating Vegan in St. Petersburg: So Much More than Buckwheat and Pickles
just realizing now that the box even says vegan and ‘no dairy’ oops forest for the trees
We tried a lot of dishes over our two meals at two different locations. My favorite was the Caesar salad, not because the dressing even remotely resembled Caesar dressing, but because it came with fried tofu croutons. There were only 4-5 of them in the whole salad though, so they really need to add more to it. I was surprised by the Olivier Salad, it’s like a traditional Russian salad of tiny chopped potatoes, peas, and carrots formed into a circle and covered in mayo, but the vegan version was 1000x better than that nonsense (I’m guessing, because mayo blechh).