Blogs
A Trio of Stories
photo courtesy of the author
BEGINNINGS
When I arrive at Arwobau Apartments in 63 Adalbertstraße in the East-Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg, I feel perfectly at home. I meet my roommate—a pink-haired and petticoat-ed artist from L.A. who calls herself Fiasco—and her best friend, who treat me to a just-cooked meal of vegan pasta, having already grocery shopped. I know instinctively that in this place, I will feel challenged, but never miserable.
I take my own trip to Kaisers, the market that lies just beyond the perfectly square reservoir and sloping green banks of Engelchen Park, where I find myself strangely drawn to German adaptations of American favorites—Special K with chocolate and strawberries, and the like. I buy my first canvas shopping bag, which depicts a frog kissing a lipstick-ed tortoise, encapsulated by a circular rainbow. “Schützt unsere Umwelt!” they say—Protect our Environment.
Later, downstairs in the room that looks just like mine, two floors down, I define NYU culture for Sean, a Duke student on the program. Having been thrown into a pool of what Sean is now calling “hipsters,” and having just drank the amount of vodka one might drink when you’re a Duke student with all NYU kids, Sean decides he’s going to style himself as one. He won’t be wearing underwear, he proclaims, since this is “what hipsters do.” He puts on a striped cashmere sweater—it gets a 4/10 from me and I beg him to put on my try putting on my wayfarers and flannel shirt. Instead, Sean moons me and twenty others. We talk and eat Haribo gummy bears, a German candy—not Japanese, like I thought. We research Kreuzberg bars on Time Out Berlin.
On Oranienstraße, we find Franken. I’m told if I go here and mention that I know Glenn from The Slackers (an American ska band), that Hilda the bartender will give me free drinks. I do, and she does, singing saxophone riffs with a German lilt. Two Gambian men, Jacks and Abraham, are regular customers here—they’re from “a really skinny country.” They light joints, one after the other, and when I ask Jacks how he’s able to do it, he motions for me to lean in really close, and then presses his adam’s apple with his finger, indicating a fake button that will now change the tone of his voice. Like Darth Vader, he says to me, “I do not smoke cigarettes.” Two new friends, both named Eddie, decide that since they’ve told two Swedish girls on the opposite end of the bar that we’re all in Berlin studying drum science, it might be time to leave.
Before bed, Fiasco and I eat Special K and watch Sexy Cam, a German candid camera show. In each and every segment, the subject is somewhere—a restaurant, at school, a Laundromat—where without prompt, everyone around them strips down to no clothing. We flip to a channel where two men play mandolin, and a woman makes a pretzel shaped like a treble clef, and it is definitely bedtime.
The next night we spy via conjoined balconies on the apartment next door with a mirror attached to a broom handle. Like giddy children, we throw Haribo gummies around the divider and giggle, ducking. Then we’re pulled away by a more adult activity—an invitation to our new friend Phil’s house—a real Berliner apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. On the way, we must stop to buy wine twice, because my friend Beki has mistakenly swung the bag with the first bottle in it at one of the metal pillars that inexplicably dot the sidewalks. Later in the night, I will unwittingly walk straight into one, get the wind knocked out of me, and have to be carried home.
Phil’s house is humungous and 900€ a month. There’s a winding staircase leading to a sweeping roof with a firepit and views of Alexanderplatz, and a fully equipped laundry room. The place is decorated with Urban Outfitters furnishings. We learn Phil is obsessed with Disney, and he serves us fondue fixings on The Little Mermaid bowls and glassware. He speaks impeccable English, and I can scarcely tell he’s not American. Once I catch him saying “acidy” rather than “acidic,” but that’s it. He and Lea tell us stories from their 21-year-old lives as not-so-starving actors in Berlin.
The next day, Cara and I explore. We eat breakfast in a Prenzlauer Berg coffee shop amidst of field of flawless laptops. We encounter an alleyway in Hackescher Markt which houses a giant steel sculpture of a bat that flaps its wings and lifts its heavy steel eyelids when you feed it a € coin. We find Temporary Showroom, an experimental clothing store where designers are rotated out every two months like an art gallery; a particular dress makes me appreciate the properties of plywood.
We arrive at Kunstwerkstaadt Berlin (KW), the P.S. 1 of Berlin. It’s always nighttime in KW, the windows coated in a dark vellum. There’s a bed Cara wants to sit on, a painting Cara wants to touch. There’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen reading “Der Gott der Kleinen Dinge,” the god of small things. There’s a room covered in antique rugs where the ceilings slope on dozens of axes. In it, a black and white video of an old couple arguing about their relationship.
Just outside the KW, is Hotel Marianbad, a small space that commissions artists to decorate it however they want. Then the artist can live there for free while installing and running their exhibition. The two rooms are decorated now like a very masculine hotel room, with a taxidermy horse head on the wall. There are strike-matches organized meticulously on the nighttable. A woman stands inside the exhibit to direct us into the second room, accessible by a secret passageway through a rotating mirror. Murmuring voices talk through speakers as we enter. In the second room are a stack of bunk beds, five-high, and a kitchen table with raspberry candies. While we’re in there, a woman comes into replenish the pile, saying that everyone always eats them. There are no limitations or criteria for usage of the space. Once, there was just a poem hung on the wall in an empty room.
Cara and I eat in Schönenberg, at an outdoor farmer’s market, which seem to be every few blocks. Falafel, rose petal preserves, mango juice, and a mackerel sandwich for which the fish is filleted to order. At Buchbilder, an old dessert shop, we read a menu that looks like a newsletter and order cheesecake that puts us in a sugar coma too deep to play with the elaborately decorated dollhouses that are mounted on the walls. On our way home, we play in a playground where we decide that many of its activities would definitely not meet safety code regulations in America. Incredible, risky fun.
We go to Panorama at night, “regarded by culture experts as the best club on the planet,” a Berliner in line tells us. Of the twenty people I’m with, three of us are allowed in. I get searched for my camera and when they find it, it gets checked like my coat, in a network of tiny cubbies. Panorama has a strict no-recording policy, because of all the things they allow to happen inside. Photos seem a small price to pay. The space is a converted warehouse, a network of secret hallways, pipes, and lights, with private elevated booths we hoist ourselves into. Every five minutes, a fog machine obscures the entire room, then clears like magic after twenty seconds. On the way home, Cara orders a McFischStäbchen from McDonalds, a fish sandwich shaped like a fish. It has a mouth and eyes and comes in a treasure-chest-box.
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INTERLUDE
Weinerei is a magical, magical place. It’s an every-day capitalist’s utopia. A place where price isn’t price at all, but mere suggestion. You have to know how it works, though, or the owners can smell your ignorance. You get a glass, you fill it up, you go back for refills all night long, and then you pay what you think you owe. It’s commonplace to leave 1€ per glass, but “people” have found that if you drop a handful of small change into the jar, it’s impossible to tell what you’ve left, given that 1€ pieces are coins.
Weinerei is hot as hell and housed by a whirlwind of ex-pats from everywhere. Once, a man named Raphael gave me his international phone number and told me to call him next time I’m in Ibiza, since he deals condos there. “Any day now,” I told him.
Coincidence in America breeds a resounding “What a small world,” but in Berlin, that world keeps shrinking. It’s effectively normal to meet a few people each night from different countries, exchange numbers and life stories, and feel fulfilled. I imagine that with Berlin as a base, one could meet interesting people all the time, feel no need to prove history or heritage to them, and travel the world, subsisting off connections.
One night, upon leaving the weinerei, my friend Callia promptly wipes out on the cobblestone exit and the manager motions me come back inside. Clearly, she points out, this girl has drunk her weight in wine and needs to pay the price for her obvious wastedness. She does. Then, in a cab, Callia (who can normally hold her liquor to surprising capacities) projectile vomits onto the cab driver, who immediately drives us to Alexanderplatz and a Geldautomat (ATM). Another friend, Bryan, volunteers to clean up the mess while the remaining eight of us pile out of the van. Though the seat and floor are now clean, the driver still screams, demanding we pay the fine, which is 150€. None of us believe him, but it’s clear that we’re not getting out of this one. I volunteer to go to the Geldautomat to take out the entire sum until Callia is sober enough to reimburse me. The Geldautomat is out of money, so I return emptyhanded, ready to sweet-talk my way out of there.
When I get back, it is only Bryan with the cabdriver.
Bryan, who speaks German, sidles up to me. “Do absolutely everything I tell you to do.” I realize what this means is “We’re gonna run,” which I absolutely do not plan on doing. I tell him so.
Having resigned ourselves to fate, the cab driver leads me by my shoulders like a hostage into another bank and stands over my shoulder to watch how much I’m taking out. All the while, he is repeating the same phrase, spoken bitterly through gritted teeth. Bryan tells me later the phrase had meant “stupid, short American bitch.”
Weinerei is a magical, magical place.
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photo courtesy of the author
HEARING BRUSSELS, EATING LYON
Ten months ago today, two Europeans gave four American college students their couches to stay on. Having just lived in Berlin for four months, we decided to travel before returning to America. In Brussels, our host is Scott, a music executive who carries our four suitcases up his six-story walk-up to reveal a one-room loft apartment, divided into rooms by floor-to-ceiling walls of records, strung together with fishing wire. Scott leaves a hand-drawn map and an extensive list of suggestions, then disappears to his girlfriend’s house for days, leaving us the residents of his “chouette Bruxelles flat.”
At Scott’s suggestion, we go to the Bozar Museum, where art and architecture are indeterminable. The chairs, motorized, walk around the quiet hallways like toddlers with a clubfoot. An exhibit on the new Icelandic Arts Convention Center in Reykjavik showcases an LCD display that mimics the Northern Lights while a symphony plays. It’s model’s exterior is elongated octagons of colored glass. New York gallerists wouldn’t bat an eyelash at 90% of the art in the Bozar, though it is charming and playful and smart. Rosalie Platteau’s video art, projected on a wall, parodies American Apparel’s infamous “scarf tutorial,” mimicking various ways one can fashionably sport a towel around ones head.
I go, the sole interested party, to the Musical Instrument Museum, an old mansion of mahogany. There are old glockenspiels, pianos, harpsichords, string instruments, zithers, from every nation and tribe, from the 16th century onwards. I get a pair of wireless headphones to walk around with, and when I stand in front of any of the instruments, a recording wires itself into my headphones from a laser in the ceiling overhead. There’s also another floor with experimental John-Cage-esque instruments that make electronic sounds from bells and computers and arrangements of spikes, mostly from the 80s, which also wire themselves into my ears through laser beams. Somehow it feels futile being at the Instrument Museum alone, presumably catching brain cancer with no one to dance with.
The subways are horrendous in Brussels, and no one seems to ride them ever. The escalators are always broken. But the handrails are multi-pronged, like a whisk, for maximum hands—a very smart design investment for such a low traffic system. The TGV train to Marseilles Airport is beautiful, in royal purple and red-orange mock-velvet. The ride is lovely, through lush countrysides with lots of cows.
In Lyon, our host is Baptiste Audet, who lives on Avenue Lacassagne 44. The building is beautiful, and Baptiste is arguably not. His apartment is very small, and he sits, wordlessly, staring at us and smiling, World of Warcraft screensaver blazing behind him. Baptiste is a guy who can’t take a hint, who is far too comfortable with long pauses, who doesn’t ask questions, and answers them in a word. He’s had about 80 or 90 couch surfers in his life, and about 20 since he moved here four months ago. He’s very eager to spend time with us and so we walk towards the city center, and get a beignet with nutella; then sit to feed the birds in Place Bellecour, the floor of which looks like spongy playground material.
We day-trip, without Baptiste, to Beaujolais. There are 2,000 vineyards around, and most of them are in the 152 most beautiful villages in France, as voted by experts. We visit a father-son team, who devote every hour of their life to properly growing and harvesting grapes for wine. They have never left the hills of their vineyard, reluctant to risk their crops unattended, even for a day. The landscape, for me an intricate patternwork of vines to marvel at while passing in a van, is these two men’s place. Their livelihood has been passed down for generations, and it could either be their sole desire in life to uphold it, or escape it. It’s near impossible to sense which. We continue driving, incessantly taking photos, and unload at a small town to wander and take more. Here we eat wine-poached eggs, and poached veal meat with rice and cream sauce, tête du veau, which is fat with meat from the cheeks of cow.
There are two rivers in Lyon that run parallel, one big and one smaller, gendered male and female respectively in the French language. The water is teal and perfect, and there’s a complex system of steps that used to be a car park but is now a bike path and a fountain.
Baptiste takes us to Ninkasi Opera, a concert hall crossed with a burger joint that makes its own beer—six different brews—in the back. I drink a Blonde beer and a Fruitée beer. Baptiste makes fun of me for not ordering a burger, and for wanting, instead, to take photos of the interesting packaging on the condiments. There is an after-dinner show, played by a band called Beltane Angel, whose members, I am positive, met at a Renaissance fair. One is dressed like a clown and sports a black afro, one has one big striped bellbottoms and has hair to his knees, and the female keyboardist wears a packaged Halloween costume (a bat? Morticia?), and the lead singer is a leopard-zebra in a Napolean hat. When the show is over, we get back on the train, then to the tram, which is all blue.
The next night, mysterious Baptiste shares a bit of his childhood with us. We go to Chez Mounière, Lyon’s smallest and oldest restaurant, where Baptiste has gone every Thursday night since he was a child. The maître d’ and waiters fawn over him like a nephew and give us wine and kiss our cheeks. Out to prove that small portions of high quality food are the way to do it, Baptiste orders us the 11-Euro pre-fixe—Salad avec Chevre Chaud, a grilled halibut with baby eggplant, carrots, and potato on the side, Fromage Blanc avec du Crème (which we then sprinkle sugar on), and a fluorescent pink praline tart. Two bottles of Beaujolais in, we find ourselves in a discussion involving Baptiste’s opinions about 9/11—“a conspiracy!” “Staged! The plane was planted!” he yells. We become resigned and quiet on the verge of tears, feeling uprooted in this strange place with a strange man, discussing a thing that we can remember happening but not quite, still adjusting to the shock of leaving Germany and the imminent fear of returning to New York.
Sensing our solemnity, Baptiste takes us to Bar Sirius, a house boat on the river, as many others in Lyon are. We drink beer with caramel syrup, and beer with peach syrup, and listen to a cover artist with a guitar sing American classics by TLC, The Police, and The Steve Miller Band. We sit by the water for a little while, fending off Spanish men, and then follow Baptiste home, his long legs striding too fast for us.
