Recommendations for those with a fear of loneliness

I'm practising at having claustrophobia. Unintentionally. And I'm starting to feel like I am getting quite good at it. Today we went to Stadtbad Schoeneberg, my all-time favourite indoor swimming pool, except that today I hated it. HATED it! Now admittedly I made a mistake in writing in my blog about what a wondrous place it is, cause now you meet folk in there that YOU KNOW! I like an empty pool. A pool that nobody else goes to. I'm ideally a villa with a private pool on holiday kind of girl. Stevie is my polar opposite and only enjoys pools that are busy. Anyway, Stadtbad Schoeneberg is closing for a couple of months as of tomorrow I think (which seems mad as it's the middle of the summer holidays for the German schools), so obviously EVERYBODY decided to go and make the most of it today. It was standing room only. Literally. Downstairs there was no room to even tread water, not that it stopped crazy nutters from doing handstands practically on top of people, or an old man from doing a really creepy floating thing where he was floating face down looking to all intents and purposes like he'd died. I pressed myself further into the side of the pool to avoid him touching me as he drifted past. The only thing that stopped me from alerting the lifeguard to the possible corpse, was the comfort of having 2 people snogging ultra passionately 2 inches from my cheek.

Outdoors is fine: especially if you want a Russian hat.

Giant star-shaped panic button for the claustrophobic.

Last week I went to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum or Mauermuseum on Friedrichstrasse. It's one of the places I've been planning on visiting for ages. The weather was a bit of a mixed bag; a little bit sunny, a little bit humid and dying to thunder. Anyway, the street was chock-a-block as usual with tourists, but I hadn't expected the museum to be *just as packed*! It was hideous. The museum itself is fine, great even, - though there's a lot of reading, but it was oppressively hot with so many bodies tightly packed in, squeezing past each other, ad there wasn't any air conditioning. Had I not paid Euros 12.50 to get in, I would have chucked it just to get some fresh air and some space. Instead I squeezed my way around with the rest of them, skim-reading a lot of stuff, bypassing an awful lot more, until I felt like I had got a reasonable amount for my money. Maybe it was just the time of year that made it *so* busy in combination with the weather, who knows, but I wouldn't be jumping at the opportunity to go back.