As I said at the end of the last post a funny looking man arrived in my office and told me he was locking the laboratory, I thus failed to write anything about the more interesting part of my last fortnight here, namely Berlin.
Berlin is unique really. If you arrive in Berlin try to get a train that stops at the Hauptbahnhof, because once you’ve gone up 5 flights of escalators and borded a double-decker train that runs under a glass ceiling on a bridge over a 3 storey shopping mall your mind will be in a suitably warped state which will allow you to experience the rest of Berlin without too much confusion. From the Hauptbahnhof I took the train to the Ostbahnhof, to find my hostel. The Ostbahnhof is in East Berlin, and you can tell. I saw my first two punks on the way out, then walked through some wasteland to the Berlin wall, tagged along the wall til I came to a bridge which looked like a castle, took a left past a sex shop and a gay karioke bar, went over the S-bahn track and hung another left for the youth hostel. There was a tramp asleep in the bus stop, only a few cars in the streets (presumably the rest had been stolen) but lots and lots of graffiti. The youth hostel itself was on a corner opposite an asian brothel and as an added bonus I got a cheery wave from two joint smoking skinheads who were sitting on a balcony nearby with a sex-doll propped up on the chair next to them.
Following this sort of introduction (think the bit in Euro-Trip when they arrive in Bratislava) I then spent the next couple of hours freaking out. Carrie would be arriving in a few hours and I was half sure that she’d slap me and then jump on the next train out, maybe stopping just long enough to call the police. This seemed all the more likely when I remembered that I’d done the booking and convinced her it was a nice place. However I conquered my fear and went exploring in Kreuzberg across the river, and I started to be converted. Kreuzberg is heavily Turkish, and heavily graffitied, and snobby West Berliners will tell you to keep the hell away, but it’s also the nicest place ever. Lovely tree-lined streets in the sunshine, amazing food; lovely houmous and proper Turkish coffee which I hadn’t had since Turkey, and yummy cheap pizza, and Indian restaurants everywhere that actually look good. Added to this the area is packed with übercool bars and some of the most insane people you will ever see. In fact one of them really was insane and followed us down the street making funny noises, but that’s beside the point.
After Kreuzberg I headed into the centre of Berlin, and was standing on a Soviet war memorial; 20 foot statue of a soldier, 2 Howitzers, a couple of T-34 tanks, Stalinist columns comemorating the Hero-infantry, Hero-tankists, Hero-engineers, Hero-pilots and probably Hero-dog handlers for all I know (my Russian isn’t that good) – basically a classic bit of Russian bad-taste, when my friend Julika rang me. I originally know Julika from back in London, but she moved to Berlin and has been living there for one and a half years. We then met up (me, her and Carrie, who’d just arrived) at the Ostbahnhof, and headed over to the Berlin wall, where we had beers at a beach-bar on some sand on a beautiful spot by the river Elbe in the shadow of the Wall (in what, until 2 years after I was born, had been the ‘death zone’), admired the evening sunshine and listened as Julika talked about how hard it is to get thin English cigarette filters in Germany.
After that it was back to the hostel. Carrie was cool about it, thank goodness, and I even overheard her telling her mum that I was an English Gentleman on the phone later! We went out for pizza, and drinks, and some more drinks, and at about 2 met a group of locals who told us all about Panorama gay bar, whis is open non-stop from Thursday til Sunday, has a blanket ban on anyone taking cameras inside, and normally only gets going around 4! Unfortunately we were knackered and didn’t make it.
Saturday was sightseeing, and we ticked off most of them. In the evening we met Helena (a fellow RISE student with me in Dresden), and her friend Ellie, who is studying German and doing her year abroad at the moment. Ellie was staying in what she called ‘nice Kreuzberg’, in that it was still cool, but didn’t look post-appocalyptic. Surrealness followed as we chilled out, drank Pimms (don’t know where she found it), listened to Berlin’s Radio Eins (the presenter was so stoned that I was waiting for him to pass out and collapse on the mixing desk, and was wondering what sound that would make), as well as Berlin’s local rap-hero Peter Fox, and of course the mighty “Toten Hosen” (which means ‘Dead Trousers’ in English). The “Toten Hosen” are a German rock band originally from Düsseldorf. In fact at one point they actually sponsored the Dusseldorf football team, who were in major financial trouble, and who then ended up playing the entire season with the Toten Hosen skull-motif on their shirts! The Toten Hosen have also written a song entirely about how they hate Bayern Munich. How cool is that! Anyway after that we headed off to a club. This club turned out to be a very gnarly heavy metal club two hours away in the suburbs, where we arrived exhausted at about 3. We still had a great time, Carrie made the mistake of dressing up nicely to go clubbing in Berlin, and got funny looks from several heavily tattooed lesbian couples!
After that we got home in the light, slept a bit, checked out the Fernsehturm, went to the Ampleman shop and then went home, feeling tired and happy.
I suppose the amazing thing about Berlin is that it has the history it has, yet hasn’t been overwhelmed by it. It’s not Venice or some nice old English town with a castle, it’s one of the coolest cities in Europe, I suspect that this is because of the history, not in spite of it. Because the present has to fight so hard to make itself heard above the past, the city as a whole is so much more intense. If your city has been smashed by thousand-bomber raids, over-run by two and a half million Russians with automatic weapons, split four ways, cut in two by a wall, supplied only by air for about a year and then finally, gloriously and surreally reunified and made the undivided capital of an undivided Germany, all within living memory, then what seems impossible in another city seems like a perfectly good idea here!