Question: Would something like this ever be allowed on the side of a building in America?

Now I'm not saying you really need something like this (it's a random collection of heavy metal lyrics) on the side of a building, but I found it pretty interesting to stumble upon in a place which fails to legally guarantee freedom of speech (although I guess you don't really have to stumble upon this, as it is rather in your face).


Anyway, the 'Diesel Wall' seems to be a pretty cool idea - they have a contest every year that's open to the public to create a design for the wall, and this is what happened to win this year. Along with all the graffiti and murals (Nike put up some beautiful ones for the World Cup with their logo only barely noticeable), the parks and open greenspace it seems to be indicative of a generally different take that Berlin has toward civil engineering and the role of private enterprise in the organization of public space.

7.01 - Frankfurt: France vs. Brazil

6.22 - Nuremberg


5:30 on a Thursday morning. An alarm ringing, then another. The shower grabs me and provides some minimal waking. I put on my clothes.

Nick and I are meeting Paul and Katrina at the Hauptbanhof at 6:30 to catch a train from Berlin to Nuremberg. Dressed modestly in their Uncle Sam hats, patriotic t-shirts and flag-capes, Nick and Paul have tickets to see the U.S. play Ghana at 4 pm. Ticket-less, I have on a stars and stripes cowboy shirt, and Nick's American Spirit truckers hat, while Katrina, British, is without stripes, though she makes her best attempt at being supportive in a red shirt, blue stars painted onto her face.

The station's escalator-separated levels shine an immaculate silver in the still early light, as a respectable number of Americans gather around us on the platform. I buy a loaf of bread, drown it in Nutella, then rescue it with some mouth to mouth. Aboard the train I try to read, and sleep, and wonder whether, after Germany, I'll ever be able to bear riding on Amtrak again.

We arrive in Nuremberg around 11:00. Aesthetically, it's immediately recognizable as Bavarian - for its architecture, as well as the shape and adornment of its non-football-migrant natives: old women wander about wearing afro puffs; no self-conscious Berlinese styles to be seen.

As we're not meeting Rajah, the guy with whom we are staying (a student of history and dreadlocked reggae DJ, as well as Katrina's former Turkish roomate's best-friend's brother), until noon, we stumble around looking for food, and come upon a gathering of fans.

“We are sorry,
we are sorry,
we are sorry,
you will lose”

echoes the drum-accompanied Ghanain chant (loosely to the tune of 'Oh My Darlin' Clementine'). We begin to grow nostalgiac for once-simple dismissals of other people as less human or evil, for differences unexplained and unpsychologized, for the encompassing sense of stability and self-assurance which such dismissals afford; I smile and think of Morbo, the alien news anchor from Futurama. Morbo: "Hello little man. I WILL DESTROY YOU!" We smile at the Ghanains, wish them luck, and take a few pictures. May the best team win, etc, etc.

After dropping our stuff off in Rajah's room, which he's graciously letting us use for two nights while he crashes at his girlfriend's, he takes us to a grocery store to buy some beers and whiskey. We buy some beers and whiskey. Hopping onto the S-bahn beside a bunch of American fans and a few Mexicans, in short time we build a wall (only a football wall, though, you know, covering our testicles, it's not that we're pro-NAFTA or anything)

Getting off the train and walking down the platform, 'The Star Spangled Banner' , 'America the Beautiful' or some other such not-altogether-interesting anthemic tune mysteriously begins to emanate from our increasingly licquored-up procession. We swing our arms and bounce on the balls of our feet, bemoaning the many Germans dressed up in Ghanain gear: is this simply motivated by geopolitically understandable anti-Americanism or a deeper Germanic urge to exotify (especially in Berlin, the Germans seem to have an overwhelming fascination with all things Brazilian)?


We empty our bladders into the bushes, then separate. Nick and Paul head into the stadium, as Katrina and I move towards the fan mile. Trading swigs of whiskey and sharing it with any legitimate Ghanaian fans that we can find, we begin to come upon the scalpers. Having just finished reading 'Blood Meridian', I grow nervous and prepare for the worst: large and mean, shifty eyed, with capitalisms dripping from their fangs. But for the most part they generally seem like nice people. Books and covers.

The first scalper's offering a 100E ticket for 120. I don't have the money, but Katrina does. She waffles and leans both ways. The alcohol pushes her. She buys the ticket. I take up the whiskey and head on alone, swigging without a partner. 100E on my person, owing money all over town, and with nothing momentarily in my bank account (some past due funds are shortly on the way, I hope) in a short-lived urge of patriotic fandom, contradictory to all my frugality and better sense, I become increasingly determined to see the game. The scalpers swarm. My hurriedly put-together sign, states quite simply: “I NEED TICKETS”.

Yet, after the one that Katrina found, no one seems willing to settle for anything lower than 150. And even if I could justify spending an amount of money on which I could live for almost two weeks for a mere hour and one half of my viewing pleasure, frankly I just don't have it. Which is what I tell them. Which is when they leave.

Silly price fixers, don't they know this isn't how capitalism works? It's always that the market's all free and such when you're controlling it. But I have time on my side, and the unbargainwithable aid of offering all I've got. I'll even throw in the rest of the whiskey. How can they argue with that?


Eventually, as the clock ticks toward game time, a Californian who's got his own ticket but is trying to sell off his wife's (the detective in me wants to know what he's done with the body), who I already offered my 100 to but like all the rest he was looking for 150, returns and accepts my price. Taking one final swig off the whiskey, I leave the rest behind with a kindly fellow beside whom I'd been sitting on the mile. Sprinting fervored toward the stadium, I find my seat just in time for the anthem, for which I stand. And even without my dad there to prod me, I take off my hat, cause it's not about politics now, it's about football. And I'm an American, God-damn it. And it's on, Ghana. It's on.

And then the Ghanains turn it on.

And then our Weltmeisterschaft is off.

And damn it Bruce Arena, why didn't you start Eddie Johnson?

what I've been reading:

Sherwood Anderson - Winesburg, Ohio
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room
George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
Don DeLillo - White Noise
Paul Auster - Timbuktu
Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

--

Weltmeisterschaft 2006:

The air is thick with pollen, yet most eyes are on the screens. A woman wipes a baby’s bottom by a recently constructed sandbox. Youth bounces on a trampoline. 20-somethings drink beer. A Dutch striker strikes a football just wide of the Serbian right goalpost, allegiances among the onlookers not readily determinable. In this host country, the home team is not playing, nor in the same group as either of the teams which are. And yet, in the visible range of these pixelated outdoor players, light-drawn through the pollen-filled air from newly purchased projectors, on a Sunday, seating capacities are reached.


Prinz Lauerberg is at its parks and flea markets, but mostly - it is watching football. You see a stranger on the street and want to say something. Sage brush brushes past you as you pass, wordless. You do not speak German. Makeshift beergardens are thrown up in empty lots. Those well-established gather makeshift German lines outside their walls, the ones already inside hanging over, looking for their friends. Men wear flags around their necks like capes. Women paint national colors on their cheeks. Waiting to get into the beergardens, people drink bottled beer, the bottles piling up in mounds like post-war rubble affording the city its minimal topographical variance.


In German-accented English two record producers speak of violence, of German adolescents (or Belgian ones) shooting up their schools, of a boy running into a crowd at the opening of the long-awaited Hauptbahnhof with a knife, stabbing. An American recording artist sits quietly, listening. Almost overnight the lavender explodes into color.


My mind empty with the churchbells' ringing, the sun glows down as if just risen, though it is already afternoon. A thin yellow-haired-shaggy dog lies resting, half in shade, while the bells continue without sign of letting up. Two women talk, and drink tall beers in tall skirts, with their legs crossed. They smoke cigarettes, and wear sun glasses. The dog looks up at me, its muzzle browned, its presumptive master reading, sandals off, legs propped. She puts down her book, momentarily gathers the air in a smell, and drifts back to her lines. The bridge passes its walkers, and below, the rumblings of a ring train, as I return to the unidentifiable yard to sit for an unidentifiable anthem.

Berlin:

An electro-magnetic field pulses. Laundry spins. Stops spinning. You bend your left leg slowly at the knee. Stretching your calf. A bird calls. A car passes. Accelerates. Brakes. A computer tries to scan the disc inside it. A book turns its pages. Reading.

Someone steps hard against a wooden floor. Ruffles a plastic bag. Clinks a fork against a plate. You move your right leg, rolling up, onto your side. More cars. A train too.

Groaning, empty-headed, at the morning, you scratch your balls.

'The ideal political candidate is both charismatic and authentic', you think.

The curtains pulled up, the windows bending light, the door opened, the morning says “get on with it”.


Nick, showered and dressed, lies back down in his bed, lazy. “Unni saw my penis this morning” he says, then sings a Dylan line for the two-thousandth time. I fart. “This sunshine feels awesome,” he replies, though I know it’s not a woman. (He lies and says “it feels better”)

He wonders aloud if he’s ever been alone in the world, farting. He wonders if he’s ever farted at the same time as Geena Davis.

Somewhere along the German country-side a cow, chewing, thinking cow thoughts, leaks methane.

5.08 - 5.24 Paris

Shakespeare and Company:

I am staying on the second floor of this two-story bookstore, spending most of my nights on a short makeshift mattress which serves as a sofa throughout the day, and the usual napping space for a black-haired cat, named simply Kitty.

(Aside: why is it socially acceptable to name cats ‘Kitty’, while dogs always receive more respectable, god-fearing names? Is this a sign of feline inferiority? One supposes it more complicated.)

Of the regularly employed or paid workers, there are two Irishmen: Asheen and Jonathan, an Australian: Jemma, a New Zealander: Rowan, as well as another Gemma (dating Jonathan) and Sylvia – daughter of the owner (George Whitman) and veritable manager of the shop – both Brits.

Of us migrant borders, the numbers, and the people-fleshes filling them, are constantly in flux - having gone as high as six, and as low as three during my stay.

Those of the longest tenure, and with whom I've become closest, are (in order of appearance):


Omar: A mustache-wearing, suspendered San Diegan of Mexican heritage. A would-be will-be playwrite and reader of Wind in the Willows who dreams of one day opening his own bookstore, titled explicitly.

Gabriel: A side-burned Vancouverite living in Montreal who makes bagels, surfs on couches, likes Murakami and lived alone in the woods with a typewriter at a fragile age.

John: A Rhode Island native who's wandering the world. A web-site designing, real-estate selling magician who doesn’t drink. But plays guitar. And likes the ladies.


Carl: The son of a Texas bible-thumping evangelical preacher. A whacky liberal artist angered by authoritarianism. And newly home-ful in a Parisian apartment, as I understand it, and congratulate.

and Sara(h-less): An American Pole (or Polish American, not being sure which label best conveys such multi-nationality) in her gap year, which doesn’t translate so cleanly into French, on her way to Brown University with tips on teachers, exceptionally well-read, and tongued (English, Polish, French and Swahili commandeered ably at her behest).

All of the boarders must help to open up the shop at noon, and close at midnight, working two additional hours at some point during the day (which are scheduled at closing the night before). Working in the store is not incredibly difficult, as with checkout duties being left to the regulars, the main responsibility is simply to stock and organize the shelves. Yet, discounting its relative ease and the ample opportunities which it provides for flirtation with the clientele, if one should ever find oneself looking to re-inforce the fact that mastery is an infinitely unattainable ideal in this universe, then this would certainly be at least one job to look into.


We hide food beneath the benches of the library upstairs, inside drawers and small cubby holes, snacking occassionally outside the shop during the days, though while the shop is open we generally must find food elsewhere. There’s a pretty good sandwich place run by a middle-aged Asian man and woman just around the corner on Saint Jacques where you can get a sandwich for 2E, and I often have one with tuna, hard-boiled egg, lettuce and tomato, as it seems to offer the most for the price. At nights, after closing, we pull a cofee-maker(to boil water), a hotplate and pan, out from under the upstairs sink and make pasta. We mix in some beans, and whatever cheese, tomatoes or other vegetables we may have, and along with a bottle or two of 1.90E to 2.90E wine, we have a generally nice little feast.

Especially compared to Berlin, eating out in Paris, even at the cheaper establishments can quickly become expensive. So, if you're trying to maintain any sort of a budget, you need to find some sort of balance between making your own food, and simply eating sparsely. Yet, even so-balanced, one yearns for some variety: a few times splurging for Indian food, or a couple non-happy hour beers, and a few times going for the better part of a day on just a baguette and some jam.

paris photos:

The Vertical Plane:

Whether height, or virility, or simply a defiance of gravity (one might call it phallic), so many cities seem to have a building serving little purpose beyond size. A sort of benchmark's what it means to be a city, or a beacon unto country:

Here, where dreams are realized, thrown together, we'll defy those natural laws - imposed, as from above…

Come join us as we Babel…

Or lean, Pisa, lean.

Often, in the afternoons, I go to the Jardin du Luxembourg to play basketball. The court is small with one hoop, thick-rimmed, and no three point line. There’s a crowd of regulars who I recognize by sight, but not by name. Children gather on the other end of the pavement kicking footballs, rolling scooters, and intermittenly wandering into our games, interrupting them. The structure of the court seems to dictate the style of play and the particular skills which thrive there. Slashers are often the most successful, as the scoring is generally done from what would be considered the paint, though there are no markings or colors to be found. Everyone plays pretty good defense, not excessively physical, but not lackadaisacal either. Yet for whatever reason there seems to be an inordinate number of foul (fout) and travel (marche) calls, and other such trivial interruptions of the game's momentum. Though I can understand how calling these violations when they do occur can help to dissuade smaller tensions from building into a generally more angry and violent all-around style of play, I must say, as an American, I find the French to be quite petty as far as these things go.

5.08 - Paris

Shakespeare and Company: The second floor, like the first, is humid, and packed with books. These books though, somewhat disconnected from the store downstairs, are part of a private collection, a collection which long ago ceded any hold on more conventional understandings of that word: privacy. I'm reading Italo Calvino's American Diary, the fourth section chronologically (the manner of this particular collection's organization) in an English-language translation of his autobiographical writings, titled fittingly Hermit in Paris.



Though not quite a hermit, I am in Paris, sitting by an opened window's letting in the breeze, the smell of the rain-laced spring leaves, and the Seine - rolling slightly faster with the recent rain, ensnaring monuments and tourists alike within its pale-green passage. Cars pass on the roads, over the bridge, and under the gothic towering of Notre Dame. Two Italians, a boy and girl, sit beside me, smiling at one another, conversing in a language I do not comprehend, while Italo writes in English, through the medium of Martin McLaughlin.

Were this a different place, I might have had to smuggle the book upstairs. But as it isn't, I walked quietly, book in plain site, up the rickety red-wood passage, the stairs peeling paint, partially hidden, in the back right corner of the shop. They tempt you with the way they wear their footsteps, the many years of traffic, the ascending weight of sightseers and poets, and all the ones who fall - into books of every kind, into enexplicable love with stores that feel, stores of memories on old wood shelves, into the picture-filled lives of Joyce or Hemingway, or two-year-old copies of the New Yorker lying unassumingly beside them on a well-placed desk.

This place... it's a hospice of sorts, a den of invitation, which wears it's motto in a marking, like a mantra: 'Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise'.


And, though the initial luster always fades, though the magic of any perfect communion must open itself to economic and practical realities, though you discover, in time, that it is technically 'against the rules' to bring new books upstairs, and though each person that works in such a place is never entirely (or even often) hospitable, the extent of your foreigness fades, and you gather yourself into its rhythms, dirty rhythms which afford you little privacy, but rhythms nonetheless.

And it starts to feel like home...

paris photos:

paris photos:

5.04 - Paris

The Primacy of Perception:

To take a picture, or document a line of influence, in an overcrowded cemetery, with maps for sale marking the locations of the numerous famous inhabitants, I didn't buy a map, but glanced briefly at someone else's for a less likely visited, if personally significant name.

And while somewhere, I am told, in the 52nd section of the Père Lachaise cemetery (Paris, France), the rotting remains of Maurice Merleau-Ponty stand as testament to his life (to his truly being dead), I don't know where, per se. To find a single body buried in the ground can prove quite hard.

Having searched throughout this section, not to note his stele-carved name upon a single of its stones; perhaps he is not dead…

The mind and the body indeed.

5.02 - Paris

Running east between Place de Clichy and Stalingrad the #2-line rises out of the ground just past Anvers. Between Barbès Rochefort and La Chapelle, just out the northwest corner of the Gare du Nord (one of Paris' main stations), beneath the morning rumblings of the metro, pedestrians crowd into a dense sensory marketplace.

As voices of the merchants – Arabs, Frenchmen, Spaniards – rising over one another, gather in the passers-bye, potential buyers, not quite noticing they're singing…

Prices, and the names of produce rolling rhythmically off their tongues, collectively – with the fragrant smells of olives, oranges, and the overpowering fish (their eyes gazed upwards, blankly, at the overpass) – trapped in the light, like's gathered at reflected angles under tarps drawn taut, and awnings of every color, circulating smells (and sounds) that those at either end be drawn on towards the other, bumping into the watch-man, with his fake designer merchandise, his eyes a bit crooked like he wants you to know it's a seedy business, but him: he doesn't mind it, cause you: you'll be getting a good deal…

And the prices are cheap, whether or not you need a watch, or a mango. And, for me, perhaps for the first time, Paris seems truly alive; not just an overcrowded tourist-trap after all...

4.31 - Paris

There's something to be said for tourism. Whether or not it conveys any real valuable understanding of another culture, it means something to us, we continue being tourists. T

here's certain places we flock to, historic or beautiful places, places we take pictures of. We tell our families we went there. We tell our friends we went there (we went there and took pictures). We tell ourselves we went there.

Do people who've seen the world and taken pictures of it still kill people? Still do horrible things in the name of justice, or righteousness, or no name at all? Do they live fulfilling lives as valuable members of families, and communities?

I don't know if a place can become the accumulation of all the pictures taken, all the stories told, our collective image of it? I think I've read these ideas somewhere, or heard them.



What is tourism? People visit places for different reasons. Some need a break from, a step outside, their lives. They work hard, and find in such communal gathering – around the same monuments, the same churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples, the same ruins – something reassuring, some collective memory reconstructed (perhaps a bit commercialized), some shared past that makes them feel less isolated in their particular troubles, in their particular jobs, or cultures.

I suppose, in traveling, we all find something different: some people say you can even find yourself. As though you might be out there somewhere. The real you. And all you have to do (the current you, not really you) is look in the right place, experience the right experience. I don't know who they are, these people who say this. And I imagine I don't really know who I am either. But there sure are a damn lot of cameras in Paris.

4.24 - Berlin

The Prater Biergarten: Sunset. First sun all day. Still early, the garden, packed with tables, is thin with people. I'm confused with what to do. The idea of going on to France, having grown closer, no longer holds the same appeal. Learning new cities can be both exciting and exhausting. The culture and affordability of berlin are quite appealing to this wanna-be writer looking for a home. There arent too many jobs here, but the realities of our digital age make place-specific employment seem a little less integral. Three small girls, in red and pink, swing on a makeshift swing out the corner of my right eye's distance. Clouds swallow up the sun. I finish my beer and walk home.

4.23 - Berlin

I've been staying in Berlin for two weeks now with my friend Nick. We transferred to Brown at the same time, but he graduated a few semesters back. He's been over here for a year teaching English and learning German, and is going back to the states in the fall for an MFA program at Stanford in documentary film. He's moved around a few times, but currently lives in a nice apartment in Prinz Lauerberg, a neighborhood in the Northeast part of the city, with one roomate, Otto, a Norwegian medical student. The rent is quite cheap here, Nick's is only €200/month, and you can find places that people are leaving for a while and sublet them pretty easily.



My friend Paul, an ethnomusicology grad student from Brown has also been over here working at the opera and doing research for his dissertation. The three of us played together on an intramural basketball team two years ago. It was called 'Beer'. We didn't drink so much that winter, but have been trying our best to atone for past shortcomings.


You can get pretty good .5L bottles of beer at most any grocer or small convenience store here, sometimes for as low as .50c. As there aren't laws against public drinking, we often head to the parks to drink outside in the fresh air, and just leave the bottles lying around, as the recycling program is quite well thought out, and you can get a solid refund at almost any grocer for turning the bottles in.

We've been going out most nights. I've been working on my 'game'. I'm still not sure whether or not I have any. So many intriguing women in these cities. French, and Spanish, and German. oh my.

Nick's going back to a city in the Western part of the country to teach English today, and I'm going to stay on in his place for the next day or two and try to figure out my next move.

4.21 - Today's mission: to recruit several dreadlocked Germans (of which there is a seemingly infinite supply), wrestle up some lederhosen and big fluffy St. Pauli Girl style dresses, and use Nick's video camera to record them singing 'We're German' to the tune of Bob Marley's Jammin'. We shall then offer said video to the German government's office of tourism so as it might be used as a statement of this nation's hospitality to visitors and countrypersons alike. We will only ask a nominal fee. You know, for the effort.


We hope you like Germans,
We hope you like Germans,
We hope you like Germans toooooooooo

4.15 - Berlin

This morning I woke up in the sunny warm tiredness of having not gone to sleep until 5am, rolling to the bathroom to crap out the tofu and curry I’d eaten still recently on a drunk belly. I drank some water and the last of the orange juice, gathered my notebooks into my bag, threw a long-sleeved shirt on its back, and went out to the courtyard to untilt the wooden bench and table’s laying against one another (for the run of precipitation and protection of the wood). I tried to think about art and social critique, then went off for a walk without destination.

When I got back, Nick was hanging out the window, asking about brunch. We went, meeting up with his roomate Otto, and his fiancee Unni. I ordered fruhstuck vegetarische: more tofu (unseasoned) with hummus and guacamole, olives, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, sprouts, bananas, strawberries, and so many cheeses. All laid out on a big platter, I threw everything but the fruit and olives into a couple of sandwiches, and ate slowly, for what felt like forever, on what felt like the first day of summer. Or maybe spring.

At the park in Prinz Lauerberg, with Nick and Paul, near where the old wall ran, we sat down on top of a hill, and smoked the last of my pot from Amsterdam. Between Good Friday and Easter, with Jesus dead in a cave somewhere (or something to such effect) we joked about tatoos, Paul suggesting that I get one of Alfred E. Neuman doing the Pope from behind, while the Pope made a face like Macauley Culkin from Home Alone with his hands on his cheeks, a bit suprised. As wearing such a likeness on one’s skin would most probably be some sort of sin, we decided I’d then be required to confess it. Does the Pope hear confessions? Regardless, an interesting scene.


After doing two Hail Marys, we tumbled down the hill and tried to play hacky sack. A small German girl of about 3 and shaggy brown hair, in a flower print dress, came by to join us, correcting my English words for things with their German equivalents; giggling. She said my airplane was not an airplane, though she pointed at the sky, not a sky, just the same. We threw the hacky sack into it, into the air above her head, letting her try to catch it. Once she had gotten it she would toss it off in a direction apart from our circle, already running before she'd let go, trying to beat us to it. At one point, hit softly in the forehead, as cutely as possible, she said "scheise", picked up the hacky sack, and threw it back.

She made long excursions across the length of the park, randomly inserting herself in a game of frisbee, or grabbing a soccer ball. Raised in small parts, in the course of a day, outside, in the German sun, by total strangers. Not so strange to her non-existent childhood self-consciousness.

4.11 - Berlin

In Kreuzberg I met a bearded American. The proprietor of a used bookstore. Some of my favorite kinds of stores. They had a lending policy for certain books: red-leafed on the opening page, the inside of the cover.

I finally found White Noise, for which I’ve been looking since I started it some weeks ago back in Providence, on the steps in front of the Diocese, in the windy sun of a sparse New England weekday.

He asked me if I was from California. I wasn’t. He was from Devon, and had gone to Conestoga. Small world. Now he lived in Berlin, spoke perfect German, worked at a used English bookstore, and seemed to have artistic commitments.

It came up that I’d gone to school in Providence. He assumed RISD. I said Brown. He made a softly condescending statement about my not being an artist; 'one of them'. He didn’t mean it badly. A clubhouse just has doors...

some of the music I've been listening to:

The Kinks - Muswell Hillbillies
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Ease Down the Road
Steve Earle - Train A Comin'
Townes Van Zandt - High, Low & In Between
Laura Nyro - Gonna Take a Miracle
Bill Monroe & Doc Watson - Live Duet Recordings
JJ Cale - (anything)

4.08

I hadn't realized how long the trip to Berlin would be. I thought I could leave in the afternoon, and get in that night, but I ended up needing to take an overnight train that left at 19.00 and got into the Ostbahnhof (East train station) at 04.30. After moving around the train a bit trying to get some good scenic shots of the German countryside, I found an empty cabin. After a while I was joined by an '04 UNH urban studies/German grad from New Jersey, and a German guy from the Northeast coast along the Baltic. She had just finished au pairing in Nuremburg for several months and was heading home. He spoke no English, and we awkwardly failed to communicate. After I helped him with his enormous bag though, he pulled a a couple of beers from it and handed one to me: a common language.


Berlin

The sky was still grey when I arrived, and slowly leaking light. At 5 am the station was mostly quiet - a few people passed out in massage chairs by the doorway, some kids scattered about outside, smelling of pot. I’d planned to give my friend Nick a call when I got in, but it being so early I figured I should kill a few hours first so as not to wake him. The lockers at the station that were large enough to fit my pack cost E3, so I got a falafel for E2 instead, having had only biscuits and beer for dinner, and headed east with all of my possessions toward the sunrise.

Friedrichshain, north of the old wall which ran east-west through this part of the city, is in what used to be East Berlin. It’s a sort of punkish anarchist neighborhood now, reflected in the shops and building fronts, and the graffiti and murals adorning them. There's a sort of seedy chaos, a disorderly intersection of artistic energies, and youthful cultures of potential change, a hopefullness which permeates the streets. I’d found some of this in Amsterdam and Brussels, but nothing so profound. It reminds me a bit of Providence, of Philadelphia or Brooklyn, though at least at first glance their seems to be less of a feeling of self-consious pretension here than what I've sometimes felt in similar American communities. But who knows, such judgments seem both convenient and superficial...

I did my usual wandering routine for a while, going from street to street, generally just scanning for things that seemed intriguing, or particularly demonstrative of the local culture. After a while, I found a building with a great mural on its streetfront wall, with Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama saying something about anarchy. I went into the courtyard in the back, and there was a whole big messy workshop - randomly scattered old bathtubs, bikes and their disassembled pieces, a compost heap in the corner next to the neighboring graveyard, and several more murals.


When I came back out front a couple of drunk, punkish looking fellas, evidently still partying from the previous night, stumbled out of the building and spotted me with my camera. They started posing like models, generally quite friendly, asking me some hardly intelligible questions. They offered me a beer and a joint, and we tried to talk about whatever the language would allow for, the kind of things that late night early morning drunk people talk about. No one spoke great English, except for a nice older guy from Luxembourg who was working on a biography of some Dadaist writer whose name I couldn't place. One guy was very excited to show me a picture of his friend 'Osama Bin Laden' (a nickname evidently for a white-bearded Arabic-looking German fellow). We had a great time for an hour or so, but then they started to wander off, in need of some sleep, and I went to go meet up with Nick, and to get a famous Berlin brunch from a cafe where you get to choose the price you want to pay. mmmm, vegan lentil liverwurst spread...

4.07 - Munich

My last day in Munich was a good one: warm and sunny. I rode my bicycle for most of the late morning. Having finished Timbuktu yesterday, I started out with an errand: trying to find the English bookstore I'd seen yesterday near the University. When I finally found it, all the prices were quite expensive. However, I asked the lady working there if she knew about any used English language bookstores, and there happened to be one just a five minute bike ride west on Schellingstrasse. Called 'The Readery', the store was run by a nice couple from Durham, NC who had just started it up only five or six months prior, upon finding only a total absence of used English bookstores in Munich. Even this place ended up being a bit expensive, but I wanted to give them some business, and I needed something to read. I bought a double version of Jacob's Room and the Waves by Virginia Woolf, and a book of poetry called Seeing Things, by Seamus Heaney. I've never read much of his stuff, but it looked interesting, and I find it pretty key to always have a good book of poetry around.


I rode to the English Gardens where I found a Texas fiddler, with a German drummer and bassist, playing some bluegrass. I rolled a joint and sat down under a tree and smiled broadly into Heaney's poems. Here's one I really like:


'Field of Vision'
by Seamus Heaney

I remember this woman who sat for years
In a wheelchair, looking straight ahead
Out the window at sycamore trees unleafing
And leafing at the far end of the lane.

Straight out past the TV in the corner,
The stunted, agitated hawthorn bush,
The same small calves with the backs to wind and
rain,
The same acre of ragwort, the same mountain.

She was steadfast as the big window itself.
Her brow was clear as the chrome bits of the chair.
She never lamented once and she never
Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.

Face to face with her was an education
Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate --
One of those lean, clean, iron, roadside ones
Between two whitewashed pillars, where you could see

Deeper into the country than you expected
And discovered that the field behind the hedge
Grew more distinctly strange as you kept standing
Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.

4.06 - Munich

I started the day with a proper (though meatless) German breakfast: one big-ass role with strawberry preserves, a hard-boiled egg, a slice of cheese, some musli, and apple juice. Though I smelled a bit, I did not shower. At this point I think my clothes just kind of smell, so showering won’t really make too much difference. I'll do my laundry once I get to Berlin.

After breakfast, and some Nina Simone and Muswell Hillbillies, I went to rent a bike. It's been rather cold here so far, but there's still no way to see a city quite like by bicycle. Give me a bike, a good map, a compass, and a few days, and I feel like I could get the hang of just about any city. But I do wish I'd brought some gloves. And €17 for a little over a day of wheel-based transportation is pretty damned expensive; comparatively my bike in Providence only cost me $35 to buy, but oh well.

Anyway, after getting lost about 1,000 times, stopping to pull out my map and re-orient myself, I finally made it to the English Gardens, a huge park in the Northeast part of downtown Munich which runs along the Iser River. After riding around the park for a little while my hands were pretty damn cold, and the sky was still quite overcast, so I decided to go to the Deutsches Museum. I got lost even more on the way there, and as it was nearing noon I stopped off for a pastry (which are quite cheap you can find just about everywhere in this city). With all the sausage and pastries these folks eat, and all the beer they drink, its a wonder they still generally appear to be rather healthy.


Finally, I got to the museum where I had to stretch the truth a little in order to get a student discount (I stupidly decided on the way to the airport that I wouldn't need my Brown ID, and took it out of my wallet). The place was amazing. I wish I'd gone there yesterday instead of just sitting around lounging and reading for most of the day. The museum basically encompasses the entire history of human technological and scientific innovation. I didn't even get to see a tenth of it, but the bridge, power machinery, and energy sections were all really neat. They had Rudolf Diesel’s original engine, and a lot of stuff about much of the other innovation going on around its creation. Unfortunately most of the physics and chemistry sections were only in German, and seemed a bit outdated. But even so, I could spend a week in that place without getting tired, or seeing everything.

Here's some interesting numbers:

available freshwater = 0.25% of global water supply

humans consume on average 2400 kilocalories (10,000 kJ)/day
90% of this energy is used just to maintain body temperature.

the sun supplies the earth with 1.4 x 10^18 kWh/year, or 15,000 x 1994 world energy consumption

current solar cell efficiency = 5-18%
max theoretical efficiency using silicon semiconductors = 27%
using tandem cells (different layered semiconductors) = 40%