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Now I'm getting excited about my upcoming trip to Eastern Europe in August. Me and my lady are flying into Berlin on August 15. A friend of mine from Portland has been living there for a couple years, so it'll be great to get to see what his life is like there. I also just finished reading Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, which is a phenomenal piece of writing on its own. It really got me excited thinking about the vibe of that city--it's so amazing what that place has been through just in the last 100 years.

We're spending about 4 days in each of the cities on our route: Berlin, Prague, Vienna and Budapest. We even found a vegetarian friendly place to stay in Budapest--Budaveg. We fly home from Budapest on August 30, which kind of sucks because that's the day the Republican National Convention kicks off in NYC.

But I'm not going to let that get me down. I just pulled some Viennese literature from the stacks: a collection of Arthur Schnitzler stories and his play "La Ronde" and Hermann Broch's "The Sleepwalkers" which is a trilogy that he wrote between 1888 and 1918. That should be excellent.

I'll have to go back and re-read some Kafka to get ready for Prague. And some Kundera.

I'm watching Fassbinder's made-for-TV version of Berlin Alexanderplatz and we'll have to rent a pile of other e.European movies too.