More from Berlin ... so last Saturday, we took a day off from work, and went off to see the sights. And the first stop was -- the Brandenburg Gate? The Reichstag? No silly, it was the HARD WAX SHOP. As a tourist trap, it sure was difficult to find. It literally took ten minutes to find the entrance, which was way at the end of an alley behind a row of buildings. And I'm not talking about a narrow European street, this was an ALLEY, complete with shopping carts piled next to a rusty garage, drunkards, and the shop's name painted on the wall for identification purposes. Then one needs to walk up four flights of stairs in a building that could easily double as the setting for a drug bust scene in any cop movie of the last thirty years.

The shop itself isn't too large, but a third of its area is taken up by a wall, I mean literally a wall of massive speakers that were playing dub music at 1/100th of their volume capacity yet still comfortably loud. The records I bought were as much souvenirs as they are musical investments.