NPD

Upcoming demonstration against the German Neo-Nazi party (NPD)

Kreuzberg

Now in the few days that i have been in Berlin I have developed a serious soft spot for Kreuzberg, so on my birthday I could think of nothing better than spend the day down there. It's a pretty diverse place, and is one of the few places I've seen here where you can actually get a street offering 'the world of food' (the sort of thing that keeps Melbourne in my heart). I am told that Kreuzberg is the largest Turkish 'city' outside of Turkey, which makes for great Turkish food in particular, great dessert and a damning state sanctioned history of racism against the residents.
The Kreuzberg museum does a good job of documenting both the trend of post-war immigration, the economic discrimination of the new migrants and the massive outbursts of anger and state repression that all this has caused.
Oranienstraße is the main street, and its got all the telltale signs that its been has been swamped with students, artists and young professionals in the last few years. Every wall or window sill that can be painted has been painted, and so for me kind of a fairytale place. The land of good graffiti, good political posters and good food. All in all its like a big treasure hunt; you're constantly stumbling across great things here while looking for something else. While we were looking for the museum we found an ornate Turkish bathhouse, while we were looking for a bar we came across a huge park, still lush, green and pretty. Yes, Kreuzberg. Yes.

Amongst other things

Amongst those other things that I just mentioned that made for a fantastic day yesterday includes gazing upon (and then eating) the best chips in the world. Ahem, listen up, this is a statement of fact, I had THE BEST CHIPS IN THE WORLD. At the Frittiersalon down the road. It was accompanied by a Camembert burger. Which was amazing. But nothing could take the limelight away from the best chips in the world. And these guys know it.

Gertrude and Alice: 100 Years, 100 Roses

Lifting belly can please me because it is an occupation I enjoy. A Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
(Bee Time Vine)

Yesterday was a great day. Amongst other things we went to see an exhibition at the Schwules Museum about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. It was great, well until I read that they were both avid Republicans.

Then it was more of a case of pouting and feigning disinterest, though I will say that I still think that Gertrude's poetry is second to none. And to anyone who thought that they were the one that came up with the idea of wearing waistcoats, think again. Gertrude had you beat by 100 years.

Berlin

Now I know I have been writing disclaimers on almost all of my posts to indicate just how patchy my treatment of these cities has been, and I know that false modesty and self-consciousness and all that can get old really, really quick. But hey, I am trying to learn German here, this is no time for further self-improvement. So this time I am going to go one step further and blatantly plagarise someone else's thoughts on Berlin cos I reckon they're onto something, and said it all much better than I could.

Eighteen years on from the collapse of the wall and the city is in the thrilling throes of making itself up, deciding what it’s all about, creating a future out of the collected lessons of an unusually turbulent past. It’s an intriguing and beautiful mess of left-wing activism, naïve idealism, stomping capitalism, a struggling economy, dizzily shifting demographics, national pride, national shame, identity politics, scholarly debate and blooming creativity. It’s a city of contrasts and counterpoints – it’s both rough and refined, multi-cultural but scarcely multi-ethnic, and the art and ideas produced here range from the sublime to the ridiculous. There is a lot of rot in Berlin that passes itself off as alternative, but there is much of worth and, importantly, the city affords everyone the time and the platform for self-expression, rot or not. With cheap-rents, a low cost of living and abundant physical space to manoeuvre, it’s no wonder that slews of Irish people, British people, Americans and Australians are moving in to take a break from the culture of work-sleep-work-repeat and to immerse themselves in the cultural, political and artistic genesis of an exiting new capital.
It’s an important place, physically and psychically at the centre of the new Europe; and the pace and force of change here make Berlin an invigorating city to be in and infuse a sense of history being made by the day. So now is the time to take a look.

Indeed. I've been looking and all of a sudden I am pretty much in love.

I forgot to write about Scotland

So my plan to document every city has gone completely awry, and now I'll never remember just how I felt about Scotland. Glasgow was surprisingly hip and vegetarian, and Edinburgh was fairytale pretty, so much so that our trip seemed all storybooky and cute, at least until we had to walk back up the Royal Mile again. Then it seemed grim and backpackery again. A recurrent theme. One highlight was the awesome lefty bookshop near the uni in in West Nicholson Street: http://www.word-power.co.uk/ Here I spent a happy half an hour looking through books that you just don't get to see everywhere; graphic novels documenting the history of the Industrial Workers of the World in the US, the publications of about 29 different Marxist groups in the region and a trans gender guide to Edinburgh. Great. I left having spent way more than my budget would really allow, which to be fair on me wasn't hard given that my left wing book budget was somewhere not far above zero.

Our return to London was made a lot less stressful by taking up Xanthe's kind offer to accommodate us, so we spent our last few dates living in a beautiful flat in Brixton, eating nachos, taking in the (comparative) calm of the high street and markets and watching kid flicks with Xanthe's son Jackson in the evenings. FUN! I think I enjoyed Jimmy Neutron even more than he did. Brixton is great.

Our last stop in Britain was Winchester, home of a very large statue of King Alfred and my uncle Alan. Here we spent a truly picturesque day strolling through the common with Stanley the Lakeshire Terrier and being fed well. By the end I felt happy and clean. A little too clean. Our last night in Hammersmith fixed that quick smart; I am still scrubbing the stench of a spirited rendition of Men at Works "Down Under" off me that I received courtesy of the (Brisbane) cover band during check in. Stay out of the Australian ghetto! I knew that. I know that. Why don't I ever take my own advice?

Anyway its all over now, and we are in Berlin. And that really, really deserves its own post.

Manchester

Manchester is a great mix of old and new. I had been told that every Northern city except York is just like Melbourne, (or to put it accurately, that Melbourne is just like every Northern city) and its true, except of course that all the things in Melbourne that feign old world charm can actually be found here in living colour. Well, you know, that muted, ye olde colour anyway. There are trams, indie record shops galore, decent hip hop coming out of clubs and pubs, working class history museums, one pound pints and good curries. I believe we may have even sited fresh fruit while here. Not as hum drum as you might think. Needless to say, I liked Manchester a lot. I'd been won over even before I'd found my bed for the night. I mean it was always going to be hard for me to not like a place that puts caricatures of Morrissey and the Happy Mondays on its tourist info map.

We even had a major rock moment over a XXL can of Red Stripe at a bar called the Night and Day. After finally sitting down after debating just where the best Mancunian watching spot might be our ears pricked up to the sound of Johnny Marr and gushing man with a Dictaphone discussing the ins and outs of whether releasing “Handsome Devil” was a good idea of not. I never knew that music biographies of fading rock gods were really cobbled together by interviewing the same people over and over again for 20 years until their half baked theories on life became a mantra to be repeated over and over again, especially to anyone who could finance yet another publication. Well now I know.
This was on Oldham Street, and here there was so much more to love. For instance, it was here that I found what I thought was always going to be the Shangri-la of England; the mythical decent coffee, and a warehouse devoted to retaining all the flannelette's and crispy shirts that I would ever dare wish to own. And there was even a Postal Strike going on down the road. To pay tribute to this wonderful place Louisa and I felt that going to see the preview of CONTROL here would be apt, though it became pretty clear pretty quickly that Ian and I weren't seeing eye to eye about the place. My doubts soon evaporated in the face of an ART EXHIBITION NEXT DOOR THAT WAS ACTUALLY REALLY GOOD, and the Peoples History Museum down the road that was equally outstanding.

So all in all we came, we saw, we got totally charmed and then we had to leave again.

Who put the M in Manchester?

London

DISCLAIMER: I am not going to do London justice. London is so many places, and for a regional youth like me (well sort of), its a bit overwhelming so we ran away fairly quickly. We're going back soon though. Anyway after successfully rendezvous-ing with Louisa at 6pm at Bethnal Green tube station (with 4 minutes to spare despite the efforts of rush hour to throw me off course, or at least make me traverse the course very, very slowly) I was was feeling pretty much in CONTROL and ready to own this town. We first went to Camden Town cos I thought it would be a little bit less abrasive than the rest of London for poor jetlagged Louisa, who I think is currently holding the world record for having the longest flight AND longest stopover in world history. That night I had a good time trying to find everything as funny as she did in her state of delirium. Drinking helped here. The phrase "It's all just like The Bill here!" has never been uttered more frequently or with such mania. In the morning we went back to check out the markets, but since we were there at approximately 5.30am (jetlag again) we were unable to make the variety of impulse buys and cultural mistakes ordering curry than we otherwise might have liked to. Oh well, my backpack feels much better for it.

Since then we've done plenty, but the standout parts of town for me were Bethnal Green & Shoreditch (home of many things including a RESPECT seat, some great bars and a big anti-war exhibition by Gerald Laing), Vauxhall and Brixton, which would've been even better if we'd managed to have our trip coincide with the markets actually being open. We stayed in Vauxhall for a couple of nights, and yeah I really did listen to Morrissey's Vauxhall and I on repeat. I have been fairly shameless in this. My happiness at being in Morrissey land, and particularly an era of a good album was only matched by the Christian missionary from Minnesota who we met who had come to London to help the Britons worship God and meet Tom Baker (AKA one of the latter day Dr Who's). I've never been more affected by the enthusiasm of someone waving a mobile phone with a fuzzy picture of a gawky young man and a fuzzy figure who I was assured was Tom Baker. So there really is something for everyone in London.

So it's almost time for me to leave my little haven at Osbaldwick Lane and head to the big city. It's been a reassuring couple of days for me, York is small enough to walk around without a map and know you'll bump into a bus stop before too long, and big enough to feel pleasantly anonymous amongst the weekend crowds. That's just one of the things about this place, even the heavy set men hanging on street corners smoking cigarettes seem as quaint as the place itself as soon as they open their mouths.

Apart from a few moments of map sharing around the city walls and some cheeky banter with a delightful ginge lad at the bookshop (who charmed me silly with his encyclopedic knowledge of Samuel L Jackson's high school civil rights activism) its been quiet. Granny doesn't say so much; our interaction consists largely of her asking me if I like her best efforts at Yorkshire cuisine, and me saying 'oh yes, yes its great. Yeah it's lovely I said'. Let no one say that there is no place for white lies in this world. Of an evening we sit by the fake fire, made particularly convincing by the central heating forever set to MAX. No wander I feel alot like my elderly cat Flick here, constantly curling up and quietly drooling on the sofa, waking up only for food and the litter tray. She'd like it here, and she'd probably wouldn't even notice the long haul flight to get here in between her naps.

Okay, no more naps. Lets go.