Berlin (Germany)
14 AUG - 16 AUG
I had a bad time getting to Berlin, I mean there were several elements that just didn't work in my favour when I flew the 'bastard cousin' of Aeroflot, Air Baltic,to the capital of the German republic. My air travel anxiety and lack of sleep from the Russian 'hippy, groovy, cool cat' techno club from several floors below my hostel might have be the logical place to begin this entry, but alas, the roots of this sojourn were surprisingly already well founded several decades in the past. To figure out what the hell it is that I'm talking about you're going to have to indulge me in a little bit of historical back tracking and in some elements that make react physically in a most unpleasant fashion.
A few months ago I sent a message to my friend Dina who now resides in Berlin. The crux of the message was, 'hey, I'll be travelling through the Baltics sometime in August, now make a pitch and sell me Berlin!'. For the life of me I don't remember the content of her response barring a couple pinch hit words that caught my attention from the outset, 'most debaucherous'. Aha, one of the 'most debaucherous' places in Europe apparently, and there were many an online list that I found in my research that echoed that same sentiment, it was therefore a relatively easy decision for me at that point, SOLD!, ticket bought ...although you see, having friends in foreign lands when you spend most of your time on the other side of the planet often has an accompanying story, and so too does this. So you're going to have to follow me a little further.
Berlin Telecomms Tower
Berlin - Germany
Back in 2006 I was having what could only be regarded as a fairly ordinary year I recall my boss spinning in his seat one day and pointedly saying, 'H, why don't you go travelling for a while, get your mind off things'. In that precise moment I wasn't sure what the right response was. I mean I know that wear my heart on my sleeve and that when it comes to emotions I'm fairly transparent but when you get called out so blatantly, well, all you can do assess the advice and take it for what it is. Several weeks later I was on a plane to Sweden, up on the edge of the Artic Circle with a great mate of mine, carving up the Swedish slopes and having a blast. It was the right thing to do at the right time...anyway, this is all leading me in to where THIS story actually begins. A few weeks after hitting the piste in Sweden I found myself back in my second home of Belgrade. Doing the calculations with my cousin just a few days ago we estimated that over my lifespan to date I'd spent approximately 2yrs of my existence here. Whilst still being an outsider here the place feels very much like home and with family around you, well, there's not much more that a typical Cancerian like me could ask for. In any case on one of those bleak Winter days in Belgrade my mum rocks into my room and says the following, 'We're going to see an old high school friend of mine,please come along!'. What you'll notice about the 'please come along' statement is that it's more of a command than a request. My response to that 'command' was, 'What the hell am I going to do there? I'm going to be bored out of my mind! Thanks but no thanks!'. Now for some reason my mum was uncomfortabl persistent, almost getting to the point where she was saying 'You will be going', and at the same time nearly pushing me to the point where I was going to throw out unecessary expletives - something that I NEVER do with my parents, but you get an idea of the sort of tension that was in air. Her final 'selling point' to me was this, 'They have a niece and nephew around your age, you'll be able to speak with them'....'Oh f***, really? Man that sounds TOPS! Can't wait to be bored out of my mind by people that I'll totally not be able to relate to. Sounds like a fantastic way to spend an afternoon. SUPER'! In the end my mum ends up winning the battle and I mentally prepare myself for hours of physical entrapment and mental torture.
Pretzel envy - 'you've got a huge one mate!' - 'but so does your wife!?'
Berlin - Germany
Walking down the street I'm quietly berating myself for being so soft. I listen to my mum drivelling along the way how about her 'high school friend' was perhaps actually a high school boyfriend of sorts, and all of a sudden I have that sickening feeling in my stomach, my mind mentally leaps to a place where it should not ever go. Now I have to trangess through the anguish of imagining my mum and some random older guy having 'made out', or worse', some 45+ yrs ago. Oh yeah, things were looking 'mighty fine'. We walk through the gate and stand at the door. Soon enough it opens and we're met by a couple that are roughly the same age as my parents. We take a seat in something akin to a sitting room and the conversation ensues. A moment later the inevitable happens, the introduction of 'the children' to one another. I sitthere and think, 'God, please make this freakin' easy on me, really, I'm not asking for a hell of a lot, especially not in my current state'. A girl walks in, introduces herself and says something to me, I don't remember what it was but I distinctly recall a pronounced Kiwi accent - 'aha, now this occurrence is a little out of leftfield!'. From this point I'm intruiged and a little invested. We trade some banter, I regress into my usual sarcastic/wit filled test pattern and get matched on each count with an equally shrewd response....'Alright young lady, you're kind of cool and I like your style'. We go on like this for a little while and I find Dina (D) to be many things, a bright spark, full of purpose, a person with great sense of humour and if I'm being brutally honesty, yeah, easy on the eye. A while later we all sit down for lunch and then the game of family one upsmanship begins. I'm not sure who opened fire first, whether it was my mum or D's aunt but it kind of went something like this, 'Do you know that Henry has a degree in business'...'Oh really, well Dina has a degree in psychology'...'Oh,as a matter of fact, Henry has completed his masters in blah'....'Well Dina has completed her masters in blah'...'Henry is just finishing his JD '...'Well Dina is moving to Prague to complete her Phd in blah!'. Man, it was hilarious, it really was. We both looked at each other in the midst of this game of verbal battle ship and kind of rolled our eyes at both the hilarity and how typically Serbian this kind of garbage was, but that ofcourse is another story. In any case it was an odd way to meet considering the troubles that we both went to in order to dodge the afternoon but I'm glad it worked out as D is one cool cat. So it was, 4 years after meeting her for the first time I was now on my way to the capital to hang out with D and her best friend Silver for a few days.
Memorial for the murder of European Jews - Berlin - Germany
Now, getting back to my escape from Riga. The hostel that I was staying at was comfortable enough but it sat a few storeys above a Russian nightclub whose penchant for brutally bad techno made the quest for sleep a necessary voyage into my untapped depths of meditation a necessity, something which I'd unfortunately not quite mastered as yet. As my mind skipped through thoughts, sorted out answers to some cheap and humble questions of life, and also demanded sleep, time skipped on by and when the Italian contingent returned from their Friday night exploits early on Saturday, well, it was already time for me to get going without so much as a real rate of return on my investment. I moved bregrudingly, jumped my ride to the airport at 5am and hoped that the Riga to Berlin transfer would be seamless. Ofcourse coming on the back of Friday the 13th it seemed that the hangover had lasted and I was going to be dealt the final blow under a blanket or rain and storm clouds. 'Freakin' storm clouds!', the death knell for an anxious flyer!
Brandenburg Gate - Berlin - Germany
Brandenburg Gate - Berlin - Germany
From my basic understanding of the standard operating environment at Riga International, Air Baltic in parallel with the Rigan Airport Authority go out of their way to make the flight boarding process of their patrons as miserable and difficult as possible. The queues for Air Baltic with their Soviet style length and their lack of satisfactory explanations as to what was happening at any stage of the process automatically had you, as in me, mentally second guessing my basic flight information.'My flight is on Saturday, right?', 'It is out of Riga, right?, 'I can't be so much of a dumbass that I booked myself out of a totally different place, could I?'. Waiting for nearly two hours to make it to check-in the crowd around me were all at their wits end with the lack of information and torturous progress through the boarding rigmorale. Not only had I not slept andnot only had the onboarding process been a lesson in futility but then, when I saw the machine that was going to lift me some 10kms above the ground and 'apparently' hit mach 0.9 somewhere above Latvia, well lets just say that my heart did not fill with the joy and goo-ish warmly sentiment that you normally reserve for bunnies and marshmallows. This piece of shit DC-10 looked as though it had been lent out by Aeroflot (Russian for 'We'll try and get you there') to Air Baltic on the proviso that it's 'mechanical issues' be resolved in time. As the pilot throttled up at the top of the runway and I went through my standard panic ritual of asking why I'd put myself in this situation once again, the French pilot of Air Baltic, (who sounded like he'd already been onto his sixth shot of Absolut), pointed us skyward and we were away. From this point on this bloody aircraft did everything it could to make the 1hr 35 min journey to Berlin as mind fucking as possible. The weather enroute was a disaster and we bounced across the top of Northern Europe in the same manner that you'd skip a stone across a pond, although as we all well know, in the end that freakin' stone sinks like a brick. Through dark rain clouds the plane dropped in and out of pockets of turbulence and it was more than audible when the pilot decided to throttle up or down in order to get through the worst of what we found ourselves in. When we finally made our approach into Berlin Tegel airport we could see nothing of the ground until we were about 100mtrs above the deck as the fog had kindly decided to blanket the city on this fine day. We touched down with a bounce and I cursed whatever almighty power it is that decided in their infinite wisdom to impart me with the travel bug! If I ever get to see you supreme being we're going to have words about that little oddity!
Rocking up to D's place on Karl-Marx-Straße this Saturday morning I was greeted with a friendly smile and the banter that I expected. Even though I hadn't seen her for four years and in reality didn't know her all that well it all felt pretty cool and very cruisy. I guess with some people you're just able to take up from where you left off and with D that's certainly was the case.Later that morning 'Choice Bro' tours hit full stride as D took myself and her friend Silver on a 'masterful' sightseeing tour of the centre of Berlin. Aside from the Kiwi commentary that accompanied our sightseeing mission it was a fair attempt to take two newbies around parts of the city that our tour guide may very well have seen a hundred times before, but eh, friends, sometimes that's the type of crap you sign up for when you enter the kingdom of 'friendom'.
That looks like one cool cat - clouds above Berlin
A sleeping E.T. perhaps?
It's strange place Berlin, I mean I'm making my assessment on having been there for just two days but it didn't have that same romantic feel that you might find in say a Paris, Rome or Vienna. It has a fantastic layout, ordered, but it felt a little bleak, although that might have just been the rain talking. Quite often it takes a sunny day to bring out the good vibes of a town, so perhaps I'll let that notion slide. I've heard Berlin described as kind of grungy, edgy and a little gritty. With a now 21 year east-west reunification and the type of nightlife that this place is famous for, yeah, I guess it's style kind of makes sense. It's the type of place that I'm sure would get under your skin and draw you into its arms in time and perhaps the type of place where if you'd established a great social network then you'd have a ball. For a daytripper however it was just a capital city, notorious for its position in history but not somewhere that you (I) could immediately hold dear. There's a little part of me that feels sorry not giving this place the time and dedication that it deserves but for this one dance, and in this time, there are plenty more willing maidens on the horizon, so onwards it must be.
D and Silver with their 'Escape from Berlin' sale - '1 Euro, anything for 1 Euro' -
Mauerpark - Berlin
The next few days were great value. From the few drunken candlelit evenings that the three of us spent talking jibberish until the early hours to the 1Euro yard sale in Mauerpark that D was offering on her 'Escape from Berlin' clothing sale, it was all relaxed, chilled and good fun - although I wish I had given myself the opportunity to take on karoake in the park on the Sunday, for an undercover extrovert such as myself singing in front of 1000+ people would have been a rush. Still, once the new week commenced and the clock had ticked us over to Monday morning it was time for me to continue on with my life of transients. The dawn of Monday now meant that I had a cousin to catch who was at that moment making his way for an airport rendevous with me at Berlin Schoenefeld, and as for D, well she'd done the slightly crazy thing and decided in good conscience to sign up for an expedition to South America? What now????? So I'll be catching you on SEP 23 sunshine, it's going to be 'choice bro!'
Starlight starbright
Now that's a karaoke crowd! Mauerpark - Berlin
