A quiet day and then Club der Visionäre

Ugh, sorry for the late posting, folks. As I’m getting ready to leave Berlin, tasks are sort of accumulating and all I want to do is lie down and be still for a while. Ironically, I won’t be doing much of that this weekend.

So I slept in after last night’s brief outing and then got out of bed and took care of some email and blogging in the early afternoon. By about 16h00, I looked up the visiting hours of the Schwules Museum [Gay Museum] and discovered that they were to close at 18h00. That’s sort of typical hours for an European museum, but I was somehow under the impression that this museum was open later. Anyway, it was clear that I wasn’t going to be able to wash up, get changed, and make it over to the museum with a reasonable amount of time to see the exhibits, so instead I just stayed in and did some more work, read some more stuff, and tried to figure out exactly where and with whom I would be staying next week.

By sometime later that evening, a French buddy of mine invited me out for drinks at Club der Visionäre, so I got myself together and headed out around 23h00. Much like last Tuesday, I took my roommates bike to get there, and I think I clocked the whole trip at 10 minutes, which is about 20 minutes shorter than the same trip by U-Bahn and bus on a late Thursday evening. And to boot, Berlin is so flat, you can just zip along at an even clip without breaking a serious sweat.

Anyway, we hung out at Club der Visionäre for a while, exchanging music on our iPods and generally revisiting the parties we had been to during the summer. Ernesto Ferreyra (the other half of Chic Miniature) was spinning, which was a pleasant surprise, but he wrapped up his set within minutes of me arriving there. Throughout the rest of the night I kept on waiting for a good moment to congratulate him on his set back at Mutek in Montréal this year, but he was quite the social butterfly, that boy. I’m sure I’ll see him again sometime.

I ran into an Italian girl that I had met weeks ago at the Primary Colours Festival, which was another pleasant surprise. Since we weren’t in a super-loud environment, we took the opportunity to chat at length and get to know each other more. When I told her what I worked on for my dissertation, her reaction was one that I’ve heard a lot since I’ve started: “I’ve always thought about that! When I’m going home after a night out, I often think about these same things.” So that was a nice moment of validation for me. Also, we finally managed to exchange email addresses and phone numbers, so we’ll actually be able to stay in touch. Yay! It’s interesting how you can hang out and spend the better part of a night with someone a month earlier and never get a phone number or email address, and then you just happen to see them later and realize, “Oh, right, now that we’re friends and all, maybe we should do friend-appropriate things like have each other’s phone numbers…”

There was also a certain DJ that I had mentioned about a month ago for having licked my neck when I complimented him on his set (I'm not saying who, so don't try to scour that blog post for hints). He was here tonight, and I was sort of tempted to approach him, but I wasn’t sure if he would remember me (considering that he was in a rather altered state at the time) and how he would react if he did remember me. “Hi! The scene where you play is also where you work, so I’m just here to remind you of your embarrassing excesses in front of your peers. Hey, where are you going?...” So, yeah, I didn’t really talk to him.

Anyway, we hung out and drank and danced until maybe 3h00 or so, and then I hopped on my bike and headed home.