Prenzlauerberg and a new arrival

After everybody slept in nicely, my roommate and her guest decided to go visit some old haunts in Prenzlauerberg, and they invited me to follow for (late) breakfast. We hit a little café on Kollwitzstraße and Sredzkistraße called Café Anna Blume, which served late breakfast and had some fantastic cakes (at least they looked fantastic; I didn’t have the appetite for a massive slice). It’s also a flower shop, apparently.

Anyway, I had the “Alpenrose” Zusammenstellung (combination plate), which included a bit of very fresh cottage cheese, some fresh fruits, some slices of alpen cheeses, some butter and bread, some thin-sliced cured ham, and this AMAZING jam. The jam was made from raspberry (I think), but the twist was that it had rosemary in it. The combination was magic, quite frankly. I could’ve smeared that on anything.

After a lovely breakfast (with the first bit of sun I had seen in a week) I left the girls to do some shopping and I headed back to the apartment. I got a fair bit of work done and, while puttering away, I sent a text message to the cell number of my friend Fantômette (previously seen on many of my Paris posts as an emerging DJ and head of La Petite Maison Electronique and the Happy People Only series of parties) since I knew she was supposed to be arriving in Berlin soon. As it turns out, she had just arrived today! So we made a date and later that evening we went out for dinner and drinks.

Finding the dinner part of the program was a bit of a challenge, as we wandered around the unfamiliar area near Kottbusser Tor. We walked along Oranienstraße, which is supposed to be the “hip” area of that street, but it was mostly rather touristy. We eventually found an Indian restaurant that looked reasonably good, called Amrit, so we sat down and had dinner. From there, we met up with my roommate and her friend at one of the bars on Hobrechtstraße, where we hung out until the wee hours. By midnight, poor Fantô—who had been awake since 3am this morning—was falling asleep in her chair, so I walked her back to her place and then walked myself back to mine.