It's my last night in Berlin, and I'm just hanging around, having packed up most of my stuff and listened to the Virgin Suicides soundtrack this afternoon. Will have dinner soon. Have been reading Vasari's Lives of the Artists, and am about to start another Henry James too - The Ambassadors. I think this will be the eighth for this trip. I was having trouble getting to sleep last night, and was thinking about the next extended piece of prose I want to write, in a year or two - thinking about how it is impossible to write the same way after reading Henry James. Not that I feel like I will try to emulate him - simply that his novels are a lesson, both in psychological development of a narrative, and in just what a sentence can do.

Today I wandered around - visited the Brandenburg Tor, the Reichstag, Potsdamer Platz. Was hoping to visit the "Neue" National Gallery (there are three or four of them, starting with what one of the guides I was given described as "noseless naked guys" in the ancient collections) but when I got there I found out the permanent collection wasn't on show (the permanent collection includes among other things some abstract expressionist works of Newman that I particularly wanted to see) because the whole gallery had been taken over by an Armani exhibition. You can imagine my outrage, abstract expressionist ousted for fashion. Though I'd discovered a little fashion for myself earlier today. But we won't say anything more about that incident.

Oh what's the use of holding back -

MARK IS IN THE FINAL OF WIMBLEDON! Maybe Australia will learn to love him a little better now. I would just like to say I've liked him for years and years. Probably because I haven't followed the Davis Cup and always hated the adulation Pat Rafter receives. I mean, he's dating an underwear model. (I'll try to forget about newspaper reports a few years ago of a possible "flirtation" between Mark and Ms Kournikova. Anyway, I'll be in Prague this on Sunday, so I will have to try to find somewhere to watch the final there. I'm almost glad I haven't seen the last few matches. I just know I would have embarrassed myself squealing.

Just think, when all this is over, this will stop being Kate's tennis blog, and maybe I'll have some more insightful things to say about finding out I love Henry James.

I went to visit the Pergamon museum yesterday, which was quite amazing. I particularly loved the Islamic collection, and the eagle headed figures of the Babylonions. It was just a day of wandering along in a state of awe. Spent a long time lingering along Unter der Linden. My only disappointment with Berlin is that I didn't make it to see much contemporary art... I'm always running out of time.

Berlin