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...