Hola, amigos! I know it’s been a while since I rapped at ya’.

More running news. This is more like it:

I went running with Philippe, who is a monster. Lilya kept saying, “Rob court vite, Rob court vite.” Well, not that vite! He set a mean pace of almost exactly 9 minutes to the mile, which is about 30 seconds faster per mile than I’ve been running—maybe he would have run faster without me. I’m sweating, I’m dying, I’m struggling to keep up, and Philippe sees that the path splits: one side, the normal path—the other, a staircase. “It’s the same,” he says, plowing up the staircase without blinking. He spoke in English for the entire run as well, which I’ve never heard him do before. We got to the park to stretch and asked if I did crunches (les abdos, by the way). He was even more delighted when I said I usually did push-ups. “Both!” he grinned.

All in all, a pretty good workout. The bad news—the toe is worse. I think I’ll do one more run anyway, since I won’t be running in Italy next week anyway.

In the meantime, for those of you who come to this blog for something other than running updates, we have pictures up, of Berlin Day 4 (massive Soviet monuments! attractive pictures on a bridge! Visit to Kreuzberg, the Turkish quarter of Berlin!). The pictures of the Soviet monument need a word or two of explanation: immediately after the war, Stalin put the East Germans to work building a massive monument to the fallen Russian soldiers—and there were a lot of them, too many to send back home. It is, like all things Stalinist, unbelievably large, with a set of gates at the entrance, a central burial area flanked by 18 friezes (or bas reliefs, whatever the difference may be) which tell the story of the terrible German aggression, the heroic Soviet resistance (look for cute kids holding hand grenades!), and the even more noble sacrifice of Russian sons for the homeland. At the end there is a truly imposing statue of a Russian warrior holding a giant sword with which he has just chopped a swastika in two.

And another set of Paris pictures, from Versailles. There is also a new post on Sasha’s blog that just a really cute picture of him with a giant container of Nutella. Seriously, it’s really big.

Blog updates will become less frequent as we move into the massive waves of visitors who are arriving throughout May and June. Some are here right now, in fact! One day this blog may even participate in the discussion of just how great Sasha Waltz is.

But I’ll leave you with pictures. How much do the Parisians love their dogs, and how Orientalist are they? Two great tastes that taste great together!

And for Manuel (who doesn’t read this blog except under extreme duress), the Code Pénal of Drinkers. “Speaking with a Drinker of Water”: gets you death. Not drinking when you have money in your pocket? Hard Labor for Life. And so on.

Et voilà.