Berlin Top 5

Everyone loves a good favourites list. Don't they?
5. German Comics







This is my favourite (and thus far, least productive way of learning German; reading comics in Deutsch. Going into a comic shop like the one in Kreuzberg is seriously dangerous, and so far everytime I have come out with titles in English and a little Spanish, and absolutely no Deutsch. So I have resolved to stop spending my money and read them online. A recurrent theme in my life.







4. Franziskaner Some beer in Germany is made out of wheat. Wheat beer. Instead of hops. Anyway this gives the beer a much stronger flavour -- which has been described by me when I was feeling a bit whimsical as 'cloves, banana and bubble-gum' flavoured -- as well as more fizz. It is generally not actually100% wheat, but somewhere around 66% wheat and 33% barley. This is my current favourite, owning largely to the fact that it is readily available from any Getränke-Fachmärkte for about €0.80 for a favourably large bottle, has a happy monk on the front and comes in three varieties. And how I love variety.






3. Weird Berlin Museums: The Museum of Broken Relationships
There are a lot of amazing museums in Berlin. In fact there is a whole island of them, its Jurassic Park out there. Unfortunately I hover somewhere between occasional museum goer to outright philistine so I haven't really given the island much of a chance. But here is one that got me to sit up and listen. I quote the museums brochure at length. " When the love affair is over and the angry words of recrimination have faded into the air, what better way to dull the pain than to put on display the tokens of that lost passion? The 250 exhibits in the Museum of Broken Relationships in Berlin are ordinary items with poignant stories attached, such as a pen used to write the now bitterly regretted love letters or the bike a man left on, never to return."
Each time the travelling exhibition pitches up in a new city, people are invited to contribute the tokens of their lost love, which they insist is a more creative and cathartic way of dealing with the refuse. One of my favourites was the story of the Berlin woman who donated an axe she had used to reduce the furniture of her female lover to matchsticks after a bad breakup. “I kept it as a therapeutic tool,” the woman says. Her departed girlfriend returned two weeks later to pick up the furniture only to find it in a splintered pile on the floor.
And the story quoted in the exhibition programme seems to be a favourite. "A well-used prosthetic leg comes with the heart-rending tale of how its owner, a veteran of the Bosnian war, had met a beautiful social worker who helped him to obtain the false limb. “The prosthesis endured longer than our love,” the accompanying note says. Under an elegant wedding dress, a woman has written: “Can I have it back if I re-marry?”

For a long-winded but kinda fun description of the conceptual underpinings of the project see http://www.brokenships.com/doc/mobr_concept.pdf


2. Rosi's Klub! + Kultur! + Kiezhof!
I still don't know what Kiezhof! means.
Rosi's is like a big old house in the middle of nowhere. Actually its just down the road from the middle of Friedrichshain. Anyway it hosts a whole lot of indie nights (a marginalized genre in electro Berlin) and if and when you find it you're pretty much guaranteed a great night of big dance moves, low prices and an unpretentious crowd that just want to kick it.
They play way too much Maximo Park, Franz Ferdinand and every other British or British sounding band of that canon, but the best part is when they play a track sung in German and the crowd erupts into a serious singalong. It's worth the wait.



1. Berlin is Nummer Eins

Note to self. Take pyjama trousers with you wherever you go.

It's been two months now since I last donned a pair of pyjama trousers, which everyone knows is the cornerstone of a good nights rest and general emotional stability. I don't know why I did it, three pairs of jeans and not one pair of pants to goon away the night in was never going to be the right choice. And the deprivation is all coming to surface. Nervous tension, the eye twitch, cold feet, signs of early arthritisism and lets not forget the occasional outbursts of trouser related fear and regret.

But that's all changed now. I thought it was just going to be another routine snoop of the apartment pulling out old lover letters and English style guides for high achieving American Phd-er's. But everything was gonna change as soon as my hand brushed against some material stuck underneath our sub-lettor's bed. Which turned out to be fisherman's pants. FISHERMAN'S PANTS. The overalls in soft textile. I am now wearing these ridiculous trousers in a state of high, high relaxation. But its come at a cost. Just as a feel too silly to write in a Moleskine 'just like Hemingway did' I now feel too silly embarrassed to write a blog in these boho trousers. So until I get these off (which may be a long time coming) this is now a photo diary. I give you the last two weeks in pictures. Don't worry, the pants have not been documented. Enjoy.


Floh Markts in Boxhaganer Straße. A find.


Still love modern art jokes.


But still it is very hard to talk about culture when one cannot differentiate between who and what.


Did you know that that guy in the middle of Liars fame is an Australian?









The Döner: Fruend oder Foe? Me feeling the effects of the Wunderlampe kebap at 3am after Liars.




















"I decided that I liked the big needle."

Love and Rockets: The Maggie and Hopey Stories

The biggest threat to my Deutsch lernen yet.

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

Life has become a little more structured for me since beginning language classes at the Sprachenatelier down the road from our flat. Its been a wonderfully confusing, challenging but above all exciting couple of weeks- peppered with small victories and occasional audible improvements to tide me over in the harder times. Learning German has put me into contact which a whole range of interesting people (the brochure even said this would happen) from all over the place, except of course from Britain. This is a mystery worth resolving. There are hundreds of Americans here, and almost as many Australians, and even some New Zealanders, but we are all having to hold our own as the irritatingly accented English speakers here without the support of the British. How is this possible? My Granny would no doubt say "It's the war, love, the blitz..." but I still feel that there must be more to it than that.

Anyway, here we are with or without them. Klaus (my language teacher) is a standout from the crowd, and I still am not over his attempt to teach us a whole range of verb conjugations in the present tense through the use of little wursts with feet that he'd lovingly drawn on the board. Over and over again. Incidentally Klaus doesn't look like that at all, he looks more like Ricky Gervais, minus the collared shirts and plus ear studs and a wry grin. I am coming to the conclusion that one in four men of European ancestry look uncannily like Ricky Gervais, and I'd like to cite the Easyjet flight attendant that brought us here and my Dad as evidence of this.

But I wouldn't want you to think that the only think we'd been up to was conjugating at likening those around us to celebrities. Oh no, we've been doing much more than that. Well, a bit more than that anyway. A standout evening was at the Babylon Kino in Mitte where we attended a screening of Sir! No Sir! (in Deutsch) on the closing night of a 1967-1977 Radical Film Festival.
It was great to be amongst a little of the left here, and the night was made all the more interesting by the introduction and Question and Answer session afterwards by two Vietnam Veteran's Against the War (who feature in the film) Stephen Summers and Dave Blalock. Turns out they have made Germany their home in order to help US soldiers stationed for training here in Germany prior to their deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan to desert. Summers also helped set up the STOP THE WAR BRIGADE in Germany during the Gulf war to build support for anti-war GIs, and has made a whole series of films that he distributes to soliders that document a growing resistance in the US military. There were certainly debates going on in the room between the two men and different political groups in attendence. If only my German was a little better I might have known what they were! In any case, it was amazing to hear the same kind of things that get brought up in Australia brought up here, particularly the one that goes something like "Yeah, okay its all happening in ___________ (insert mythical land where it is easy to build against the war, on this ocassion it was Italy), but its not like that here in Berlin, the people are just too apathetic here". I never thought I would here that here, but there you go.

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.