Is there anything Google can't do?

We visited Berlin for a weekend in October, and since then we have made several attempts to upload a blog with all our photos. However, the process is long, tedious and crashes pretty often, so we still haven't finished.

So, we were very happy to find another way to post photos - using Google. Now, we can upload our pictures much faster and they are easier to view online. Our Berlin photos can now be found at: www.picasaweb.google.com/mariekeandanthony (along with our other travel photos). We should be much better about keeping this new site updated (at least in theory)...

We do have one story that cannot be told with photos - our dinner at Dunkel restaurant. Cameras are not allowed in the restaurant; not that they could do much anyway. The entire restaurant is pitch black - in fact, Dunkel means darkness.

The concept is to experience dinner as if we were blind. We selected our food from a purposefully vague menu:

• The starter was described as a fruity salad of which "weak ones become strong and shy ones courageous."
• The soup was a crème soup of a vegetable that was planted a lot before the potato spread around the world, sophisticated with long forgotten wild herbs.
• The main course was a recipe of a wheat produce passed down by Japanese monks, excellently combined with a not quite sober cream sauce and mushrooms that borrowed their name from a settled mussel.
• And the dessert was an exotic salad composed of fruits of an evergreen melon tree, oval fruit with large stone, and Chinese gooseberries.

From these vague riddles, and the use of our remaining four senses, we could try to figure out just what we were eating. More of a challenge was figuring out how we could eat it. And whether or not we'd eaten it all.

We also tried to guess the layout of the restaurant. Based on the voices around us , we figured we were in the centre of a large room. However, near the end of the meal, Marieke noticed that she was sitting beside a pillar. Further groping in the dark revealed that it was actually a corner of the room...