"For the next three days, you will drink only beer and eat only meat,"

is not what Paul said to us on arrival in Berlin, but he might well have done. On the way to his (extremely nice and ridiculously affordable) flat in the old East Berlin, we picked up a crate of Erdinger and began the drinking.

We headed out after some food (and vodka, much protested by your correspondent) to a bar in a dilapidated old cinema to meet up with Steve, a friend of Paul's. The bar just oozed bohemian cool: an impressive building that had seen better days, messily redecorated and overlooking both traditional old and stark new buildings.

Our pirate hat fitted right in.

Towards the end of the night, for reasons that escape me now, we split up into two groups. Jeff, Steve, Antonio and I headed for a club on the 14^th floor of a communist-era tower block on the Alexanderplatz, with the ludicrously soviet TV tower looming over it. Josh and Paul would meet us there later.

Apparently the club was tres (or sehr) cool, so we ambled up to it as coolly as we could manage, and were turned down flat by the bouncers. Fortunately, it wasn't that they didn't like the cut of our jib, but that we were conspicuously without attractive female company. Or any female company, for that matter: the evening's sole attempt to strike up a conversation with some ladies had been when Josh and I sat beside a group of girls who studiously (and correctly) ignored us.

Ah well; we ate some excellent kebabs and went home, plastered.