Shataina (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} dragonladyflame) wrote,@ 2008-03-14 17:43:00 |
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and though she will mess up your life, you want her just the same
Well! I'm back in Chicago. I'm glad to be home, jetlag and all. I feel a little weak, but I think that's just because of recent digestive problems, which will no doubt solve themselves now that I'm back in a vegetarian co-op. I irrationally miss some nectarines that I purchased in Germany and meant to eat on the plane, which were sniffed out by a small dog and confiscated by U.S. Customs.
Ah, Berlin!
Despite my excitement, currywurst was not amazing -- and I even went to one place the Blue Guide said was the best in Berlin! The currywurst wasn't bad, of course; just not as transcendent as I had hoped. Le sigh. Döner kebabs, on the other hand, are pretty great -- they're fresh-mixed meat-and-salad-filled packets of bread, miles better than any possible American fast food -- though they are made with long-left-out Turkish meat, which I suspect may have been partly responsible for my upset stomach. And maracuja nectar is delicious.
There is an amazing spa right on the banks of the Spree River (Trevor referred to it as "the Badeschiff", which seems to be a general German word indicating "heated clean pool placed in the middle of a river"). There's a bar and stuff, and a sauna, but the really exciting part is the pool. It's right in the river, and you can swim up to the edges and reach your hand over to dip it into the Spree if you feel like it. I failed to make friends with a duck from the chlorinated safety of the pool, but I did get an amazingly beautiful view of the city along the river, at night, while swimming. Trevor's friends and I left at midnight and tried to find a place to eat; this took us rather a long time, including a few false starts, like White Trash Fast Food (I think that's their site, anyway).
From the front, it has an awning that says: WHITE TRASH in big serious letters, and then below it in classy script, FAST FOOD. Inside, we walked past a couple dancing to the swing-dance-ish music and claimed a table. The décor, I fear, doesn't really come across in the picture. It's a reasonably excellent hodgepodge of Chinese lanterns and other Chinese-ish furniture, plus random pictures like that duck. The menu exhorts you to call the waittress "baby". And the food looked fabulous -- absurd steak fries, delicious burgers, etc. etc. Unfortunately we couldn't eat any of it, because it was 1.30AM on a Sunday and the kitchen had closed. Next time.
Man, sometimes I hate starting these Look-I-Had-A-Trip entries. It half-feels like a chore. I know I'll be happy when I'm done, though. When I was having dinner with some family friends in Berlin, they told me that they'd found some 40-year-old letters and were amazed by all the details and observations in them. At least half those notes, they said, had gone unremembered. There's a humbling example. And it's easy to lose photos when they go unprocessed ... I'm not even sure where my Berkeley Asian museum photographs are. All that inspiration, mislaid? It can't be so!
An hour or two past nightfall on Saturday, I was on the way to a club to meet a friend when I came upon a large open-doored church, with a charming row of small lit candles and some earnest young Christians out front. One handsome young man approached me and asked -- in English, of course, English being the lingua franca (that phrase might be a bit ironic) -- if I would like to come in, then offered me a candle to light for someone I was concerned for. I said that I was meeting a friend, but that otherwise I would visit, and asked if there were visiting hours. He invited me to Mass the next day but explained that the church was normally closed for fear of thieves; still, he insisted that I take the candle home and light it. I was touched by this gesture (it reminded me of Unitarian candles of love and concern), and later lit the candle for women in Congo. What a sweet way to do outreach.
Notwithstanding the example of the church, Berlin is a remarkably safe city. This is especially interesting because it's so poor -- why aren't more people being mugged? My family friend Marek, who lives there, noted that this is probably mostly because there's very little actual race/class tension in Germany. Of course, graffiti is still quite prevalent -- maybe more prevalent than any other place I've ever seen. I like it.
.
.
.
Marek (who has spent lots of time in the States) had something interesting to say about Americans, too. I had told him of my Peace Corps aspirations, and then noted that the outside-world awareness of the Europeans I'd met made me feel small-minded. After all, they all know about the elections in America etc., but I hardly know anything about Germany or European politics in general. Marek pointed out that, while this was true, I do know something about Africa. He said that he feels that American newspapers have far better world coverage than German newspapers do, that Germans occupy themselves with news of America and largely ignore news of the Third World; and he said that while of course there are small-minded Americans, he considers educated Americans to be much broader-minded than educated Germans.
Germans are pretty rude and blunt. I mean, I'm known for being rude and blunt (or at least I have been in the past; I think I may have toned down in my old age), and damn. Marek said that he thinks shopkeepers expect shouting matches rather than meekness when they act snippy. One good example might be the time I took this picture:
... at which point the guy behind the counter lectured me (in English) for like two whole minutes about how I should have asked first. He seemed nonplussed when I apologized several times, and finally dismissed me rather sniffily. It was definitely the rudest reaming-out for being rude that I ever received, and I've received some rude ones.
Before I get into further commentary and pictures, allow me to prove that I was totally not lying when I talked about "iSmoke" ads on my last Berlin entry:
Lucky Strike is so getting sued.
Squats
On Friday I went to a couple squats, one of which featured a band and one of which was a community kitchen. The band-featuring one had a bar, a foosball table, two bands playing, and was covered in excellent graffiti -- much of it, naturally, with an anti-American tinge:
There was also a picture of the Statue of Liberty with a skull for a face. And lots of anarchist symbols. As a side note, I think I would respect the punk scene a hell of a lot more if any of the generalized political rage ever had actual, you know, results -- and didn't seem to just be a matter of style. Oh well.
The community kitchen also had a foosball table (these seem to be a squat fixture), and was covered with posters ...
... and some similar graffiti, including generally "argh!" political stuff:
Speaking of squats, my American friend Jon had suggested that I visit a wagenplatz (video is in German) -- "a (sometimes squatted) trailer park for the young and hip". I tried to find one, but only found this site, which -- by the same I found it -- was in an area of the city I'd already covered. I wanted to spend my time elsewhere. So I felt really lucky when Trevor and I accidentally stumbled upon one on our way to an outdoor Turkish market.
I guess there are lots of wagenplatzes that have stuff like shows, bars, even cinemas -- a guy we encountered at this one even directed us to one -- but I didn't get a chance to visit one. The one I saw was still quite charming.
.
.
Tacheles Gallery, Pergamon Museum
Arising from the squat tradition is also the Tacheles gallery (featured briefly on this squat site's Berlin photo collection). It's a crumbling building in one of Berlin's current mostly-shopping / gallery districts, Hakescher Markt (or that's the transit stop's name, anyway). Apparently, it was first colonized by squatters just after the wall came down -- 18 years ago or so. Since then, it's morphed into half-squat, half-respected-cultural-icon. There's a great sculpture garden outside, with what was probably my favourite Berlin sculpture in it:
The graffiti behind it makes it hard to see all the wicked-looking Cthulhuesque vaguely insectile glory of it. Oh well. There are several doors to the Tacheles -- one is through the sculpture garden. Marek was with me, and we walked up the incredibly graffiti'd stairs to find all kinds of things -- multiple galleries (some with shock art, and some with art / clothing / small decorative objects that I liked), some cafés. He remembered a cinema in there; we found a small red-lit café with doors that appeared to go to movie rooms, but did not determine whether it still shows movies.
One gallery held an artist whose work I really liked. He was surprised when I asked if he had a website ("Why do you want it?" -- I mean, don't they use Web sites in Germany?) but gave me his site's address: Bruno di Martino. If you click on [Malerei] you can see some of the paintings I loved, or similar ones anyway.
Another painting by a different artist, showing an old man dissolving water-colourily from the torso down into vaguely data-like figures, left an impression also. And there were two further paintings that I photographed, feeling guilty. I really thought they were beautiful:
They evoked Berlin for me -- fire-vivid ruins.
The Pergamon was the only museum I went to. It has a remarkable Assyrian collection, whose crowning glory is this gate:
It also, of course, has smaller bits ....
.
... and on the non-Assyrian front, three more things:
A beautiful calligraphed ... fireplace?
A Sufi (I think) holy man from an antique manuscript.
Another manuscript page, of a Muslim court.
Sculpture
Most of the sculpture in Berlin is pretty modern. Leaving the Pergamon, I passed this:
And on the way to the Turkish Market:
I didn't take any pictures of the Holocaust Memorial, but I remember it quite clearly. It's many long, rectangular, coffin-sized cement blocks, with very irregular ground forming narrow corridors between them. As you walk forward, the ground slopes down, so that as you come to the center of the memorial the long blocks reach above your head, and as you emerge they shrink down beside you -- but nonetheless remain quite solid and large, a reminder of the darkness whence you emerge. It's quite evocative.
At the Marx & Engels plaza there were tall, thick sheets of steel with photographs etched on them. I'm not sure what they memorialized -- perhaps something to do with Communism, the wall coming down, etc. -- but some of the photos were haunting:
Across from there is a charming fountain with sea creatures whose charming crocodile, rearing to look at a king of the sea, made me smile.
And lastly, in Alexanderplatz (a center of activity in Berlin) was a fountain that I longed to see running with water.
Oh man, I think I need to make this a two-entry series. Next entry: the best chocolate cake recipe ever; a bunch of architecture photos; postcard wildness; the Berlin botanical garden; and some other stuff.
I am coming back, for sure. Things to do when I return to Berlin:
* See other museums, particularly Checkpoint Charlie, which is supposed to be great.
* Actually eat at White Trash Fast Food.
* Walk around Prenzlauerberg, which is the neighbourhood I heard the most about that I missed entirely.
* Track down that church where the young man offered me a candle, and maybe even attend Mass.
* Visit a wagenplatz that has shows, or a cinema, or a bar, or something. Perhaps the one that the other wagenplatz directed us to.
* Put together an incredible meal from the Turkish Market, which had cheese-stuffed artichokes and three zillion kinds of hummus / cream spread and spinach-and-feta-filled bread and seventy zillion kinds of olives and was generally amazing.
* Make music with Trevor, either before or after we build a stage in his living room (yeah, I told him about Moomers, the best apartment ever).
* Get Trevor to show me the reddest thing in Berlin (we didn't get to it) and figure out what the most creatively literate thing in Berlin is (we had some ideas, but nothing exciting).
Well! I'm back in Chicago. I'm glad to be home, jetlag and all. I feel a little weak, but I think that's just because of recent digestive problems, which will no doubt solve themselves now that I'm back in a vegetarian co-op. I irrationally miss some nectarines that I purchased in Germany and meant to eat on the plane, which were sniffed out by a small dog and confiscated by U.S. Customs.
Ah, Berlin!
Despite my excitement, currywurst was not amazing -- and I even went to one place the Blue Guide said was the best in Berlin! The currywurst wasn't bad, of course; just not as transcendent as I had hoped. Le sigh. Döner kebabs, on the other hand, are pretty great -- they're fresh-mixed meat-and-salad-filled packets of bread, miles better than any possible American fast food -- though they are made with long-left-out Turkish meat, which I suspect may have been partly responsible for my upset stomach. And maracuja nectar is delicious.
There is an amazing spa right on the banks of the Spree River (Trevor referred to it as "the Badeschiff", which seems to be a general German word indicating "heated clean pool placed in the middle of a river"). There's a bar and stuff, and a sauna, but the really exciting part is the pool. It's right in the river, and you can swim up to the edges and reach your hand over to dip it into the Spree if you feel like it. I failed to make friends with a duck from the chlorinated safety of the pool, but I did get an amazingly beautiful view of the city along the river, at night, while swimming. Trevor's friends and I left at midnight and tried to find a place to eat; this took us rather a long time, including a few false starts, like White Trash Fast Food (I think that's their site, anyway).
From the front, it has an awning that says: WHITE TRASH in big serious letters, and then below it in classy script, FAST FOOD. Inside, we walked past a couple dancing to the swing-dance-ish music and claimed a table. The décor, I fear, doesn't really come across in the picture. It's a reasonably excellent hodgepodge of Chinese lanterns and other Chinese-ish furniture, plus random pictures like that duck. The menu exhorts you to call the waittress "baby". And the food looked fabulous -- absurd steak fries, delicious burgers, etc. etc. Unfortunately we couldn't eat any of it, because it was 1.30AM on a Sunday and the kitchen had closed. Next time.
Man, sometimes I hate starting these Look-I-Had-A-Trip entries. It half-feels like a chore. I know I'll be happy when I'm done, though. When I was having dinner with some family friends in Berlin, they told me that they'd found some 40-year-old letters and were amazed by all the details and observations in them. At least half those notes, they said, had gone unremembered. There's a humbling example. And it's easy to lose photos when they go unprocessed ... I'm not even sure where my Berkeley Asian museum photographs are. All that inspiration, mislaid? It can't be so!
An hour or two past nightfall on Saturday, I was on the way to a club to meet a friend when I came upon a large open-doored church, with a charming row of small lit candles and some earnest young Christians out front. One handsome young man approached me and asked -- in English, of course, English being the lingua franca (that phrase might be a bit ironic) -- if I would like to come in, then offered me a candle to light for someone I was concerned for. I said that I was meeting a friend, but that otherwise I would visit, and asked if there were visiting hours. He invited me to Mass the next day but explained that the church was normally closed for fear of thieves; still, he insisted that I take the candle home and light it. I was touched by this gesture (it reminded me of Unitarian candles of love and concern), and later lit the candle for women in Congo. What a sweet way to do outreach.
Notwithstanding the example of the church, Berlin is a remarkably safe city. This is especially interesting because it's so poor -- why aren't more people being mugged? My family friend Marek, who lives there, noted that this is probably mostly because there's very little actual race/class tension in Germany. Of course, graffiti is still quite prevalent -- maybe more prevalent than any other place I've ever seen. I like it.
.
.
.
Marek (who has spent lots of time in the States) had something interesting to say about Americans, too. I had told him of my Peace Corps aspirations, and then noted that the outside-world awareness of the Europeans I'd met made me feel small-minded. After all, they all know about the elections in America etc., but I hardly know anything about Germany or European politics in general. Marek pointed out that, while this was true, I do know something about Africa. He said that he feels that American newspapers have far better world coverage than German newspapers do, that Germans occupy themselves with news of America and largely ignore news of the Third World; and he said that while of course there are small-minded Americans, he considers educated Americans to be much broader-minded than educated Germans.
Germans are pretty rude and blunt. I mean, I'm known for being rude and blunt (or at least I have been in the past; I think I may have toned down in my old age), and damn. Marek said that he thinks shopkeepers expect shouting matches rather than meekness when they act snippy. One good example might be the time I took this picture:
... at which point the guy behind the counter lectured me (in English) for like two whole minutes about how I should have asked first. He seemed nonplussed when I apologized several times, and finally dismissed me rather sniffily. It was definitely the rudest reaming-out for being rude that I ever received, and I've received some rude ones.
Before I get into further commentary and pictures, allow me to prove that I was totally not lying when I talked about "iSmoke" ads on my last Berlin entry:
Lucky Strike is so getting sued.
Squats
On Friday I went to a couple squats, one of which featured a band and one of which was a community kitchen. The band-featuring one had a bar, a foosball table, two bands playing, and was covered in excellent graffiti -- much of it, naturally, with an anti-American tinge:
There was also a picture of the Statue of Liberty with a skull for a face. And lots of anarchist symbols. As a side note, I think I would respect the punk scene a hell of a lot more if any of the generalized political rage ever had actual, you know, results -- and didn't seem to just be a matter of style. Oh well.
The community kitchen also had a foosball table (these seem to be a squat fixture), and was covered with posters ...
... and some similar graffiti, including generally "argh!" political stuff:
Speaking of squats, my American friend Jon had suggested that I visit a wagenplatz (video is in German) -- "a (sometimes squatted) trailer park for the young and hip". I tried to find one, but only found this site, which -- by the same I found it -- was in an area of the city I'd already covered. I wanted to spend my time elsewhere. So I felt really lucky when Trevor and I accidentally stumbled upon one on our way to an outdoor Turkish market.
I guess there are lots of wagenplatzes that have stuff like shows, bars, even cinemas -- a guy we encountered at this one even directed us to one -- but I didn't get a chance to visit one. The one I saw was still quite charming.
.
.
Tacheles Gallery, Pergamon Museum
Arising from the squat tradition is also the Tacheles gallery (featured briefly on this squat site's Berlin photo collection). It's a crumbling building in one of Berlin's current mostly-shopping / gallery districts, Hakescher Markt (or that's the transit stop's name, anyway). Apparently, it was first colonized by squatters just after the wall came down -- 18 years ago or so. Since then, it's morphed into half-squat, half-respected-cultural-icon. There's a great sculpture garden outside, with what was probably my favourite Berlin sculpture in it:
The graffiti behind it makes it hard to see all the wicked-looking Cthulhuesque vaguely insectile glory of it. Oh well. There are several doors to the Tacheles -- one is through the sculpture garden. Marek was with me, and we walked up the incredibly graffiti'd stairs to find all kinds of things -- multiple galleries (some with shock art, and some with art / clothing / small decorative objects that I liked), some cafés. He remembered a cinema in there; we found a small red-lit café with doors that appeared to go to movie rooms, but did not determine whether it still shows movies.
One gallery held an artist whose work I really liked. He was surprised when I asked if he had a website ("Why do you want it?" -- I mean, don't they use Web sites in Germany?) but gave me his site's address: Bruno di Martino. If you click on [Malerei] you can see some of the paintings I loved, or similar ones anyway.
Another painting by a different artist, showing an old man dissolving water-colourily from the torso down into vaguely data-like figures, left an impression also. And there were two further paintings that I photographed, feeling guilty. I really thought they were beautiful:
They evoked Berlin for me -- fire-vivid ruins.
The Pergamon was the only museum I went to. It has a remarkable Assyrian collection, whose crowning glory is this gate:
It also, of course, has smaller bits ....
.
... and on the non-Assyrian front, three more things:
A beautiful calligraphed ... fireplace?
A Sufi (I think) holy man from an antique manuscript.
Another manuscript page, of a Muslim court.
Sculpture
Most of the sculpture in Berlin is pretty modern. Leaving the Pergamon, I passed this:
And on the way to the Turkish Market:
I didn't take any pictures of the Holocaust Memorial, but I remember it quite clearly. It's many long, rectangular, coffin-sized cement blocks, with very irregular ground forming narrow corridors between them. As you walk forward, the ground slopes down, so that as you come to the center of the memorial the long blocks reach above your head, and as you emerge they shrink down beside you -- but nonetheless remain quite solid and large, a reminder of the darkness whence you emerge. It's quite evocative.
At the Marx & Engels plaza there were tall, thick sheets of steel with photographs etched on them. I'm not sure what they memorialized -- perhaps something to do with Communism, the wall coming down, etc. -- but some of the photos were haunting:
Across from there is a charming fountain with sea creatures whose charming crocodile, rearing to look at a king of the sea, made me smile.
And lastly, in Alexanderplatz (a center of activity in Berlin) was a fountain that I longed to see running with water.
Oh man, I think I need to make this a two-entry series. Next entry: the best chocolate cake recipe ever; a bunch of architecture photos; postcard wildness; the Berlin botanical garden; and some other stuff.
I am coming back, for sure. Things to do when I return to Berlin:
* See other museums, particularly Checkpoint Charlie, which is supposed to be great.
* Actually eat at White Trash Fast Food.
* Walk around Prenzlauerberg, which is the neighbourhood I heard the most about that I missed entirely.
* Track down that church where the young man offered me a candle, and maybe even attend Mass.
* Visit a wagenplatz that has shows, or a cinema, or a bar, or something. Perhaps the one that the other wagenplatz directed us to.
* Put together an incredible meal from the Turkish Market, which had cheese-stuffed artichokes and three zillion kinds of hummus / cream spread and spinach-and-feta-filled bread and seventy zillion kinds of olives and was generally amazing.
* Make music with Trevor, either before or after we build a stage in his living room (yeah, I told him about Moomers, the best apartment ever).
* Get Trevor to show me the reddest thing in Berlin (we didn't get to it) and figure out what the most creatively literate thing in Berlin is (we had some ideas, but nothing exciting).
