Berlin day 3

Well, I decided to do something weird with my hair, because this is Berlin, and because next door there is this place called 'Hair Station' where they cut your hair for cheap, but you have to dry it and style it yourself. Incedentally, they are having a party tomorrow night.. complete with snacks and djs and hair cutting competitions.?! I was worried about telling my hairdresser what I wanted for fear he wouldn't understand, but he was from France, so we spoke French. Actually, he is from Brittany, so he was completely unintelligable, but my hair turned out really nicely. He lightened it just a tad, so now it matches my beard... Yes I have a beard! Anyway, from what I could understand, my hairdresser, Immanuel, lived and worked in Vegas illegally and hates the states. He also hates French politics, and thinks all Germans are incurable racists. He thinks the French are worse. He is engaged to, get this, a Lebanese catholic professional dancer who also translates the encyclicals of Pope Benedict into Arabic. If this is mind boggling to you, well it should be. But this is Berlin, and anything goes. On the weekends, they go snowboarding, go for brunch, dance to techno music on Sunday afternoons, and usualy go to the Staatsoper in the evening (Wagner is a favourite)...Afterward, Immanuel likes to go out to eat, and gaze into his girlfriend's eyes, but not talk, so that the music can just repeat in his head. Okay. I am apparently going to the party at Hairstation tomorrow.. that is if I don't go to Lucia di Lammermoor, Eugene Onegin or Un Ballo in Maschera....
After this, I decided to go to West Berlin and visit 'KaDeWe', Berlin's answer to Harrods. There is nothing quite like watching pencil thin blonde West Berlin matrons browse through the Chanel display... If you only have one more chance to eat in your life, go to the Food Emporium. I have never seen anything like it my life. The chocolate section alone is about an acre, and contains every kind of chocolate there is... well, only the good stuff. You can appreciate that I spent about 3 hours there. The salami counter (well more like Salami wing) was unbelievable. There were 6 kinds of Serrano ham. You cannot buy Serrano ham in Vancouver. There was also a champagne bar, a huge buffet, a caviar counter, a meat counter (where you could buy tongue and tripe and calf head, but also organic grain fed steak for like 159 EUROS a kilo). Also, a tea wing that I think was hermetically sealed to preserve the aroma!!!! They were cooking lobsters to order for old men and their mistresses when I left... to have a drink with Andre.. the crazy PhD student... Actually, I tried to call him first, but German payphones are the most annoying machines I have ever encountered. They are impossible to navigate, and it took me an hour to figure it out. They thank you for your call before you have finished dialling it! Of course, the instructions are in German or Turkish...
Andre grew up in East Berlin, and apparently KaDeWe was used as an example to show how bad capitalism was 'sure, they have nice things in KaDeWe, but they also have unemployment and inequality and homelessness.' Point taken.
Andre is doing his doctorate on the conditions of Mining Engineers in the Third Reich, and the extent to which their political affiliations affected their ability to get funding, and to what extent the government put pressure on them to join the Nazi party. He has been going through the state archives for about 2 years, and his research is mind boggling. As is the amount of Beer (and Jagermeister,and aquavit, and schnapps) he drinks, and I drink in his presence. I think you have to drink a lot to live here.... Did I already say that?