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%

4.05 - Munich

It's raining this morning in Munich, and I'm huddled up in my top bunk with a book, under a fluffy comforter, freshly showered and dressed in warm, clean clothes. This is the nicest room I've stayed in so far. The three travelers with whom I shared it last night have all already left. Two cute German girls, consultants from other cities in town for a meeting, appeared younger than I: jobless.

The rain turns to sleet, then snow. The view out my window - a juxtaposition of rooves, of colors and textures - gathers the sky's moisture at angles, holding it in, or letting it run. Red-brick-pink-stucco, I do not know the words for most of what I see. My imageries have been the stuff of imagination.

I'm not sure if it's taking pictures, looking them over, and trying to figure out what works. Maybe it's just traveling, not speaking the language, when the sounds of a conversation seem more noticeable than the meanings of the words. Or maybe it's all the art I've been seeing. Anyway, sensory parts of me seem to be opening up in new ways, or maybe just forgotten ones. Image - colors and shapes: how they express themselves amidst a field of differences, and similarities - its alive, or lively, or changing in me. And I don't yet speak its language.

Eating breakfast this morning at a table by myself, I slowly bit into an apple watching the ways it bore the bite marks, spaced against each other around its core. Within thin skin it grew sweet flesh around its seeds, protecting them, offering them; appealing to the appetites of distance, and difference, for propagation.

Where do we - eating, interacting - stop? When we're no longer hungry? When the fruit tastes bitter? or we reach the seeds?

4.04

The sun comes up purple on the German country-side. The steep red-roofed houses, white, spread wide or clustered around the grassed and muddied fields, wake with the almost silence of a passing train.

Hungry, tired, who are you? Lonely, worn down, at wit's end, what are you capable of?


Munich

A new city, equipped with the small compass I purchased in Brussels, open to exploration...

And what beer! The Hofbrauhaus was nice, and you can't beat a whole liter of fine German beer, but I have to agree with the guidebook, the Augustiner beer garden was nicer. The beer was smaller, but richer, and I got to have a nice conversation with a young couple from Boston, World War II buffs, not to mention a big old German pretzel.

4.03 - Brussels
In every city there's a conglomerate of closely related experiences which intersect to shape a somewhat vague, amorphous, culture; a culture which in turn shapes the range of individual experiences within it. Inside of every city, there are an infinite number of cities: accumulate experiences thrown together, by chance and determination, into lives.


Sometimes I'll go to the monuments and take pictures of the tourists taking pictures. I still like the monuments, taking pictures of them, and reading about their history. But it’s also fun to notice the intersections: where a four-hundred year old church sits beside a sexually suggestive builboard; where an old woman in a shawl asking you for change stands between them; where a younger, wealthier woman goes inside the church to hear the music, or see the history, and returns outside to jarring images of what she’s supposed to be, or look like.


I like to walk the back streets and stumble into courtyards in the poorer parts of a city, to notice the laundry drying on the lines. Today I ate chocolate and waffles until my belly hurt. Tonight I'm going to take the overnight train to Munich.

4.02 - Amsterdam

This morning I went with the Austrians and the Canadian over to the Van Gogh Museum. I never knew very much about his life, or had seen anything other than the more famous of his paintings, but I was thoroughly impressed.



Afterwards, having not yet eaten all day, I went to an empty Mexican cafe run by an Egyptian man who spoke Dutch to me. In the northwestern part of the city, in a more historically working class neighborhood away from the tourist shops and restaurants, Otis Redding was playing on the radio, and I ate a large burrito. After a while, a man from Amsterdam and his Northern Dutch wife, old friends of the owner, came in, the three of them sitting down to a friendly conversation. Slowly, we all began to sing along to the music.



They invited me to their table, and bought me a beer. In English we talked about music and politics and culture, about Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the EU, and the US. He loved the city and told me where I might be able to find a job if I wanted to stay. I could see myself staying here, but it also seems a bit intense with the red-light district and all the smokeshops. It seems a bit too touristy. I left the restaurant, went back to the hostel to gather my bag, and say goodbye to my friends, and headed for the train station, and a late night arrival in Brussels.

4.01 - Amsterdam

For most of the day I just wandered around the city. I'd finished the book I was reading (Mother Night, which I forgot to tell you that I borrowed from you Taylor) last night, so I stopped at a used book market in one of the open squares, and finally found something that looked interesting, and English, Paul Auster's Timbuktu.


At night, with low wooden tables surrounded by large seating cushions, I found myself upstairs in what seemed like an opium-den (though it was only a smoke shope). Not too confident in my joint rolling, one of the two guys from Austria - another is from Toronto - with whom I'm sharing a room at the hostel, rolled one. And then another. We invented a smaller game of snooker, flicking discs with our fingers into one of a small chess-sized board's four corners. By the end I'd gotten the hang of it and won the last two games. They went back to the hostel, as one of the Austrians quite incapacitated from his smoking too much, and I wandered off to get a slice of pizza.

I don't know the age it becomes comfortable to think of yourself as a man. I don't know when that will become comfortable.

3.31 - Amsterdam (some first observations):

Already, in descent, there's a pronounced visual difference. An order. Un-American; not in any condescending sense of patriotic one-upsmanship, like that term's now often used, but something else, something organizational that I just haven't ever seen at home, or maybe I just haven't noticed. Channels pass concentrically from the city's center to its outskirts. There are lanes and traffic signals for the bicyclists, who outnumber the drivers (and the bicycles outnumber the people!). Ducks swim in the channels, and trolleys channel down the roads.

Forget what you might have heard with puritanically-rooted American ears: not just the red light district here is orgasmic. Ohh, what public transportation! Philadelphia, America, you could be so much more with just a bit of love for your Septa, or your Amtrak, or a little bit more thoughtful, efficient, domestic planning. Perhaps a little less war.

The people in this city bustle around, looking driven. But they bike too. And they don't always seem to be driving towards anywhere in particular. Or to be too worried about getting thrown off track. The men sit with their legs crossed at uncovered cafe tables smoking cigarettes.

Places tend to have a feel, a general tone with which they approach their internal tensions, a manner in which people wear their differences: the way they sit on a train amongst dissimilar appearance, or negotiate a conversation swollen with linguistic gaps of understanding. Once you have to work just to communicate, it can change what you mean, even when you no longer have to work for it. There are so many different languages here, so many ethnicities, so many cultural histories. They've certainly had their fair share of tensions in the past, and with the EU there are bound to be so many more, but...

I dont know, maybe it's just me. I've never really traveled much before. It's funny how strong the onrushing drive to interpret can be upon arriving in such a place. You try your best to digest, I imagine, to judge it.

And hell, this is only Europe...