Lost In The Library/Pre-Dresden Photodump Mk. II

I am sitting in the massive central silence vault of the Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm Zentrum, that is the large university library in the middle of Berlin, and cursing the confusing and narrowly-bounded wireless internet system. Oh, terrific, I can only use the clunky, useless HU intranet—that’s fine, I didn’t really want to connect to the rest of the world anyways. I mean that is obviously not what the internet is FOR OR ANYTHING.

Time for a deeeeeeeeep breeeeeeath. Woof. I have enough in the way of blank postcards and swirling ideas to keep me busy even without instant access to mankind’s combined electronic knowledge. I guess I had planned to upload my extensive collection of photographs of Dresden, but as I seem to have forgotten my camera cable that particular point is moot.

What I didn’t forget is my camera. Look at where I am:Cool, huh? As I mentioned am Anfang (at the beginning) this is the large and dead quiet central study chamber here at Humboldt’s main library. It is beautiful but also kind of unsettling in its silent, empty transparency, if that makes any sense. This place was designed to keep you quiet and staring straight ahead, and the weird pressure to conform makes me uncomfortable, even as it sharpens my concentration. I am probably just being neurotic, but I feel very observed right now: every one of those little gaps in the wall is a window into the stacks, from which countless book-creeps are not doubt peeking at me over the tops of upside-down encyclopedias; and this whole tiered catacomb of knowledge is one big room, so if I drop my pen, every one of the other 279* people in here will know it, and they’ll probably talk about their friends with it later and then laugh at me in the cafeteria.

*According to some easy calculations—this place is v geometrical—there ought to be 280 total workspaces.

My goodness, look at all of those negative thoughts; I should take a Pause.The Grimm Zentrum has this neat system of Pause (a break or pause, pronounced POW-za) cards. When you have had enough of the biblio-panopticon and need to go get a cup of coffee or cry on the toilet for a while, you just set this little card to the current time and prop it up on your workspace. Provided you return within an hour, you can reclaim your spot and get back to your differential equations or Kafka or photo-blog or whatever. I’m not sure if such a system could function among the cutthroat capitalists of Northwestern University, but I’m sure it does gangbusters here—the German sees some numbers, and a list of rules on the back, and he is suddenly at home, and he nestles into the bureaucracy like a cat falling asleep in a basket of warm laundry.

Alright, that ended up being sort of negative as well. Let’s think positive! What’s nice about this place? It’s clean, well-ventilated, neither cold nor hot; the walls are a pleasant shade of burnished wood, with little holes to soak up sound; and the place gets a tremendous amount of natural light. Heck, I can see clear through the building, from men in white working on a scaffold to the south to a crane lifting great big sheets of steel to the north, and up above I can see light grey skies with flecks of blue:See? It’s not all bad! I should try to see this as a community thing, as like a common, open, public space for individual concentration. The worst part—all these other people and their needs—is also the best part, because I have motivation to be quiet and mindful, and I get to be alone without being lonely. Also it is not like I am forced to be here—if I want to try to blog on some noisy street corner, no one is going to stop me.
You know what? This Dresden post has yet to write itself, and I STILL have a small backlog of pre-Dresden photos, so I think I will get those out on the internet where they belong and buy myself a little more time.

Story 1: I’ve been wanting to do yoga in Berlin since I arrived, but cultural uncertainties, a lack of a yoga buddy to inspire me, and a generally extremely busy schedule have conspired to keep inner peace just beyond my grasp. Also I am lazy and dislike change. Anyways: I picked up a couple of pamphlets last week, figured out the location and schedule of the Raum für Yoga, carved out some time in my Wednesday afternoon, and actually got to the place at the time. I was feeling pretty proud of myself and ready to breath very deeply for an hour and a half. BUT, as a very relaxed man in orange sweatpants informed me when I walked into the hot and empty foyer, the schedule on my pamphlet was out of date, and class had already been underway for a half hour. So I didn’t get to do yoga. But I did get to disturb some mid-meditation Germans, which is always fun, and this handrail in the building was super neat:
I had been holding off on dinner—all of the yoga studios in Berlin seem to share a very insistent “No Food For Two Hours Before Yoga” rule that I’ve never encountered in the States—so I ate a big feel-better plate of rice, beans, chicken, mushrooms, and I think eggplant at a little Mediterranean place before rolling home. My route took me through the charming Bezirk of Prenzlauerberg, and as I suddenly had an extra couple of hours, I took the time to photograph some things.

This mural is super cool but I had a terrible angle and the lighting was not the best. Worth revisiting on a sunnier day with more time on my hands.

This has got to be a travel agency—“reisen” means travel or trip, and that’s a map in the left window—which makes the name at least mildly hilarious. Really? "Titanic Travel"? They could not come up with a synonym for “big” with fewer connotations of colossal failure and death, especially with regards to travel? You might as well open up Hindenburg Blimp Service, or 9/11 Airlines.

This faded, crumbling hotdog-man is pretty horrifying:His arms have fallen off and his fiberglass filling is leaking out the bottom, but he still looks so hungry, and his ketchup and mustard eyebrows have a real predatory tilt to them. I think he devoured his own forearms, and the extra stuffing has caused his casing has burst, but all he can think of is his next meal.

This bar is called ACE OF SPADES:
But it does not have the same heavy metal cache auf Deutsch.

Then I came home and did some other stuff that I guess wasn’t worth photographing. Next story!

Story 2: I ate lunch at the good Mensa and finally discovered where they’d hidden the bathroom—down a flight of very well-labeled steps in the middle of the lobby. Twas your typical clean German bathroom, unremarkable except for this awesome hand drier:It is called AIRBLADE and it actually works really well. When you insert your hands as directed:A thin sheet of very fast moving air—I guess it is kind of like a BLADE of AIR—fills the gap in the cylinder and kind of scrapes the water off your hands. It feels cool and takes about two seconds. Killer.

Then I headed to Dussman, the huge bookstore where I had tried and failed twice already to obtain my French textbook. This time I was successful. On Y Va! A1, you are MINE. I also photographed this row of German Star Wars novels,And this awesome sphinx. At first I thought it was a replica, of course, but this label implies, to me at least, that this is an actual ancient Egyptian artifact, on loan from the state collection. I guess Dussman pulls a lot of water in Berlin.

Also, I saw this book called Rap Rhythm & Rhyme in the window and thought to myself, "Look at those silly white kids pretending they have rhythm. Nothing could be sillier than that."Then I looked slightly to the left and saw another book, also by Richard Filz, with a picture of him on the cover:I wonder how many times he had to hit himself in the face before they got the one on the left.

The rest:
1. One day I ate this hilarious breakfast.
2. My friend Alex invited Johanna and me to dinner at her homestay, a lovely penthouse apartment on Karl Marx Allee. I liked this thing, whatever it is:MIRACLE FISH. Such hope.

I’ll try to get crackin’ on Dresden tonight. I really did go to Dresden, trust me.

In the meantime, look at this crazily articulated yellow crane, which has 5, count ‘em, 5 hydraulic joints:Crazy!