4th Of July/Aus Der Traum/Some Days You Feel Like A Blog, Some Days You Don't

[this opener is a week old and full of lies. enjoy!]

No, your eyes do not deceive you (probably), nor has a hacker taken control of my blog to bring you his own twisted take on my wholesome Berlin existence (as far as you know): I am in fact back in the blogging saddle for what I suppose is the fifth time this week. We owe this miracle partially to guilt, and I suppose a smattering of love and respect for my oh-so-concerned audience didn’t hurt, but the main reason I’m going through the ardurous camera→computer→internetting digital photograph procedure (not to mention the equally bothersome memory→reflection→writing process) is because I’m headed to Austria on the 8th of July. If my very limited intra-Germany travel experience has taught me anything, it is to clean out your camera (figuratively speaking) before taking a trip to a famously beautiful place, like, say, for example, THE ALPS. Aaaand tomorrow’s blogging time will be limited at best, as I have my last two finals (Deutsch, then French, in quick succession) to take, and my last translation class to attend (I will give Michael Davies an earnest handshake), and a certain very important soccer game to watch. So here I am, doing what I can to crack out one more block of words and pictures before a refreshing extra-Deutschland jaunt.

Aaaand here I am a half hour short of my destination, which I ought to reach about an hour after my projected arrival time thanks to this charmingly late Bavarian train. The conductor told us about the delay in polka form, and you could hear his lederhosen squeaking in the background. The point is, I’m not gonna finish this ‘pre-trip’ post until after my trip. AW WELL.

Now surrounded by breathtaking Austrian mountains, spending a quiet morning with Johanna. She reads a thick novel, I write about Berlin, the coffee is hot and the Müsli rich in Ballaststoff (fiber—my parents’ hippie friends and their kooky “I’d rather not have a heart attack” dietary concerns, lemme tell ya). Sometime soon Brigitta (I think that’s how it’s spelled) will swing by to take us out to lunch, but for now I’ll look through my pictures and give you the scoop on early July in the Hauptstadt (capital city). If I ever run low on inspiration I can go look out any window in the house and contemplate a rugged peak for a couple minutes, then come back and blog like peals of vengeful thunder, like giants in the earth.

Everybody knows about the superior nature of German train systems. I’ve been captivated by the trains here, amazed at their influence on the physical, social, and cultural shape of the place. Mass transit and the city are inseperable entities, the trains as a kind of imaginative/psychic force that drives the here-and-there, the up-tempo narrow-margain human interactions that build the towers and the plazas, the cathedrals and the vacant lots. Way deep down the city is the intersection of millions of stories, a layering and weaving of many lives, and more often than not we are on the train, unterwegs, when we come together. I could wax poetic about trains all afternoon. I had a point here what was it.

OH YEAH, about those trains that run on time: their facilities require occasional rennovation; and the bigger the station, the bigger the build. Since my May 1st move I have lived about a block from the Schönhauser Allee U-Bahnhof, a major subway hub (the track is actually elevated, but it is still technically part of the subway system) that was terribly convenient until they shut it down for a rebuild in early June. Workers and equipment began to appear in growing quantities, and a set of huge plywood enclosures started to spread down the line. Last week it hit Gleimstraße, my cross street:
This thing went up fast. I wonder if they’re doing some major work on the elevated structure, maybe redoing that set of steel girders that arch in to support the roof of the station proper, or like a bunch of fine electronics work that they don’t want getting rained (or SPIED) on. Whatever the case, it’s very impressive, and it’s certainly impacted the flow of foot and auto traffic in my neighborhood. Gleimstraße passes (via the creatively named Gleimtunnel) under the long northern arm of Mauerpark that otherwise hems off my neighborhood, so it’s always been a major thoroughfare for folks traveling east-west through Prenzlauer Berg, and the Gleimstraße/Schönhauser Allee intersection was a good old fashioned hectic urban headache. Now it looks like this:
I wonder how long this weird temporary building in the middle of the street will be in existence. I think I saw a sign that said November at some point. I hope the workers and equipment disappear one night, and the people peel away the plywood to reveal just a solid block of alien black stone, heavy as ages, that vibrates gently as the trains pass through and whispers gentle lies to those who walk beneath.

Later that week, I went to an avant-garde video performance at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt with the elusive and unconquerable Beau Box. He is hard to photograph:
We got there a bit early and killed some time outside, as it was a very lovely summer evening. I tried to take some pictures of the venue but nothing could measure up to these trees in a nearby field:It was the kind of weather you work extra hard to store away in your brain so you can recall it and bask in its warmth some cold winter night.

The video piece itself—created by a Japanese artist whose name I am incapable of remembering—was very good, just the sort of passionately bizarre thing I should be savoring while I’m in Berlin. Impressive CG graphics, built from breathtakingly crisp images of nature, crept and flowed across the screen over a thunderous electronic soundscape. The sound fell just short of painful, but it still kind of shook my organs and drove more than a couple of yuppie Germans out of the theater. My primary complaint: the idiot behind us who brought his CHATTY 4-YEAR-OLD SON to an experimental video performance. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time? Little kids love sitting still and silent while abstract images crawl across the screen, right?

Heh heh. I found this written on a board in the study abroad center and just had to take a picture of it:Context: Lucy will often refer to any of a wide variety of men as a “honey,” even if he is really not all that sweet. For example: former East German General Secretary Erik Honecker.

As my time in Berlin winds down with astonishing alactrity, I do my best to savor the good things this city has to offer. First and foremost is, of course, Mensa Nord. Look at this beautiful cheap meal:Everything came together on this one. Fills me up for the better part of a day, costs about 2 euro dollars.*Sigh*. I am going to miss Mensa Nord.

Also outstanding and soon to be missed: the excellent playgrounds spread around the city. These things are made of wood and metal, and they’re generaly big enough for a grown man-child to play on. Like all fun things they offer all kinds of opportunites to really hurt yourself, which is why we never get anything so awesome in litigious America. You can still find a few excellently dangerous old pieces of playground equipment in the States, but they’re being systematically torn down and replaced with lumps of extremely boring contoured plastic so little Johnny Snotnose can’t fall down and suffer enough Emotional Pain & Suffering to bankrupt whatever organization was RECKLESS enough to put up such a DEATH TRAP where the CHILDREN could be HURT.

What I’m trying to say is, I’ll miss this: while walking aimlessly through the Park on Nordbahnhof (North Train Station), Phil and I stumbled upon this completely great trampoline:This thing was a concussion and two sprained ankles waiting to happen. I’m always looking for new entries for my list of “Things You Have To Do In Berlin,” and this definitely made the cut.

I worried briefly that I might have been stretching out the rubber mesh, potentially threatening the trampoline’s Bounciness Quotient (BQ); buuuuuut I decided after a few bounces that this thing was more than up to my weight, and in any case it is nearly impossible to worry about something whilst bouncing on a trampoline. I was just like KA——SPROING
Once straight-up-and-down bouncing lost its novelty, I worked on my tramp-to-tramp transfers. (The four bouncy squares are separated by some cushy foam rubber.) It was tricky at first, but after a couple of minutes I got pretty good at it and eventually made it “around the world” in four consecutive bounds. I asked Phil to photograph me on a couple of transfer leaps, and although he managed to include his finger in nearly every one of those pictures he did get one flawless action shot:YES. Man that was fun.

Later that night we spent many, many hours drinking wine, dancing to doo-whop, and talking to Germans and Americans at a WG (Wohngemeinschaft—an apartment shared by roommates, often students) party. On the ride home I was impressed by the brightness of the 4 a.m. sky and stopped to photograph this scaffold-clad building in the early-morning mid-summer twilight:
I liked the archaic-futuristic DATAMAX 2000 sign on this junky old rustbucket:This looks like a ‘90s paintjob to me, something out of the heady, optimistic years at the beginning of the computer age. This guy probably conceived of the word “datamax” (The MAXIMUM amount of data) in a dream, tacked on the largest number he could think of, then started dog-earing pages in the Leer Jet catalogue he got at the library.

At some point this conversation took place:
Entrepeneur: I need tens of thousands of dollars to buy a car for my business.
Venture capitalist: Well I don’t know, that’s a lot of money, I’ll need to ask some questions first. For starters, what is your business called?
E: DATAMAX 2000
VC: TAKE IT TAKE IT ALL

And now he drives from pharmacy to pharmacy in Berlin, debugging electronic drug catalogues and wondering if he’ll ever be able to pay off his computer-wizard junker. Alternately DATAMAX 2000 went out of business years ago and this filthy white hatchback is now the property of some punk who still hasn’t gotten around to spraypainting his favorite band’s name (THE DEATH PUNCHERS) over the logo.
World Cup Update: As you may have heard, it’s all over now—Spain won a very good game against the Netherlands, 1:0. However I still have a few photos from back when Germany was still in it and life was great, so let’s go back in time a week or so to the convinving 4:0 victory over Argentina.

I watched the game with the Leaning Bums again, and once again schlepped down to Eberswalderstraße for the post-win street-madness celebration. These spontaneous festivals got bigger and bigger as the matches became more important, with a proportional increase in police presence. This photo is notable for the cop in green riot gear standing above the crowd on the platform of the shuttered train station. See him up there, on the right? I suppose he could have been there to discourage idiots from climbing up and raising hell, but I cannot help but think that he was ready, willing and able to rain down a few tear-gas canisters if the crowd got too unruly.

More cops, in these ridiculous suits of armor they wear for crowd control. I have sympathy for Berlin cops. This city is full of radical idiots (on both sides of the political spectrum) eager to see policemen bleed, and it seems to me that the culture in general is still not comfortable with armed authority figures in uniform. It is not a job I would want to do, somebody has to do it, and I haven’t personally seen any real police aggression or brutality in my time in Germany. HOWEVER, I feel they are deployed too often and in excessive numbers, and I absolutely hate it when they’re armed and dressed like soldiers.

The two dudes feelin’ it the most:
1. This triumphant herald atop a transformer. He looked so picturesque I was even able to forgive the vouvouzala.

2. This profoundly drunk flag-waver on his balcony. I guess I don’t really have proof that he was profoundly drunk, but his total fixation on waving this giant flag didn’t strike me as terribly sober.

In way, way more important news: the 4th of July happened! Did you all enjoy yourselves? I was lucky enough to be invited to a very well put-together BBQ, organized by a couple of good old fashioned American girls. Here is our Primary Celebration Coordinator, Maureen (I think?), showing off some linked sausages:She was a little concerned about dragging the dogs in the dirt while posing, but Phil assured her he would eat any ground dogs. About 3 seconds after I took this photo an ember leapt out of the grill and into Maureen’s sandal, prompting her to yelp, hop, and, yes, drag the bottom two sausages through the dirt. Phil, being a man of his word, presumably ate them.

This was truly a top-notch event, featuring not only these lovely American flag streamers:
And this tropical kiddy pool full of beers and genuine ice cubes (a rare delicacy in Germany ["What part of COLD AS THE ROCKIES do you not understand?"]):But also this patriotically delicious Old Glory cake:
In the spirit of internationalism we Americans generously allowed some foreigners to take part in our celebration of the U S of A. In fact, I think we were outnumbered. For example, the leg curled up next to the cake belongs to an Englishwoman, and this America-cucumber is being displayed by Gema, a Spaniard:
Here our Spaniard speaks with an Italian and an American about all the valuable lessons we all have to learn from one another:
This goofy sucker and honorary American is named Kris, and he is from Austria, although he grew up in Spain, and also in Canada, and Austrlia, I think. Kris is one of those irritating people who can speak every language perfectly, and he caps it off by being a very nice guy who is very hard to get properly mad at for being so much better than you.

I activated an obscure feature on my camera to automatically photographed the moment I loved America the most. I think it worked:
Aaaaaaand the last and definitely saddest BBQ event: I sold my bike to a Dutchman. Here is Jens with his new purchase:I wish him the best of luck.

I kept trying to take a farewell picture but it neverTurned outQuite right.

As regular readers will recall I was rather devastated the next day. This awesome tractor in the middle of the city cheered me up a little:Solid.

OKAY that’s finally done with! Back home, my trip went great, Berlin is very hot and I am tying up loose ends before I leave for London on Saturday! Next up on the blog: Austria! And then THE END OF THIS BLOG AAAAAHHHHHH.

Love you all, back very soon.