Berlin Stories Vo. 2

As you may recall from my last post, I forgot to bring my camera along for what turned out to be a very photogenic Saturday afternoon walk. In a misguided and hopeless attempt to recapture all of those lost moments, I resolved to take my camera on my Sunday run and try to get some shots of the neat things I saw the day before. Well, let met tell you: just like every prideful madman who interferes with the natural cycle of creation and destruction, who denies death and plays God in an attempt bring a loved one back from oblivion,* I paid for my hubris in ways too terrible to imagine.

*(I think my top examples here are Rotwang from Metropolis and Mr. Freeze as portrayed by current California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1997’s Batman & Robin)

yeah i know my finger is in the picture that doesn't make it not great

Not really! I got pictures of many of the things I wanted to get pictures of, and generally just had a grand old time of it on a beautiful spring day.

See? I told you there were flowering trees in blossom. These white individuals seemed to be at the peak of their flowery glory. The bicycle woman was getting some close up shots.

This pink number was a little past its prime already—the darker, orange-brown spots are wilted blossoms—but it smelled so terrific I just had to take a picture. I was probably 20 feet back to take this photo and I was still within its frangrance-sphere. The scent was sort of like lilacs, but fruitier.

ITEM: the Germans love physical fitness. I’ve already relayed two stories on this blog about receiving encouragement from random strangers while out jogging. (One old man gave me a thumbs up on the street, and another dude gave me a honk/thumbs up as I jumping-jacked at a crosswalk.) I was jog-exploring around my massive residential complex when I found these little workout devices, and they just looked so new and clean and hale and hearty in the afternoon sun that I had to take some photos:

I did some leg-ups on the green one.

The huge traffic-circle fountain was still in action:I took several pictures of this thing, but none of them really capture its largeness. I wished I had enough time to wait for somebody to stand next to it for scale, but I had to keep the old heart rate up.

This is an awesome car. It is like a sporty, Italian AMC Eagle in midnight blue:
Also a beloved car—this thing was polished to a mirror shine. The owner probably rubs it with a diaper every morning and only takes it around the block on national holidays:I felt it warranted a third photo, mostly because it is so pretty, but also for two nice details visible only from the back. First, it is an Alea Romeo, which seems totally appropriate, and second, the gleaming chrome tailpipe points demurely towards the ground, rather than straight back. V classy.

Trucks with big blank sides are vandalized pretty much instantly in Berlin, so some owners of big blank trucks try to discourage taggers, and I guess gain some “street cred,” by hiring some reformed street punk to decorate their vehicles with gentle, business-friendly designs. This trailer belongs to Jan Drum and Sons, a Dutch fish-seller. Hence the fish.
The obvious star is the grim big daddy fish here. I assume this is the fish version of Jan Drum, and the little fish following in his wake is one of the Sons. Jan-fish, with his broad scowl, imperious glare, bulbous stubbly chin, and weird fish pompadour, comes across as kind of a jerk, but maybe that’s just what Jan wanted in a fish-portrait.

I liked this hybrid church. They kept the cool old stonework exterior and tower while adding on what I’ll wager was a very necessary expansion, and probably revamping the interior too. I want to go inside but I am not sure of the procedure for doing so.
I thought this thing was modern when I first saw it, but that was before I noticed the solar array out front:I think I can now declare it to be Future Church, Church of the Future.

One of a series of really intense ads for a volunteering campaign. This one reads, “Your Sweat for Berlin.”They all follow the “Your [bodily fluid] for Berlin” pattern. So far I have seen Blut, Schweiss, and Tränen (blood, sweat, and tears). I don’t know how much farther they can take it without getting very gross. Your Mucous for Berlin, Your Lymph for Berlin…

The concept for this mural is fairly cheesy (“Nuclear Family” hahahhahah), but I think it is pretty well done. There’s actually an entire second half that you can sort of detect behind that dumb tree with its fancy new leaves. Spring: not worth the trouble.

The Volkspark was once again idyllic and Elysian. It had been beautiful the day before (that strange Saturday) when I’d seen it in a sort of golden pre-twilight; but I think the park looks its best in full mid-morning sunlight. The older Germans sat by the lake (more of a reflecting pool, really—it is about 5 inches deep) and watched the ducks and willows,While the younger Germans stretched out on towels and sunbathed shirtless. Germany seems to have a strong “lying around” culture. I think it is related to the fairly strict cultural divide between work and recreation—leisure time is for leisure, leave work at work. I can support that in principle, and it would probably be good for me to practice, but as a naturally anxious person I’m sort of put off by this whole “relaxing” concept.

I understand that my pictures of fountains are fairly popular with my target demographic of “my grandmothers,” so I would be very remiss not to include a few photos of possibly the most celebrated fountain in Volkspark Friedrichshain, the huge and elalborate Märchenbrunnen (fairy-tale fountain).Like the soviet memorial in Treptower Park, the Märchenbrunnen is so big as to be hard to photograph. I would need like a satellite photo or a sketch artist in a helicopter to capture the scale of the thing. The fountain proper is like a long pool in several tiers on a slight incline, and the water flows down the steps and past all kinds of founts and statues. The big classical-looking colonnade runs behind the upper end of the fountain, and beyond it there is an entire ancillary garden complex with more statues and an additional, smaller fountain that is not yet in operation.

See that tortoise on the lower right of the picture above? He is worth a closer look:Aw yeah, that’s right, he is a funky old man tortoise. The little bee on his shell was kind of agitated but I decided this photo was worth risking a sting.

These glum frog-dudes are pretty sweet. They should be even sweeter, because they should be spitting water in big arcs, but almost all of them barely have a little dribble running down their chins. I guess the master fountainmaker must have had his bumbling apprentice set up their piping.

I guess all of these statues depict characters/scenes from fairy tales, but I didn’t recognize any of them. For example, I have no clue on this girl with what appears to be an armor-plated tom turkey:I guess these are probably from the really horrific original Grimm versions, where everybody gets cut apart and eaten by worms instead of living happily ever after. The turkey/girl story probably goes something like this: a the girl’s little brother is transformed into a turkey by a witch, and then she brings her turkey-brother home and her parents kill and cook and eat him, and then they all choke on turkey bones and their house burns down. The End! Moral: do not eat your siblings/children.

I could take photos of this fountain all day, but as my heart rate was dropping (recall: I am still on a run) I had to move on. I stopped once more on the way home to photograph these cool little parking spot guards:I guess every resident gets a key for the guard on their spot. You stand it up when you leave to block out intruders, and when you come home you just hop out of the car and lay it down flat again so you can park. I see these all over so they must be pretty effective. Has anybody seen a similar system in the States? Or do we just build elaborate parking garages instead? I don’t know how well the whole “physically get out of your car and kneel down and mess around with this piece of steel” process would go over in America; we are more of a “stay in the car and let machines do the work” people.

So: came home, showered, probably took a nap (it’s been a few days, okay?). Once that was over with the sun was still out and it was still Sunday, so I decided to go exploring. Quickly, the to bicycle!

I rode east of the Alexanderplatz, along the river, into the fabulous Bezirk of Friedrichshain. Due to poor planning I had run low on food on a Sunday, when every supermarket is closed, so I had a pretty righteous hunger going on for the first part of this trip. I checked Alexa, the massive American-style mall on Alex (you can see the sign on the right in the photo below), hoping to find something cheap to eat, but everything that wasn’t closed was mad expensive and jammed with tourists. So I rolled hungrily on down the riverbank, stopping to photograph this awesome Little Nemo mural:
Three overpriced restaurants later, I finally found a little stand with cheap food, good beer, and seating by the water. The bread was of the super-lame hyper-processed variety that many Germans call “toast,” and the sausages were so-so, but that was one tasty Hefeweisen, and I paid about 5 euro for the whole spread.

There was a little stretch of sand installed in the sidewalk for all the people who wanted that real beach feel, where your socks fill up with grit and your chair sinks a little bit when you sit down. The point is: these little birds were taking sand-baths. It was pretty cute.

I crossed the river at the Jannovitzbrücke. Look at this funky building on the other side:
At first I thought it was part of the Chinese embassy complex, but upon further consideration of those smokestacks I decided it was some kind of factory.

Actually, Friedrichshain ended up having quite a bit of industrial development. I’m always a little thrown by inner-city factories—space in a city just feels so valuable—but I suppose they kind of have territory to burn here in Berlin, and the riverside locations (now that I think of it all the facilities I found were on the river) must make it easy to bring in raw materials and ship out finished products via boat.

Speaking of factories, what’s that over there?Why it is the Vattenfall Heizkraftwerk (“combined heat and power station,” whatever that means) Mitte, of course!This was like the cleanest-looking factory I have ever seen. Fine landscaping, too.

The problem with these functional factories that are actually producing stuff is that they tend to be well-fenced, heavily observed, and generally not very explorer-friendly. To really muck around in some industrial guts, I was gonna need some sort of abandoned factory. Now, where could I possible find such a place…

Oh yeah, right across the street:
I locked my bike to a street sign and headed toward the busted-down gate. Along the way a disappointed, dressed-up young Italian man (he may have actually been dressed-down—these young Berlin Italian hipsters exist on a whole different plane of fashion) started to tell me something in rapid, incomprehensible German, in the sort of flowing and melodious but totally unintelligible rhythm of many Italian German-speakers I have met. I asked him to repeat himself more slowly but he switched to English instead (Europeans love to show off their English) and informed me that the illegal underground Sunday afternoon factory ruin techno dance party had been cancelled. I said I was sorry and asked what the place was called, and he told me its name was Schwarzer Kanal (black canal) before heading back across the bridge to rejoin his Italian clubbing buddies and begin the search for a different underground dance party. I don’t think they had to go to far—there was some thumping techno coming from one of these riverside windows:

But I was here to explore, not dance, so I clambered into the complex and took a look around. I went down by the river to photograph this funny thing:And noticed a path between some trees, which I followed into a quiet little corner that featured a whole mess of these purple flowers:And this weirdly elaborate homemade fence reinforcement system. I have no idea who is trying to keep whom out, but despite the very creative use of bike locks and scrap iron, this thing was still easy to climb around. I did it just to prove I could, then picked up Bikey and walked right back in through the wide open, doorless gate. These Germans and their walls, man. More on that later.

I liked the look of the main facility in the afternoon sun:
Look, rowdy teens! What do you suppose they were doing in there? Working on a school report about homelessness? Feeding orphans? Learning about their families? I wasn’t really dressed for climbing—light cotton pants instead of jeans, smooth-soled sneakers instead of hiking boots, no fingerless gloves to speak of—so I left the interior for a later date.

I like the frowny-face tree stumps.The stumps themselves are pretty mysterious. Who would have cut down these three trees in the middle of this abandoned complex? My theory is a hobo with a chainsaw, scrounging firewood.

This place just kept on going—around the next corner I found a beat-up parking lot with some cool graffiti, including this happenin’ bowtie frog:And this hilarious BACKSTREET BOYS! tag. I hope some youth gang who had never heard of the band decided that name sounded super-hard, or like a 16-year-old girl decided to try her hand at tagging and wrote what was most important to her: BACKSTREET BOYS, double underline.

Also I guess the building on the left is a stable? Like for horses?I never actually saw the interior, but that is a horse trailer, and it is full of horses (two, to be exact), and I do not know why you would bring your horses back to this busted-up lot if not to stable them.

I looked for a way out but kept running into more walls.This thing may look pretty cobbled together, and it does appear to be reinforced with scrap wood, but it was high, sturdy and effective. I wished I had a crowbar and a few hours of private dismantlin’ time.

I eventually found an alternate exit, past a lot full of broken cars awaiting repair or the scrap heap. This little green number looked in especially dire straits:The horses drove past me while I was photographing junkers. See? Horses.

Look it is a pug! This is an ad for a print shop, and I think there is a little bit of wordplay going on here. “Drücken” is German for “to print,” but more generally it means “to press,” and these lazy dogs—whose images have been so sharply printed—are looking sort of pressed-down upon, right? Right? German wordplay, everybody.

Down the street I found yet ANOTHER makeshift barrier:Which surrounded another sort of squatters art-colony thing. I walked in and was about to photograph this huge hanging sculpture of the Statue of Liberty’s head when a sickly-looking pissant with a goatee let me know, very rudely, that photos were prohibited. I could have gotten into a big argument with the dude but instead I decided to wage peace and let him stew on his stoop.

Here is the menacing, aggressive no-photo policy sign, which concludes with a thinly veiled threat of physical violence and an angry-eyebrows smiley face:Before I left I photographed the gate of this place, which is apparently called Kopi:I had barely taken this photograph when a bum with a beer started stumbling across the street and shouting at me. He said “HEY” and “GO AWAY” and “F*** YOU” (he did not use asterisks), which probably exhausted his English vocabulary. I once again turned the other cheek and rode away on my bike. Brother-man is probably a mentally-ill alcoholic who will be sleeping under a tarp in Kopi tonight; he doesn’t need any abuse from a well-off college kid.

That crappy experience triggered a couple of thoughts on artist colonies in Berlin:

So far I have found three of these squatter communities around the city: Schwarzer Kanal and Kopi, pictured above, and Tacheles, an awesome facility in Mitte. They’re all located in cool old abandoned buildings, covered in art and full of artists, and as they are all illegal and illegitimate and subject to destruction whenever some official body gets around to it, they share a common priority: surviving. This is generally expressed with the verb “bleiben,” to remain or stay, as in “Schwarzer Kanal bliebt!”So: they share a common goal, but they seem to have very different attitudes towards the concept of survival. At the one extreme we have Kopi, where a siege mentality seems to have taken root: no photographs, no tourists, let’s build walls and stay behind them. To me this seems like a recipe for destruction—nobody is gonna care much about a bunch of obnoxious, aggressive old drunks getting kicked out of their trash-fortress.
On the other end of the spectrum we find Tacheles, which is extremely open and constantly full of visitors. People are encouraged to take photographs and ask questions. Tacheles has hit a nice balance where it still feels edgy and interesting and experimental while maintaining a generally welcoming vibe, and as a result it is a major destination and a thriving community. Any attempt to tear it down would trigger all kinds of public outcry about demolishing culture—I think some bank has been trying to knock it over for a couple years, but they haven’t succeeded. Tacheles doesn’t have any walls, and that is what makes it so secure.

Morals of the story: if you want to remain you have to change, hooray for the free market, screw those jerks at Kopi.

I had to get home in time for my weekly video skype with the parentals (with a Grandma Mona bonus this week), so I only took a couple more photos on the way home. First, I like this:Roughly, “The border/barrier doesn’t run between above and below, but between you and me.”

Finally, I was amused by this ice cream advertisement. The Enigma looks like some sort of experimental ice cream prototype:I giggled at “Magnum: World’s Pleasure Authority” because I am 10 years old:And the Magnum Gold is apparently so outrageously delicious that one can only say its name with both a question mark and an exclamation point after it:

Yet another situation just screaming for an interrobang

“Magnum Gold?! Are you insane?!”

Then I finally got home. I have more photographs from a separate Monday adventure, but this thing is so long already that I think I will just make a separate Monday post and post it later.

Oof. Blogging once again ate up the better part of a Friday morning, but hey: you’re worth it. Now: beans on toast, swimming pool, and homework!

My train for Dresden leaves tomorrow at 8:15! I promise to photograph the whole thing for you.