As I often hold friends and family to task for not communicating more about the mundane day-to-day details of their world travels, I present here the first 2 hours of Thursday, July 21, 2011:

• 8:01 a.m. – Woke up to the sounds of street machinery on Graefestrasse; they are ripping up parts of the sidewalk this week and they start work early. There seems to have been a little competition this morning between the workers, making the street a mess, and the street cleaners, making it clean. Together they made a lot of noise.
• 8:05 a.m. – Checked on the progress of my XCode 4 download to my MacBook. I had to reinstall OS X Snow Leopard yesterday after my hard drive’s kernel extension got borked, seemingly over a conflict with the portable Seagate GoFlex drive I purchased just before we left. Firefox reported 15 hours to go, so I suspended the download.
• 8:15 a.m. – Showered in the tiny, tiny bathroom. It really is tiny. But it works, and if you plan the shower curtain placement right you only get a little bit of water on the floor.
• 8:25 a.m. – Catherine’s awake. Asks if I’m leaving right away or if I can get her coffee first. As averse as I am to interruptions in the flow, love conquers all, and I reroute my plan for the next 30 minutes.
• 8:30 a.m. – Downstairs and over 2 doors to the Kaffebar, a coffee place that opened, as luck would have it, the same day we arrived in Berlin. Ordered an espresso macchiato and a cappuccino to go; received the macchiato but a croissant in place of the cappuccino because, well, I have an espresso macchiato and a croissant every day and coffee shop owner is also averse to interruptions in the regular flow. Cappuccino obtained. Kept the croissant for Oliver.
• 8:45 a.m. – Upstairs. Oliver’s awake now and in fine form, galloping all over the apartment. Wolf down my macchiato and pack up my digital gear.
• 9:02 a.m. – Kiss Catherine and Oliver good bye and head off to Betahaus, a 15 minute walk away, to start my work day. The walk takes me up Graefestrasse, over the canal and up to Kottbusser Tor and then around the corner and through the park and along Prinzessinnenstraße to Betahaus. I have yet to figure out how to pronounce Prinzessinnenstraße. Mornings are my favourite time in Berlin: the air is still cool, the streets are relatively deserted and there’s a sense of expectation in the air.
• 9:17 a.m. – Arrive Betahaus. Preparations in the first-floor café for the “BetaBreakfast” are in full swing – it’s a weekly free breakfast that Betahaus hosts and includes speakers on various topics. I consider staying down in the café, but I have a lot of work to do and Catherine’s handing over Oliver at 1:30 p.m. to go and spend the afternoon talking knitting and hacking.
• 9:30 a.m. – After a quick blueberry muffin in the café I head into the bizarre dinosaur of a freight elevator up to the third floor “coworking” space – I should take the stairs, but I don’t have the energy for it today. I find myself a desk with a green dot on it – the signal that it’s a “flexdesk” for people like me – and set down my MacBook.
• 9:34 a.m. – On the other end of the third floor is a bank of lockers where I keep my full-size keyboard, mouse and various cables; I walk over and grab it all, trying and failing to be ginger in my steps so as to not disturb the nearby knowledge workers (I’m still getting the hang of “corworking”).
• 9:45 a.m. – Get everything plugged together: every day is a reassemble-work-tear down cycle when you’re “hot desking.”
• 9:50 a.m. – Start the XCode 4 download again. This time, with more bandwidth, it reports 46 minutes to download.
• 9:52 a.m. – Start writing a little blog post (this one, as it turns out) about the mundane parts of our life in Berlin. “I’ll just take 8 minutes to dash this off before I set down to work,” I tell myself.
• 10:13 a.m. – I am nothing if not incapable of judging how long it takes to do things; 21 minutes later I finish the blog post and set to work.

I’ll be here at Betahaus for the morning – I’ll likely grab a quick lunch in the café around 11:30 a.m. – and then Oliver and I will head off for father-and-son adventures for the afternoon.

So, there you have it.

Yesterday was my first of five scheduled dates in the letterpress studio at Druckwerkstatt. Regular readers may recall that, thanks to the eagle-eyededness of my friend [[Luisa]] back in February when having supper downstairs at 3 Schwestern (“I think there’s something to do with letterpress printing in this building”), I discovered this print studio arm of Kulturwerk, a non-profit “infrastructure for the arts” organization in Berlin.

After some backing and forthing by email with Doris, the helpful Druckwerkstatt administrator, I made arrangements – at the very reasonable price of 8 euro a day – to spend every Tuesday of our summer in Berlin using their printing equipment. And yesterday was the first Tuesday.

At the appointed hour of 9:00 a.m. I arrived at Doris’s office to find that Doris had left for vacation and there was no record of me. Fortunately Doris’s replacement kindly pulled together the various pieces of paper and obtained necessary signatures to make me official, and then introduced me to Mathias, the director, who gave me a whirlwind tour of the printing facilities.

To get from the main office, which sits just above 3 Schwestern, down into the letterpress studio you enter a tiny elevator and go down two floors into the basement whereupon you enter a rabbit-warren like network of rooms holding printing, binding and cutting equipment, with the halls filled with drawer after drawer of metal type.

There are many amazing things about Druckwerkstatt – offset presses, screen printing workshops, digital plotters, bookbinding shops. Alas it turns out that letterpress printing is the sort of forgotten cousin of the group. There is scads and scads and scads of metal type – I’d hazard a guess that there are at least 200 fonts – but nary a fully operational “personal-sized” letterpress in sight.

Mathias suggested that I use the old Gutenberg-style press as a backup, but then it turned out there wasn’t even a chase for the type, which would have made that almost impossible.

Fortunately at this point Frank turned up. Frank is the amiable manager of the print studio, and he sprang into action suggesting that although it would be nigh unto impossible to set smaller metal type, we could use the partially-functioning proof press – a Grafix-brand press and operates much like a Vandercook – with larger wooden type, manually inked with a brayer, to get me going (he also referred me to the neighbourhood Linotype shop; is there nothing that Kreuzberg cannot provide?).

I pawed through the wood type drawers and found enough type to set some dinosaur-sized business cards for my friend [[Morgan]] and Frank guided me through the process of setting the type in the bed of the press, locking it into place, inking it, setting paper into place, and then rolling the paper over the inked type to print.  Our “makeready” – getting to the point where all the letters printed equally and well – took about 45 minutes and then Frank left me on my own to explore and experiment as I might.

I printed a run of 16 cards for Morgan, cleaned everything up, and then set and printed 20 two-colour postcards to send out to my subscribers (you too can become a subscriber and received something letterpress-printed in the mail).

“Set and printed” makes it seem simple, but what with finding all the type I needed, setting it all up, inking and printing and cleaning up and then repeating for the second colour, it took about 5 hours in all (and thus about 15 minutes per postcard; one quickly sees why the laser printer was invented for rush jobs).

If you want to get the flavour of what Druckwerkstatt feels like, here’s a video I shot walking the hall of the basement print studio, then taking the elevator upstairs and out of the building. You can get a preview of the postcards drying at about one minute in.

I’m headed back to the shop later today once everything has dried to trim up the postcards; if everything goes according to plan they should be in the mail tomorrow morning.

In the meantime I’ve emailed Mathias about the possibility of breathing some new life into an old flywheel-equipped platen press in the hallway that seems to be in good working order but that’s sitting unloved and unused; perhaps that will be next Tuesday’s project.

When I saw that Freiluftkino Kreuzberg, the open-air cinema in our Berlin neighbourhood, was playing Der Zauberer von Oz (The Wizard of Oz) last night, I reckoned we had to go.

Not only is it [[Catherine]]’s favourite movie (a fact that was a touchstone during our wooing), but being able to go to the movies outside – outside! – was the whole reason I dragged my family to Berlin for the summer in the first place (well, maybe not the whole reason, but…).

As it turned out, after a week of build-up (and beautiful weather), it started to rain yesterday about supper time, and it looked like our plans were dashed.

My brother [[Steve]] once said that my primary motivation in life is to do things that result in good stories. And he’s right: story is everything for me, and I’ll do a lot of things that are otherwise mildly uncomfortable if there’s a chance that a good tale to tell will result (why else would I have carefully constructed a situation where I’d get coffee thrown at me?).

Catherine, on the other hand, gets her kicks from other things, and story, at least in the way that I think about it, means almost nothing to her.

Which is to say that the opportunity to see The Wizard of Oz in the pouring rain, favourite movie or no, was not something Catherine would jump to.

Oliver, on the other hand, had been looking forward to this all week. And yesterday he was counting down the hours – “the iPad says 17:30, when is 21:30?” – and coming up with clever rebuttals to our suggestions that movies in the rain were not pleasant (“Your clothes will get wet!” said we; “They’ll dry out!” said he).

Admiring his pluck, and realizing that “remember that time we didn’t go and see The Wizard of Oz in the rain in Berlin” doesn’t cut it as a story, I was in.

Oliver was very prepared, with rain pants and a rain jacket. I was not prepared at all, and so borrowed Catherine’s rain jacket (the sight on me in which made Catherine and Oliver both break down in laughter for some reason). And off we set.

The Freiluftkino is in the back yard of the same Kunstquartier Bethanien that’s home to Druckwerkstatt, where I’ll be printing tomorrow. It’s about a 15 minute walk from our apartment, and in that 15 minutes we managed to get ourselves awfully wet. It was raining.

We arrived at the box office around 9:15 p.m. to find ourselves the first ones to arrive. They told us that the show wouldn’t go on unless 5 people showed up and, as luck would have it, as soon as they said that another 3 brave souls showed up. A few minutes later 2 more people showed up. We paid our admission, bought beer, apple juice and M&Ms at the concession, and, to our surprise and delight, found our way under one of three giant beer umbrellas at the back of the field.

The chairs were a little wet, and the rain blew in from time to time when the wind picked up, but otherwise we were mercifully dry for the night, and our worst enemy became not the rain but the mosquitoes (and even they weren’t too bad).

The manager came out a few minutes later and said something in German that I feared was “even though there are seven of you we have had to cancel the show because the projector is under water.” When he repeated it in English, though, it turned out to be “the weather for The Wizard of Oz this year is much better than it was last year; this is the original print; there’s coffee and tea at the concession; enjoy the show.”

And then we were off to see the wizard (in English with German subtitles).

I hadn’t seen the film in over a decade – the last time was before Oliver was born when I snuck Catherine, blindfolded, into the Somerville Theatre in Cambridge, MA for her birthday – and I really, really enjoyed it. Nothing like seeing a tornado-themed movie when the wind and rain are swirling all around you. And think of the vocabulary we learned from the subtitles – worth the trip alone – Hexe (witch), Gehirn (brain), Herz (heart).

I also came to realize that whereas I thought Seinfeld and The Simpsons were responsible for most of the popular sayings to emerge from the 20th century, really everything came from The Wizard of Oz.

The movie finished up around 11:30 p.m. We suited up and headed back out into the rainy Berlin night; back at the apartment we peeled out of our wet clothing, I tucked Oliver into his bed in the kitchen, and we dreamed dreams of talking trees and ruby slippers.

I left this apartment this morning before Oliver woke up – he’s still getting used to European time and was up until 11:00 p.m. last night – and so when he woke up I wasn’t there.

He obviously needed to tell me something, and, absent his own mobile phone or a way of coming to visit me on his own, he routed his feedback into the only mechanism he had available: comments on this-here blog.

I suppose I need to prepare myself for his teenage years when his comments will no longer be plaintive “come on dad you left me here with mom without you” but rather more “I hate you and everything you represent and this blog is stupid.”

I will enjoy the “at daylight I am writing on your side of the screen” while I can.

Six years ago I first met Martin Roell thanks to a Plazes-fired happenstance at the reboot conference in Copenhagen. It was and remains the nonpareil Plazes moment: a geo-social meetup of the like-minded. It never, alas, happened again. At least in that happenstancy a way.

But the echoes of that moment keep resounding: Ton was also there that night, and I’ve been doing some Drupal migration work with him on the ePSIplatform (we’re also both shareholders in a boat); we had Skype call just yesterday from here at Betahaus where I’m renting a desk for the summer to his office in

And this morning the happenstances kept stancing: walking into Betahaus this morning I found the “betabreakfast” about to start – it’s a sort of one-hour Zap Your PRAM held every Thursday morning – and who should I see sitting at the breakfast table but the selfsame Martin.

Once the festivities were over, we had a good chance to catch up on the last 4 or 5 years since we’d seen each others – monasteries, children, travel, work, life – and we made plans to reconnect in August. It was like meeting an old friend. Actually, it was meeting an old friend.

The moral of this story: fleeting connections, no matter whether they are geo-enabled or happenstance of a very analog sort, can be a wonderful, enabling thing. Perhaps the best reason to jam shyness propensity into the deeper recesses.

As a somewhat frequent transatlantic flyer, most recently earlier this week, I’ve developed a survival routine. Flying at all, let alone across the ocean overnight, is brutal to mind and body and there’s no way around that. But you can take the edge off.

• Drink water. Lots of water. You cannot drink enough water. Really. Drink more. Flying in an airplane for 6 or 7 hours is like putting your body inside a food dehydrator. How do you know if you’re not drinking enough water? You don’t, until it’s too late. But if you find yourself not having to pee a regular amount that’s a good signal.
• If traveling as a family, or group, establish clear ground rules that permit and accept irrational behaviour. Travel is stressful. Normally happy people will snap and fly off the handle and sink into fits of despair. This is okay. You need these rules even more if you’re a new couple or a unfamiliar group of people: travel together is the acid test for a new relationship, and if there are breakup fissures already in the air, transatlantic air travel is the best way to crack them open. So talk about this, in advance.
• Face it, you’re not going to get any sleep. There are exceptions to this rule: my dentist has a drug-induced sleep plan that seems to work for him, for example, and there’s always the chance that you’ll luck into some magic across-three-seats sleeping position that will work out for your body. But probably not. Don’t worry about it. The best you can do is try to squeak out some REM sleep here and there.
• Your mind will not be working for the first 24 hours after arrival. You will forget things. You won’t remember what day it is. You will tell border guards completely made up stories because you believe them to be true (note to authorities: I have never done this). Relax into this, don’t fight it: treat it like an expensive drug you’ve taken that confers temporary dullardness.
• Upon arrival, eat breakfast. Don’t worry about what it costs. Try and find a sit-down place, especially if you have some time to kill in a transfer airport in Europe. Have coffee, fresh fruit, whatever. So what if you spend 30 EUR on a 5 EUR breakfast: it’s a one-time investment in your physical and mental sanity.
• Take a taxi from the airport. Public transit is great, but there’s nothing like trying to negotiate a new transit system when your mind is working at 30% capacity. Write the address of your destination on a piece of paper and hand it to the driver and then just relax. Your mind will try and convince you, in its paranoid sleepness state, that the crazy taxi driver is taking you to the wrong side of town, but this is unlikely.
• Arrival day is a write-off. Remember, your mind is not working. Relax, eat, drink, be merry. Don’t schedule anything important. Ice cream is good. You’re going to have a sleepless night anyway, so don’t pay any attention to people who claim to have a foolproof system for beating jet lag.
• Expect pooping irregularities for a while. Your body and mind are confused (“why did he feed us at 4:00 a.m.?!”).
• It’s possible that your mind will convince you, during the first 24 hours, that you’ve made a horrible mistake leaving Mayberry for the Left Bank. Your mind is just complaining to you and will get over it. After 24 hours you will wonder why you didn’t kick Mayberry years ago.

As I write this I’m starting out on day three – we landed in Berlin 19 hours ago after leaving Halifax the night before – and the fog is just beginning to clear. We all went to bed last night at 9:00 p.m. and we all woke up at 1:30 a.m. thinking it was time to start the day and we were all groggy when we actually did start the day at 8:00 a.m. There is, I can attest, light at the end of the transatlantic tunnel.

My friend G. and I drive out to Montague this morning for the open house at the Great Enlightenment Buddhist Academy, brought to us by the same group that’s taking over 186 Prince Street. Here’s the map we were presented with on arrival:

Everything was held in tents set on in the front yard of what once was the Lobster Shanty; it’s a beautiful spot overlooking the Montague River and, as I heard several times, The Irish Rovers used to play there.

Each of the tent was staffed by volunteers and covered a different part of the involvement of the Great Enlightenment Buddhist on Prince Edward Island, or of Buddhism in general; there was a great emphasis on vegetarianism and organic agriculture as well as on Chinese culture.

Everyone was incredibly friendly and somewhat earnest on their comportment, and attitude not uncommon to strong believers in, well, anything (see also Apple staff at the booth when the company used to display at MacWorld).

There was a free lunch of noodles, spring rolls and pineapple cake provided by the Splendid Essence, a lecture tent with speakers covering, well, I’m not sure, as it seemed to involve something called “OMAK” that I couldn’t make out the definition of.

I can’t say as though I left with a profound understanding of Buddhism, but I met some nice people, had a meal, and count the visit as a positive one.

I decided that before I leave for the summer I had to take my new set of line rule out for a ride on my letterpress. So I decided to whip up a quick book, a sort of “two-panel comic storyboard” book. Here’s the walk-through.

First I set up up the line rule in the letterpress chase (this photo from The Museum of Printing gave me a good head-start as to how line rule is set):

I put the set rule on the press and printing up 10 pages on half-letter-sized card stock that was leftover from my Kwik Kopy printing demonstration:

I stapled one end in three places (using the new “one touch” super-stapler that Johnny gave me for my birthday; it can staple, with no effort, through up to 25 pages!):

Next, for the cover, I cut and scored a piece of yellow card-stock that Catherine brought back from Halifax last fall:

I glued the cover to the stapled pages:

And clamped the glued-up result with binder clips to dry:

Here’s the finished book:

What might you use it for? With apologies for my still-at-grade-two-level drawing skills (is it any wonder I seek solace in the arms of metal type), something like this:

As usual when book-making is the subject, tip of the hat to Hamish and his DIY Book podcast, the source of everything I know about making books.

You can tell a lot about a person by the car they drive. And, I presume, by the television series they have set up to record on their DVR. I was cleaning up the DVR last night in anticipation of going away for the summer, and here, in chronological order of date of first entry, are the television series I had set to record. Of particular note are series like ER that have been off the air for a while, and series like Journeyman, Flash Forward and Dirty Sexy Money, that were short-lived.

• The Unit
• Saturday Night Live
• Journeyman
• 30 Rock
• The Office
• ER
• House
• Lost
• Dirty Sexy Money
• Fringe
• My Own Worst Enemy
• The Apprentice:UK
• NUMB3RS
• Worst Week
• 24
• Chef School
• Lie to Me
• Amazing Race 14
• Southland
• Extras
• Shark Tank
• NCIS
• Flash Forward
• Law & Order
• Amazing Race 15
• The Deep End
• Kitchen Nightmares
• Amazing Race 16
• Daily Show With Jon Stewart
• Californication
• Mad Men
• Community
• Rubicon
• My Generation
• Amazing Race 17
• Human Target
• Modern Family
• The Event
• Blue Bloods
• The Big Bang Theory
• CBC News: Compass
• V
• The Opener
• Season 25: Oprah Behind Scenes
• Amazing Race: Unfinished Business
• Glee
• CHAOS
• Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution
• Happy Endings
• The Kennedys
• The Voice
• Love Bites

I presume that a trained psychographic artists could, with that list in hand, tell my birth date, brand of shampoo and political tendencies.

As reported in this space last month, after more than 10 years in operation Formosa Tea House in Charlottetown is closing.

But, as it turns out, it’s not really closing at all, simply reinvented itself under new stewardship.

If you’ve been around the neighbourhood over the past few weeks you’ve probably noticed the new paint job and the bevy of volunteers swarming over the building at 186 Prince Street. I was as curious as the next guy as to what was going on, and while I heard suggestions of the involvement of The Great Enlightenment Buddhist Academy in its re-imagining, I didn’t really know what this would mean.

Early this week, though, I was sent word through an intermediary that my presence was requested at 186 Prince on July 7 at 7:00 p.m. (7/7 at 7) for either a closing ceremony or an opening ceremony, or perhaps both. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but as a longtime member of the Formosa Tea House family, I felt duty-bound to attend.

On arrival I was greeted by both Mr. Lu, the new owner of the soon-to-be-named Splendid Essence, and by my old friend Chien-Ming Yeh founder, with his wife Fen, of the Formosa Tea House:

What followed was a fascinating cross-cultural three hours of food, fellowship and leaning.

And what I learned is this: in the practice of Buddhism there are, shall we say, “sub-religions” – followers of particular strands of the faith, adherents to a particular spiritual leader. In this case, the same Buddhist sect from Taiwan involved in the The Great Enlightenment Buddhist Academy and related monasteries in Montague and Little Sands has a group of lay adherents who have purchase the Formosa Tea House and will run it as Splendid Essence, evolved but following the same general “tea house” model as Chien and Fen have established. This effort appears to be a part of a broader economic and educational effort that in Taiwan involves organic farming, vegetarian food manufacturing and other endeavours.

The large crew of workers we’ve seen in recent weeks painting and renovating 186 Prince Street are a group of visitors to the Island, adherents of the faith, here volunteering their time and energy. Among those that I met last night were a retired colonel in the Taiwanese army, a computer engineer and a former graphic designer for Honda cars and motorcycles. I also met Geoffrey Yang, already here on the Island for two years and living in Stratford, who’s a sort of “real world liaison” for the monks, conducting their business affairs, and acting as assistant to Mr. Lu.

Mr. Lu is here to run the Splendid Essence; also a lay member of the sect, he has a background in organic agricultural and non-food additive manufacturing in Taiwan. His plans for the tea house include expanding its menu (while keeping the core than Chien and Fen established), and engaging in other educational and economic pursuits in the community.

This is all at once interesting, heartening and deeply, deeply weird to me. I’m very attracted to the notion of “non-capitalist enterprise,” and there’s a lot of philosophical overlap between my approach to economic matters and theirs. And it seems that if anything the special place that Formosa Tea House has had in the community will only be enhanced under this new ownership.

But I find the Buddhism angle perplexing – faith and religion of any sort are, as regular readers might recall, all a great mystery to me – and I’m not quite sure where to slot the laypeople I met last night in my everyday cast of characters: missionaries? religious people on retreat? CUSO-like volunteers? As much as I enjoyed myself last night, and was engaged by their company, there’s also a certain amount of “so this is how you win over converts through food and subtlety” paranoia in the background of my mind.  I don’t wish to ascribe ulterior motives to this group; this is simply a case of that which confuses me makes me suspicious and afraid (a solid Prince Edward Island trait if there ever was one).

All that aside, the tweaks that have been made to 186 Prince are quite nice; the old back room – the original Live from the Formosa Tea House recording studio – has been transformed entirely:

And the main room has been simplified and softened, with the booths reupholstered, pillows added, and some of the clutter removed:

The spread they put out for we visitors – mostly Formosa regulars – was about as good as it gets in the “vegetarian buffet” world: some Formosa standbys like spring rolls and dumplings supplemented by some spicy new dishes, fresh watermelon, a very tangy soup, and some packaged desserts from the home office in Taiwan:

Fen will be staying around until the end of July to help the new owners with the transition; Chien left at the crack of dawn this morning for the North Sydney ferry and the drive onward to St. John’s where he and Fen will make a new life for themselves. They both seem very happy with the new path the Formosa is set on, content that they’ve left a legacy of a special and important place in Charlottetown that will stay that way.

If you’re curious about all of this, one opportunity to learn more is the Gratitude Fest this Sunday that the Great Enlightenment Buddhist Institute Society is hosting in Montague from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. This is the Montague outpost of the group; it’s the old Lobster Shanty location for those of you that remember where that was. It’s describe as follows:

GEBIS and followers from Prince Edward Island, Ontario, British Columbia, New York, California, and elsewhere, will organize exhibits, seminars, family activities, and storytelling, on issues such as organic farming, saving the planet, gratitude, and Buddhism.
Chinese delicacies will be provided courtesy of Splendid Essence Restaurant.

If I can find the time in my busy Sunday – I’ll be madly making last-minute preparations for my Monday departure for Berlin – I’m going to try and make it out.