It's A (Cloudy And Drizzly But Still Fairly) Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood

Finally updating, oh my Lord, choirs of angels heralding my return, etc. Sorry it took/is continuing to take so long, I am a naturally busy person.

Cologne was fun, like very exhausting and full of that wonderful human interaction stuff. I took an unforgivable number of pictures, and the eventual Cologne post will surely be a doozy. However, before I can tell you about that, I need to tell you about this:

Yesterday I was on the train back to Berlin, and I got to thinking about the last train I took back to Berlin, an ICE (Inter-City Express, I think) from Dresden on April 25th. It was supposed to be the comfy train back home, like the relaxed, refueled, easygoing post-vacation return to comfort and routine; but instead of feeling entspannt (relaxed, literally “un-tense”) I was extremely stressed out at the prospect of coming back to Berlin, thanks almost entirely to my awful living situation. I thought, “Oh no! I have to go home! This is terrible!” That was the point when I realized I had to move.

So then I moved! (Remember?!)

And just yesterday I was aboard another ICE back to Berlin, like floating along at 250 kilometers per hour (i.e. 155.34 mph, i.e. watch this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOLAUD0Ef84), and it occurred to me that I was finally having a proper homecoming experience. There was a minor haze of show’s-over melancholy, of course, a little sadness at leaving Köln, but generally I felt tired and dirty and—here comes the important part—ready to be back home. I thought, “Oh good! I get to go home now! Excellent!” That was the point when I realized I’m living in the right place.

Aaaaand that is why you all are just going to have to wait a spell to hear about this particular (amazing) trip—my new neighborhood is wonderful, and merits a post all its own!

These photos were taken on a jog about town. While limited in scope and park-heavy, they cover a heckuva lot of the best Prenzlauer Berg spots I’ve found so far.

Hey, it is my new front door!

There is no 12B.

If I may flatter my new Wohnung (apartment) for a moment, I must say this door looks pretty thoroughly urban to me: secure, unassuming, right up against the bustle of the street. I find this city-door fits my neighborhood, as Prenzlauer Berg is definitely the most legitimately urban place I’ve ever lived. It’s densely residential—the streets are lined with buildings, most six to ten stories tall and chock-full of Germans and Brits and their little children—but not in the industrialized, straightedge, planned-economy-housing-block-with-geometrically-distributed-playgrounds-and-grocery-stores way my old densely residential neighborhood was.

For example, Prenzlauer Berg has like shops and bars and restaurants all over the place; heck, I have three, count ‘em, three top-notch Spätkaufs* within a block of my front door. Despite the density, this place is marvelously green for an inner-city locale, with most streets lined with trees and a handful of really fine parks scattered around. There are fewer tourists and more genuine Berliners here, along with, for whatever reason, a large number of British people. All these limeys add an odd but generally pleasing twist to the culture—I hear English-accented English (and German) on a regular basis, and my favorite local coffee shop is a Brit establishment. In my mind the city is always bound up with public transportation, and my current apartment is within spitting distance of two huge transit centers—Schönhauser Allee and Gesundbrunnen. Most any time of day or night I can get anywhere and back home in no-time flat, and as you will see in the pictures to come, the whole landscape around here is defined by a massive railway intersection.

*Have I told you what a Spätkauf (literally “late buy”) is yet? They’re pretty important, so I’d better clarify again: a Spätkauf is a small-to-midsized convenience store that is open late, usually all night. Some are sketchy dirty holes in the wall, others are magnificent temples to unnecessary late-night consumption (Como kids, think of the double-decker EZ-Stop by the freeway), but all share a common primary function: selling cheap beer all the time. I’m talking a good beer for 1.50 or so, and a cruddy beer (and in Berlin even the cruddy beers are fairly delicious) for as little as 45 euro-cents. Outside of supermarkets—which hold goofy hours and are universally closed on Sundays—you cannot get a cheaper beer in Berlin. Last night, restless and beerless at around 11:20, I decided I wanted one more beer to cap off the night. In most every other place I’ve lived, my beer-free fridge would have been the end of this beer story; but here in beautiful Prenzlauer Berg, I simply pulled on some shoes and a jacket, grabbed a handful of coins from my Wechselgeldtüte (change bag), walked about 50 meters to the nearest Spätkauf, and picked up large beer with a lion on it for 60 cents. Makes a man feel like a city-dweller.

Right, so, in conclusion, I like where I live now. Let’s go to the film.

Check out the paintjob on this comic shop:The sign reads “Comic & Novel ‘Meeting Place’, Buy Sell Swap,” and the huge deep blue mural over the walls and shutters depicts some kind of futuristic cityscape with skyscrapers at jaunty angles and awesome graffiti lightning. The residents are bald, with mysterious light-bulb apparatus attached to their huge round heads. This guy probably looked a lot friendlier before some enterprising young artist added in those oozing red pupils: So yes, judging solely by external appearance this looks like a fairly splendid shop, and no, I do not have a good excuse for why I have not checked it out yet. I’m busy, alright? I can waste money on comics merchandise next week.

The Treffpunkt lies a half-block south of my new apartment, and just beyond it lies the massive Mauerpark. It is not in fact named after Joe Mauer, but rather after the Berlin wall (die Mauer). The wall ran straight through the park and a little section of it is still standing beneath a very thick layer of spraypaint. Although Mauerpark looks like a big green open meadow on the map, it is really not much of a park. Rather, it is largely a collection of huge outdoor facilities, including three soccer pitches, two stadiums, a concert venue, and a flea market. Check out the map:
It’s still a pretty cool place. Just a little too developed to provide the absolutely peaceful, Elysian release that we concrete jungle-dwellers need after a long day of bankrupting small businesses and evicting orphans, you know?

Fortunately for the glass-and-steel weary, Mauerpark contains a little sub-park called Falkplatz with like grass and trees and quiet shrub-lined paths. There’s also a nice big Liegewiese (“lying [it is lying, not laying, right?] meadow”, i.e. a stretch of grass that it is okay to stretch out on), visible here behind a couple of spitting walruses:I had never seen this thing actually spouting water before, so I was a little surprised to see it founting these piddling little streams of water when I stopped to photograph it. I think liked it better as just an awesome walrus statue. The current water dispersal system is just not up to the majesty of these goofy, bronze, anatomically incorrect beasts—these guys should be up on a pedestal with a bunch of angels spitting on them and like classical figures emptying amphoras into the basin and crying for joy.

Always nice to see grass overtaking some pavement. I’m really “rooting” for the plants in this one. (Puns are good for you.)

These pink flower petals were pretty nice up in the trees, but I really dug on the post-rainstorm natural pink carpet effect.
Look, genuine purple lilacs! These smelled great and reminded me of home.

Now the Falkplatz is nice and all, but it is a bit small for my taste. A fella needs some room to run, some hills to climb, some pretty crap to photograph and put on my blog—say, where do you suppose that cool overgrown drainage system leads?Why it leads to this little stepping stone pond and these sizey solar flower things, of course! It’s a neat concept, but the solar panels look ancient and broken. I first found this place before there was water in the pool, on an even drearier day than the one pictured here, and the whole set-up was just downright depressing. Seems to me this thing deserves some of that fat park cash they sling around here in Berlin, and—say, what do you suppose that black rectangular tunnel-type object on the left is?

It is a fairly neat (but also quite dark and hence unphotographable) tunnel under the train tracks! This is a major northern artery of the S- and U-Bahn (elevated rail and subway, respectively, although the S-Bahn often runs underground and the U-Bahn is sometimes elevated) systems that, about a half-click north of this spot, runs into the Ring, a heavily-traveled, 24-hour loop around central Berlin. In general this city does an excellent job of maintaining unrestricted foot, bike, and auto traffic around its unbelievably extensive public transit system, but this intersection is just so darn huge that a serious stretch of land has been converted into a massive railyard a few stories below street level, passable only via tunnels and bridges at select intersections. Is this inconvenient? Yes. Does it mean there are awesome bridges all over the place?Double-yes.

I really like the railyard. It’s a clean, green, relatively peaceful place, and it reminds me of the tracks through good old Brainerd, Minnesota. This one is a heck of a lot bigger, of course, and more layered. I took this otherwise unremarkable photo to demonstrate the three separate levels of rail traffic near Gesundbrunnen—trains run through those tunnels in the foreground, on the tracks atop the tunnels, and across the light-brown background bridge over the tracks atop the tunnels. I guess I could have waited for that perfect moment when all three levels were occupied, or even just for a single train, but I had to keep up my heart rate, you know?

This big impassable trench full of silly pinko trains makes getting around on foot a bit less intuitive, but as a lover of shortcuts and secret paths my complex neighborhood suits me just fine. I get to feel super sneaky and in the know, and finding a new route feels like a real accomplishment.
So: If you cross the right bridges and evade all the tunnel trolls and whisper the secret password into the correct knothole, you may eventually find your way to Prenzlauer Berg’s real natural oasis, the biggest and the best, your park and mine: Volkspark Humboldthain.I’m sorry to dislodge my beloved old Volkspark Friedrichshain, but I think I may have a new favorite park in Berlin. Humboldthain is huge and old and full of tall trees. Take it from me: just walk right in, and about 100 meters from the street you will feel serene and peaceful, snugly embraced to nature’s bosom, even though you’re smack dab in the middle of a bustling neighborhood. Being a Berlin city park it is of course obscenely clean and well-maintained, and it strikes a really fine balance between cultivation and wilderness that would take an awful long time to explore fully. This post is more about introductions and highlights, like this audacious flowering tree:And this as-of-yet-roseless rose garden: I walked here again with my friend Lucy on Sunday, and we discovered that every little hedged-in plot had a little sign that indicated the variety of rose that would eventually blossom there. The only types I can remember now are “Schöne Berlinerin” (pretty Berlin girl) and “Las Vegas” (Uh, Las Vegas, Nevada, I guess). If only there were some way I could show you how extensive and thoroughly geometrical this whole construct is, some sort of an elevated vantage point—heck, why not this one?See? Box after neatly-trimmed box of future roses. Oughta be downright beautiful come high summer.

Oh, and my elevated position was on one of the many paths winding up the huge hill on the edge of the park. It takes a fairly serious climb to conquer:

I’m always impressed by the mothers (and fathers) who push triple-wide strollers all the way to the top.

But the summit features a very awesome payoff:
The first time I came across this big friggin’ castle thing, it was a complete surprise. I was very impressed and totally flabbergasted as to why they’d built such a massive thing—I had been expecting like a flat spot with some low stone walls, and maybe a bench or two. Then I noticed a sign (not pictured) reading FLAKTURM (flak tower), which leads me to believe that this was an anti-aircraft position during the Second World War, and deepens my astonishment that it still exists. In any case: it is cool and symmetrical, mountaineering-types can often be seen climbing up and rappelling down its 20 meter face, and it offers one heck of a view on the surrounding area:
Two other points of interest from the roof of Berlin:

1. This mysterious door into the structure, which I suppose reaches down through the hill as well. The sign reads Welcome to the Berlin Underworld, and I noticed a cardboard box full of cheap hardhats inside the door before this vested official locked it up, so I assume this is some sort of underground museum-type thing where you pay 10 euros to walk around in the dark for an hour. I don’t know if it can top the Magnetic Mineshaft. (All kinds of Brainerd references today.)

2. The faded word on this step is CHECHNYA: I wonder what motivated its creation. Perhaps a band of Chechen nationalists, eager to assert their independence from Russia, decided the perfect way to sway public opinion was to write CHECHNYA in block caps on this step in Berlin. Putin must be shaking in his boots.

I ran back down the hill—running downhill is tough on the old knees, but it beats falling—and across this neat red footbridge:
Finally, here’s a shot of the Flakturm from below:I am glad I do not have to storm that particular castle.

UGH. THERE. This post was super easy to write and didn’t two weeks or anything, and I am not already behind on and forgetting everything about Köln, no sir, no siree Bob.

I am stressed and busy but blogging is good for me. The bread is so good here that my really decadent desert is a toasted slice of Sonnenblumenbröt (sunflower seed bread) with butter and strawberry Marmalade (basically really delicious jam/preserves) on top. I will fill you all in on my vacation and correspondence (including the Joe Mauer Postcard Contest) relatively soon.