Second wind (more guests)

Just after my brother and his girlfriend left Berlin we got a second guest. K cycled all the way from Copenhagen to Berlin in an organised cycling event to support libraries. She used to live in Berlin, but now lives in Lapland, in the very north of Finland, so she was very excited to be back in a real city. Both nights she was here we accidentally ended up getting pretty drunk – A always left before us, since the poor thing had to go to work in the mornings.

Since it was K's last night yesterday, we wanted to go out for dinner. We circled around Ostkreuz in the area where our mutual friends will move next autumn, and decided to try the restaurant that's pretty literally behind their house, Transit. Our Berlin friends eat there often and are excited about it, so we decided it must be good. When we got there we couldn't decide where to sit, and after a minute, a grumpy German man said to us "Can you please not just sit down!" which made me hate him and ruined the first impression I got of the restaurant. After a while I managed to sneak the guy a "did you seriously tell US off" -look when his kid was misbehaving, and felt much better.

The idea in Transit is that you order Thai and Indonesian style dishes as little tapas plates at €3 each – a few bigger portions come at €7. Almost all the dishes can be ordered as with tofu instead of meat, but the downside is that you end up eating a lot of just tofu. We ordered three dishes each, but if you're on a budget you could order one of the heavy coconut milk curries with a side of noodles or rice (€1), and be pretty content. Everything we sampled was really good, even if my "Party Girl" papaya salad was almost too spicy to finish. The "Little Swimmer" fish soup was the best dish I tried and I'll go back just to get a bowl of it, and lick it clean. If you're hungry and want a lot of drinks, Transit will set you back more than your average Asian restaurant in Berlin, but the gimmick with tapas and writing down your own order doesn't feel too gimmicky when you realize how good the food is.