This is it, the last entry in this journal. I said I was going to wrap it up after I arrived in Berlin and, true to form, I've been here six weeks already and I haven't quite gotten around to it. But no more excuses! This is the final entry.

Don't despair, dear faithful reader, I have another, similar project in store. In very preliminary production, even. Details will be available here early next week, in the first few days of November. I needed the impetus of a fresh month. It will have a new name, a new look, a different format. Less a disorganized daily journal, more a writer's scrapbook: longer thematic pieces, works in progress, some random fiction, finally, and photo essays if I can scrounge together the funds for a cheap digital camera.

Meanwhile, adieu Words. It's been fun. I won't dwell on a longer epitaph - "It's been fun" seems more than adequate.

We now return to our regularly-scheduled journal entry.

Feeling vaguely guilty for ignoring all things Canadian news since my departure, I signed up for the daily email bulletin from CBC Newsworld. This story appeared in the first bulletin I received:

AMERICANS ARE GETTING FATTER
Americans are still fighting the "battle of the bulge" - and the South is leading the way.
FULL STORY

Every now and then the CBC fails to contain its prejudices.

The fat business is true, of course. I am shocked every time I travel to the States - there are fat people everywhere. The contrast with Germany is quite striking. Germans do not eat a particularly lean diet - lots of cheese, meat, sausage and beer - but you see far fewer overweight people here than on other side of the Atlantic. It has to do with exercise, obviously. Europeans walk to and from public transit, ride their bicycles to work, actually move their bodies instead of driving any distance longer than one block. They don't take aerobics classes or ride exercise bikes in the gym until their minds turn to mush, but they do propel themselves with their feet during the course of a normal day. And that is why they do not turn into blimps.

I shouldn't gloat for nationalistic reasons, really, obesity is also on the rise in Canada, though it's not as great a problem as in the U.S. Vancouver is unusually skinny - on the West Coast, chronic inactivity is as great a social sin as smoking - so the contrast often seems starker. I feel perfectly free to gloat for personal reasons, however.

I really don't understand this inactivity thing. I feel perfectly wretched if I go more than a few weeks without some form of regular exercise. I absolutely cannot imagine becoming a sedentary blob.

My god, I'm actually finding time to read books that I want to read (at the expense of my German texts and my big fat ASP guide, but whatever). I finished the first volume of the Klemperer diaries, which was wonderful, and eagerly await the second. They've even turned it into a mini-series here, which I would happily watch if we had a TV. (We'll have a set at the new place. Otherwise I would buy one, as it's not only a great time-waster, but also a wonderful tool for learning the language.) Then I polished off The Invention of Currywurst, a little gem of a novel set in Hamburg right at the end of the war. Now I'm re-reading Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, again wonderful. I love the precise, fussy language: "In Bucharest he had an exceedingly unpleasant experience with a water-closet."

Our temporary liquidity problems have for the time being disappeared, so not only did we buy a printer and a few other household necessities, but I now have the green light to purchase a pair of speedskating blades, without which I cannot, obviously, skate at any reasonable speed. This is a welcome development. Tomorrow we shall go to the Wilmersdorf oval and see when it would be possible to begin training. Annette, who is far more graceful on ice than I, though not necessarily faster, is also interested in trying some speedskating this winter.

While we're on the money front, my [insert name of former employer here] shares took off like a rocket a few days ago, nearly doubling for a few glorious hours before returning closer to earth. The numbers are quite meaningless at this point in time - I can't sell until early next year - but I still find it rather amazing to know that from one day to the next my net worth has changed by, say, the value of a new car.

What else is happening here in Berlin, the sunny capital of Switzerland's bad-ass neighbour? It is in fact sunny and warm, quite unusual for late October. A pleasant surprise. I'm training a bit, nothing too extreme as I had a minor sinus thing over the weekend. Annette and I do a fair bit of puttering about during our days but we still manage to finish the jobs we have to finish. I will spend the weekend at home, working on the new site and on a translation job for a company here.

What a strange story that has been. After several months of dancing around - this all started when I sent an email asking for employment advice to a guy from Hamburg who I found on rec.sport.skating.racing - I finally went to see this small biotechnology/software firm way the hell up in Pankow. I'd originally thought that I would be doing an English version of their site. No, it turns out, they have a "multimedia agentur" already, they just need English text. So instead of hiring a proper translator, of which there are hundreds if not thousands in Berlin, they want to hire a Canadian web developer with bad German who will get help from his wife or friends. (Annette and I did a sample translation for them back in August, which they liked. As native English speakers we have a certain advantage, even if we don't know a thing about genomics.) It's all too strange. I don't really want to do translation work - I thought it would be a good complement to web design, that's all - but somehow I found myself in this bizarre situation where they appeared to believe that I'd already agreed to do it, and now they need it yesterday. What the hell, it's not that much work (and not that much money) and if things go well for the company I might get genuine web stuff next year. It made for a very pleasant if odd day, meeting with these guys then going for lunch with the friend who'd set it all up (the skater/programmer originally from Hamburg, now in Berlin).

Of course this all hangs on whether I can get an Arbeitserlaubnis with my Aufenhaltserlaubnis (a work permit with my residence permit) next week. Or it will have to happen somewhat schwarz. (One of my favourite words: schwarz - black. It means basically anything against the rules, of which there are many. Working for cash or without papers is working schwarz. Riding transit without a ticket is riding schwarz. It's such a perfect, all-purpose adverb for this rule-bound society. There's a lot of schwarz in Berlin - one of the things that makes life here bearable. But there are limits. As Annette once pointed out, it looks pretty bad when you're sitting on a bus, talking to each other in English, and the only German word you use is schwarz. Gives a very poor impression.)

Beyond that, still hustling the odd contract from folks in Vancouver, still pestering companies here. Same old, same old.

This is more than enough now. I've made my last entry respectably long. What more is expected of me?

I was hoping for something funny or strange or just plain irrelevant for the final sidebar. 

But I could not think of a single amusing thing, so instead here's a sneak preview of what's coming next: