Berlin in May

Journeying from one place to the next was a lot like being in an Opera and waiting for the Prima Donna to finish the 7th movement of her neverending song. The lover is leaving, the tram is leaving, but I can't figure out this map. The map is a blackhole, as are most streets. Occasionally, this meadering produces collateral discoveries: we found a 150-year-old pawn shop built underneath the S-bahn tracks. Every ten minutes a train's momentum would shake the tea cups and urns and mooseheads that were attached to wooden walls and bookcases. No bacon presses there (I won't relent). I figure that's okay since train grit had free range in the outside yard where kitchen appliances were stored (next to antique stroller-buggies and black busts of sober mustached men)

On the way to Berlin, I took the I.C.E (Inter-City Express) train with eight other students since the bus was full. We were entertained on the train by some alcoholics which I later realized were not alcoholics but GERMANS! The bastids! Germans are efficient at doing a lot of things including getting drunk. They don't mess around. They get drunk with the same concentration and efficiency as parting their hair. Eins; zwei; drei... so many gates to be passed and they'll do it speedily, with the same thrust of the 230 km/h train we're sitting on. Everyone drinks together. I watched these people in their 40s and 50s with their bottle that was covered in crinkly tin foil like the jagged finish of a space arm. Some of them drank out of film canisters, others out of doll-sized mugs. With the same rigour they had to finish the bottle. The 50-year-old with jeans and hair like dried algae, doled out again. His wife, blond, round, the type who wears one piece of every kind of jewelry, young-looking, almost like his daughter, intermittently went into a concentrated daze. After each shot she stuffed the same kleenex into her tiny cup and looked around. Her eyes wandered like a stunned fish, but she had a hard mouth and her cheeks were flush with energy. Their voices built like heavy clouds: Ich bin so weg! said one man. They got sloppy, and confused when they checked their surroundings. But soon they were giggling as though they'd hit an electric fence and there was some current pushing out tears and pulling the jaw wide. It's not the stage of drunkeness that would stop them, only the quantity of booze left and our arrival at the crepe-scented Hauptbahnhof in Berlin.

I left a lot of touristy things until I go back in July with my parents. My timetable was thus a little weird. Also, every place we chose seemed to be falsely advertized. Andrea and I made a list of things we really wanted to do and we came up with was this:

World War II Bunker (actually, a haunted house with mechanical manequins and sound effects)
Checkpoint Charlie (actually, a tourist trap!)
The Sea Dome (Andrea really wanted to do this and she made me read every Did You Know sign. My only retribution was seeing sting ray eggsacks suspended like headless bats from a wire.)
Gay and Lesbian Museum (pretty much what it said: a history in photos)

At the sea dome we went into a circular elevator that was surrounded by a fish tank. It was a novelty that wore off pretty much as soon as we stepped on. Why? Because we were stepping, and not being pushed in wheelchairs. We had not sat down in approximately six hours. The five-minute climb to the apex of the office building was a great anticlimax. Looking out the window was like staring at a crappy double-exposed photograph of gold fish and hotel/office windows. Andrea and I walked off the elevator as though we had just had foot surgery to attach raptor claws (a new fad?). We hobbled as if on hot-coal through the terrasse coffee drinkers to a cafe. There I sat with a cold chai and a packet of honey, eating honey directly out of the packet as if it were some sort of balm. I was in need of many massages.

The club that night made up for a lot. We had planned on going to the grand re-opening of a techno club called 'Tresor' located inside an old power plant; unfortunately, half the clubbing population had the same idea. The line-up was more of a mob, and it was impossible to judge whether people were budding in line. I was dressed up in a Lame belly shirt that I wore backwards. I also had purple and black hairspray keeping my ratty hair in place and two facepainted triangles on my cheeks. I was a raver. There are advantages to looking crazy. Strangers are intimidated by your gutsiness and don't harass you. If they do you can feign craziness, or Englishness, and turn a philosophical talk with a panhandler into an Austin Powers moment: I don't know you; you’re not German; but you're alright baby! Party on!

While we were debating what to do since it was clear we would be waiting hours to get in, I emptied out my wallet of small change and dumped the money by a lamppost. I left to get a beer and a bottle-collecting girl with red dreads found my stash of coins. The people I was with reported that she was very excited. Maybe that was my fateful mission - to leave change by a lamppost dressed in pocketless clothes so that the person who found the money would use it in order to prevent the end of civilization. Sometimes you hope life is like the movie Crash.
We left that line-up and walked down the street to a subway entrance. During the day no one would notice the graffiti and poster-covered metal door that was the entrance to a different club. Inside the club was devised like a heart: atriums and ventricles and arteries made it feel like a never-ending bunker; the doors batted open and shut between rooms like valves. Each room (minus the buffer halls) pumped a different style of music. If you walked far enough you found a door to a semi-covered patio with impeccable angular couches and cushions. Everything was clean, and everyone was civilized, talking quietly as though sharing stories at a slumber party. A few half-rooms later, you found a blue-glowing swimming pool with a long mattressed bench running along one side, and a statue of Buddha at the far end. I sat here for a long time staring at the sky and feeling as though I was high up, on top of a skyscraper, and imagining this was the private party of someone I knew. Heaven knows the poolside whiskey tasted good.