A Pretty GIrl Is Like A Bicycle

I am in love with a beautiful Berliner. It is this bicycle.
Spring sprang this week and I have been riding my bike so much that the seat is sort of conforming to my butt. I won’t think about anything in particular for a while and will suddenly find myself on a bike ride—not working out, no destination, just pedal, coast; pedal, coast.

Most German bikes seem to have these nifty little spring-loaded clamp things. They are very useful for holding small objects that are not easily crushed.Everybody told me Berlin was a bike friendly city, and I am going to have to agree completely. The self-powered transit infrastructure is excellent—almost every major road has a bike lane, and busier streets will often have a special strip of sidewalk reserved for bikers/skateboarders/Razor scooterers—and more importantly, cars respect cyclists. Maybe I have just been biking in the wrong parts of the wrong cities, but in America I never felt on equal footing with automobiles whilst on my bike. In Berlin I am recognized as a nimbler, slower, more attractive part of traffic, which makes major urban bike journeys/exploration safe and relaxing, rather than nerve-wracking.

So: I have a bike, and it is wonderful, and I’ve been tooling around the city all weekend taking photos. Let’s start on beautiful, beautiful Friday.

I got up, went for a run, then took a test to determine my official German language classification. After three weeks of intensive Deutsch, I scored an 81/100 on the difficult and cumbersome exam, good enough for a C.1. I’m told this places me at the level of a typical German undergrad. So I can take whatever courses I want. Which is nice.

But enough about school! School is boring! Bike rides are cool!

I finished my test and coasted over to James Simon Park, a strip of grass along the Spree across from the Museuminsel (Museum Island). The atmospheric transition from sleet/gravel/cold to sun/grass//warmth has had a transformative effect on the population. Look at all of those satisfied Berliners in the grass! I don’t think I saw this many happy people all month.

This black lab worked up a real thirst frolicking and rolling in stinky stuff so he took the stairs and got a drink from the river.The problem with photographing the Dom (cathedral) is that it is so huge and hazy and outrageous that it always looks fake to me. It is as if this river photo wasn’t interesting enough so I decided to photoshop in a huge CG temple. Enough to make a brother feel like George Lucas.

Saturday was not as out-n-out gorgeous as Friday, but the cool, cloudy weather was perfect for a bike adventure.

I started out the way I seem to start every day: going to the Alexanderplatz. The stupid post office was closed—postal workers must have one hell of a union—so the next batch of postcards will be a bit delayed. BUT, Alex being the beating heart of a bustling metropolis, I found some other interesting things to do besides interfacing with grouchy government employees.

Example: this huge market that kind of materialized out of thin air. Three days ago this was just bare concrete. Now it is full of all kinds of kitschy, overpriced crap. Progress!Actually, while prices were inflated and tourists were rampant, this was a pretty legitimate European-style market, with skilled handworkers selling their high-class wares. I foolishly neglected to photograph the glass blower and the whittler, but I caught a genuine baker and a staid, bearded young blacksmith in action:
I liked this assortment of ceramics:This banana-Nutella crepe was v tasty. Germans love their Nutella.
Once I’d had my fill of looking at tiny expensive things, I wandered off the Platz in a new direction. I gravitated naturally towards the old town hall.The bike pretends to read some interesting information about the building. It thinks it’s people.
While photographing the town hall I had a very Berlinish moment. I noticed this cool, totally different structure across the street, so I turned 90 degrees and took a picture:And then I noticed this other, also cool, also totally different structure right next to that, so I spun another 45 or so and photographed a third cool building without taking a step.
A bit later I came upon this hollowed out church ruin with a nude, beefy Christ out front.
The bike contemplates nude, beefy Christ.
Next I headed towards my local park, the very big and war memorial-ridden Volkspark Friedrichshain. I bought an apple and a Brötchen at one of the 5 supermarkets within two blocks of my front door. This was supposed to be just a snack, but when the woman running the meat promotion stand gave me some free meat samples as I left, well, I had a legitimate picnic on my hands.

Free meat!Cheap lunch!
I ate my one Euro lunch by this as-of-yet-still-deactivated fountain. I would have needed a ladder to really photograph it properly, but you get the idea: four statues in a circle spout water towards the middle. Bike included for scale.
These elephants are neat,
And this sea lion is okay,But the real star of the show is this wacky penguin/fish duo. The fish, eternally in the process of being devoured whole, still has the pluck to spit out huge arc of water in its last ridiculous everlasting moment. The penguin seems cool with that.The bike pretends it is the Lion King.
Oh hey, it's that super creepy muscular child gymnast statue that’s been haunting your dreams lately.

The sun came out just in time to set on Dense Residential Sub-Block 16-A.

Hey remember this?Well the Saturday night show was sold out, of course, so I bought a bottle of wine for the train ride and went to see about getting in anyways.

Again with the luck: I showed up at intermission—Germans love intermissions—mingled with the crowd, and saw the second half of this awesome show for free. Peaches wore this shiny gold egg-shaped parka thing and shiny gold tights and shiny gold shoes, and her accompanist (Chilly Gonzales, former holder of the world record for longest piano solo) wore a shiny gold shirt, and they were both completely into it and the crowd got to yell CRUCIFY HIM. It was so great. Words are not sufficing to describe its greatness right now.

Afterwards I met up with my Northwestern friend Nate Furey. Nate’s German grandmother just celebrated her 100th birthday, and the Furey clan decided that was good reason for a family reunion in Berlin. For his last night in town, Nate and I tripped around the very cheap, Turkish, cool-but-it-knows-it neighborhood of Kreuzberg.

We found a bar whose DJ—Karach der Roboter (Karach the Robot)—disappeared before I could photograph his awesome robot costume. There was a shopping cart there for some reason. I liked the restrooms
and this neat light up globe.And last but not least, on my walk home I found another pug. Overall, a pretty Rad Day.


Next time on Unterwegs: Hamburg!

P.S.: This is ridiculous:

Postcard Policy Announcement

Hello everyone! I have a few very odd photos and a very important announcement for you all. First, because it is important, the announcement:

As you may recall from my first post, my original postcard policy was "I'll send you one if you send me one," with a special exception for grandmothers. This policy has proven to be both pretty presumptuous, as I have yet to get a thing from any of you beautiful people, and unrealisitc in light of my own fondness for purchasing, writing, and mailing postcards.

So, the new postcard policy is as follows: send me your address and I will send you a postcard. You can email me your address, leave it in the comments, shout it to the east wind, whatever. I would still really like to get physical news from and about you special individuals, of course--also updates on such American topics as baseball and black beans and wasting water--but I suppose as I am the one on an adventure in the interesting tourist destination I can bear the majority of the postcard burden.

Speaking of adventures: I have next week off, so I am taking a trip to Hamburg between Monday and Wednesday! I bought my train tickets and made my hostel reservation today--a bit less than 200 Euros all told, so not bad for such short notice. I still need to do some research, but as I understand it, Hamburg is a working-class harbor town. While not as vast as Berlin, it's still a major city with it's own incredibly rich history and local culture, and it ought to be a little more down-to-earth and thoroughly German than the Hauptstadt. I am looking forward to water, and the Star Club, and cheap beer in harbor bars.

On to the Photos:

I seem to take a lot of pictures of advertisements, but that's only because they are so crazy. This one is for some kind of orange-n-chili-flavored energy sausage. The text reads "Tired? Eat sausage!"

Burger King is stupid popular here. It is kind of upscale, which is bizarre--same crappy food, but relatively much more expensive. I suppose they are just capitalizing on the popularity of the American brand. These Mountain Burgers are definitely very American. After many debates in many train stations I still think I would go with the Rocky Cheese: despite it's tooth-chipping name, it is the only one of the trio that features an entire patty of fried cheese.
Lotsa cranes at sunset. I swear sometimes it seems like as soon as they finish a building they start taking it apart again.

The Grande Finale: I was out walking with my buddy Nate the other day when we happened upon this art gallery that featured all kinds of porcelain pugs.So great.

Taking Pictures So You Don't Have To

I am producing more photos than prose these days, so this will be kind of a bare bones update with lots of pretty pictures.

I’m in the final week of my intensive German instruction course. I’ve done this many times before—filled out all of the worksheets and taken all of the notes, read about the Wall and the Wende and the Widervereinigung—but I am still thankful for the review. Classes start in two weeks and Professor Doctor Lutz Danneberg is going to want to talk about Kafka, not the correct construction of a passive conjunctive II past tense sentence.

ITEM: there are a lot of sweet posters up all over this city. They seem to just appear magically, as if they are applied by invisible leprechauns very early in the morning, or like they are a natural protective dermis grown by construction barriers and sidewalk transformers (I’m hearing David Attenborough saying, with great reverence, “As stop motion photography reveals, the old posters gradually give way to the elements, allowing the new, freshly-grown advertisements to emerge from underneath”). Only once so far have I actually caught a posterman in the act:Also his neat modified post-up bike:
Here are three posters for upcoming shows. I want to see the first two, and the third dude shares my middle and last names and has got the hair and the nose and the mustache and the yellow slacks that I can only someday dream of achieving.(Yes, Peaches Christ Superstar is Peaches singing all of Jesus Christ Superstar. Yes, I'm seeing it on Thursday. Yes, that is great.)ITEM: American influence in Berlin: On the plus side there are these awesome jars of Hot Dog Sauce and Hamburger Sauce,And on the downside there is this crappy merchandise for the stupid Yankees, who stink, and who are somehow the only stupid MLB team with it’s stupid merchandise in this dumb store.

ITEM: heh heh hehITEM: I went to the opera. The show was Carmen, so it was cool to be able to recognize some of the main themes. Still, though: looooooooooooooong time to sit and listen to Germans dressed as Spaniards sing in French.

Look at all those attentive krauts down in the classy season ticket area:The building was sort of astounding. Very old, very geometric and efficient, with that strange sense of time travel I associate with well-maintained dirt-old structures. None of my pictures really turned out, except for this one of the magnificent primary chandelier: See, that is the kind of thing that the word “magnificent” was made for.

ITEM: photos that didn’t’ fit anywhere else:

I call this one, The Tower And The Moon (And The Clouds At Night):

And finally, this one is Duck-Duck, The Duck In My Elevator Who Loves Smoking Cigarettes But Can't: