The Blue Fox is a hotel bar. I point this out because hotels are places where all kinds of people go. Including the kinds of people who would order a Cosmopolitan, or a Midori Sour. Which is all to say that from the get-go, hotel bars are a little bit hamstrung by the need to pander to a broad range of clientele used to sucking down syrupy abominations.
Does the Blue Fox succeed in rising above in the face of this adversity? Read on to find out.
We continue our street art series with some items from the walls in Bratislava.
Do you think this is what the Beatles meant by “Here I stand / head in hand” ?
When we were in Paris, the Pompidou had a Le Corbosier exhibit. One of the things he was big on was the Modulor. Basically it’s some golden ratio driven hooey about how much space a person takes up. Disturbingly, many of his renderings of this concept feature lumpy crab-human hybrids in psychadellic compositions.
Note the powerful psionic waves emanating from the claw. I, for one, welcome our new crab-men overlords
When we heard there was an Anonymous themed bar making solid drinks in Prague, we knew we had to go.
This was on display at the MOCAK contemporary art museum in Krakow. Apparently it was done with cooperation from Lego.
Photographs showing the lego concentration camp set.
Unfolded boxes for the lego concentration camp sets.
The holocaust is such a hard thing to understand on a personal level; the scale is just too big. Different approaches can help make the problem relatable for different people. The combination of mass produced children’s toys and assembly-line genocide was surprisingly powerful to me.
We checked out Fortuna Brewery’s Komes Baltic Porter at our meat-filled bash on a Polish farm. It was the highest rated thing we could find in the Polish grocery store.
Why hello table full of alcohol.
There are a lot of pictures I’ve earmarked for blog posts that just don’t have enough meat to stand on their own. Here’s a photo dump of quirky things we’ve seen across our trip.
I could have used one of these on my last trip when the bridges were washed out from the floods
Pretty sure a strong wind would blow this thing on its side. It looks amazing though. (more…)
Bryk is the last bar we’ll be covering in Berlin. We were a little skeptical heading in, from the outside it has a touch of that “ultralounge” vibe that defines the eurotrash experience. Thankfully the drinks were on point, though they often veered into molecular gastronomy territory.
I keep wanting to call this place Beckett’s Kampf. Kampf means “struggle” (as made memorable by a certain infamous book). Kopf, on the other hand, means “head.” Here is the sign from Beckett’s Kopf. Maybe it will help me remember the distinction:
In my defense, Beckett looks like he’s been through a lot
Lost in Grub Street is a weird bar with a weird name in Berlin’s business district. It was literally empty when we got there at 8PM on a Saturday; the bartender had to follow us in (he was sitting outside). He blamed “weekends in the summer,” which to me seem like good times to be in the bar business, but maybe things are different in Berlin (?)
The theme of the bar is “big bowls and short drinks.” Being as how there are only two of us, we skipped the punch bowls.
Bonus points for the double-wide cocktail napkin to accommodate the palate cleansing water.