what do you know, Deutschland?
By anders pearson 20 Dec 2001
so lani and i finally made it to berlin this past weekend. after a few minor mishaps, we even made it back.
<p>on friday we got off to a somewhat <a href="node.pl?nid=2814">late start</a>. happily though, the airline gave us dinner and a $140 credit each on future flights with them (this becomes important later in the story) as compensation for the 6 hour delay. at our stopover in milan, we noticed that it was a little chilly out. berlin was absolutely freezing. cold, rainy (well, rainy and snowy and freezing-rainy), and dark for most of the time we were there. most people would have been disappointed with the weather. i think i would have been disappointed if it hadn’t been miserable; the cold and wet atmosphere is closer to how i’d always imagined berlin.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.miromi.org/">mimi</a> met us at the airport and led us back to her apartment to drop off our stuff. the public transportation in berlin is wonderful. the trains are clean and fast and everything works on the honor system. that’s good since berlin covers a pretty large area so you have to travel a long way to get anywhere. mimi’s apartment is in a bohemian part of east berlin. having spent time in china, i felt right at home with the old, distinctly communist architecture. it’s apparently a “cool” place for young people to live now and a wide variety of ethnic restaurants, bars and clubs have sprung up along with makeshift squats in the abandoned buildings. </p>
<p>we went to a star trek themed bar down the street for some dinner and drinks with mimi’s friend whose name i’ve forgotten but who was a forestry phd student at the university of toronto and who was very nice. after some pizza and a couple pints of hefeweizen, we were ready to go out on the town. first we figured we’d get the tourist stuff out of the way and went to check out the Reichstag but discovered that we’d gotten there 5 minutes too late to go in. then we went to Potsdamer Platz and got our fill of fancy modern (or is that postmodern?) architecture. finally we went to a drum n bass club called “icon”. it seemed to have been built out of someone’s basement. very dungeon-like. the music was pretty good and they had a projector showing little video clips that had me fascinated for hours.</p>
<p>the next morning, because i had forgotten to fully work out the “lani is allergic to cats” + “mimi has cats in her apartment” equation, lani got up really early and went outside so she could breathe and take some pictures of graffiti. the city is pretty much covered in graffiti. very refreshing after living in new york which <em>should</em> have lots of it but has been helpfully “cleaned up” and sterilized by the boring people who are in power. when she got back, we went out some breakfast and then wandered the city some more. we went to the Pargamon museum and looked at old babylonian and roman temples, saw tons more cool graffiti and went to the Neue Synagogue, where security is apparently tight and i was more thoroughly metal-detected, frisked, and searched than i’ve ever been at any airport or government facility. </p>
<p>finally, we made it back to the Reichstag and, after waiting in line for a while, actually got to go inside. it’s very cool. they put a huge glass and metal dome over the hall where the government meets and people can go up in it and look down on their representatives. i figure they should have just gone the whole way and converted the government to “thunder dome” style. when a bill is introduced: two congressmen enter, one congressman leaves. pretty soon people would just start electing professional wrestlers [as lani points out: “oh wait, we’ve already started doing that”]</p>
<p>then off to a Biergarten for some real german cuisine (and more beer of course). i had some kind of mashed potato and egg concoction with a wonderful mustard sauce. tasty and filling. then tea and glühwein, a hot wine + rum + fruit + spices christmas drink that warms you up like nothing else. the swedish have a similar drink that uses large quantities of vodka instead of rum but is otherwise the same.</p>
<p>after dinner, we went to — tucker, are you paying attention? — a <a href="http://www.paules-metal-eck.de/">metal bar</a> for drinks. it totally rocked. demons, scary crucifixes and battle-axes on the wall. death metal on the stereo and a wide selection of tasty malted beverages. i was in heaven.</p>
<p>the next morning, we get up at 4am so we can catch our 6:55 flight out of Tegel. as the taxi was waiting downstairs, lani realized that her passport was missing. minor panic set in. we spend the next couple hours trying to get a photocopy of her passport faxed to mimi’s office. eventually we realize there isn’t much we can do until the american embassy opens that afternoon so we go back to sleep (i’ve found that while some people get panicky and others very focused and efficient during stressful situations, my natural inclination is to go take a nap. if we still lived on the plains of africa, i’d probably have been eaten by a cheetah long ago).</p>
<p>we’re woken that afternoon by a call back from the airport. apparently lani had been lucky enough to have lost her passport on a plane or in the airport and it had been found and turned in to the police. so, while we’d missed our original flight, we at least would be able to get home after all. since mimi was at work, lani and i made the trek across the city by ourselves to pick up her passport at the airport. while we were wandering around figuring out the subways, i realized that i’d picked up a nice cold. </p>
<p>we went back to mimi’s place and basked in the heat of the coal stove for a while while lani fought with the airlines over getting our tickets fixed (we bought them on priceline for cheap so they weren’t really refundable or changeable) and ate bread and cheese with mimi’s roommates and my cold made me progressively less lucid. </p>
<p>up at 4am again the next morning to catch that day’s flight. we hadn’t had any success with getting our tickets changed but we decided we’d just go to the airport and try to look pitiful (suprisingly easy on about 2 hours of sleep and a bad cold) and hope they’d let us fly standby. our scheme more or less worked. they couldn’t change our tickets but those $140 vouchers we’d gotten perfectly covered the cost of new return tickets.</p>
<p>overall, i really liked berlin. the people weren’t very outgoing but they were definately friendly. despite having a bad reputation as being the dirtiest city in germany, berlin was cleaner than anywhere i’ve been in the US. i really want to go back sometime for longer. preferably in the summer, which everyone assured us is heavenly in berlin and preferably after i’ve learned a little more german so i don’t feel quite as helpless on my own.</p> Tags: berlin