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.