Berlin Photo Diary- Part Two

Berlin is not only about books and films, it’s also about the music. For some it’s Bowie, for others Lou Reed, for others yet Nick Cave- I love them all, but the ultimate Berlin music for me is U2’s Achtung Baby. Their best album by far (in my humble opinion- which generally implies you’re sure as death and taxes), it reached me in my most formative years musically speaking, so taking a shot at Zoo Station was a must. Time is a train/Makes the future the past/Leaves you standing in the station/Your face pressed up against the glass.

Club Mate has always been the Berlin drink by definition to me- it’s of course made somewhere next to Munich, but that’s a side note to the story. I once saw a picture of someone in Berlin casually drink it, and, since I was a major energy drink fiend at the time, I felt an undefeatable urge to try it. By the time it finally made it to Budapest I’d given up on energy drinks, but got hooked on mate, so I obviously loved it. Berliner Pils has however never made it to Budapest, at least not that I know of, and I feel there’s a pretty good reason behind that, but not going into details is probably more gracious. I however felt that the pairing of the two empty bottles on a sunny morning in Kreuzberg was very fitting to the city’s spirit- little did I know that I gave a total fright to a very polite German vagrant, who assumed that I intended to pilfer his bottles and take them to the recycling centre. Once it became clear to him that my intentions were pure, he chilled and rattled away with a bag filled with these two, and other precious receptacles.

This the moment you look up, go, awwww, this building is so cute,  how  nicely they all colour-coordinated, and then it suddenly dawns on you that you hope to God those windows don’t open to the outside.

More amusements for a Kreuzberg morning walk, deciding whether this is the trunk of an elephant, or the tail of a dragon. I guess it’s rather the first, though I secretly wish it was the second. There was also a whiff of Terézváros wakes, or rather, doesn’t really wake up to a Saturday morning in the air, with mostly empty streets and the occasional group of people looking like vampires who’ve just realized they’re oversensitive to the sun. This was also the perfect time to raid the shelves of the original German drogeriemarkt and come to the conclusion that the bastards do keep the best stuff just for themselves. 

Now this, by all accounts, is a bloc- the block of flats, great love of Romania’s enlightened communist leader, and the sardine can in which too many people wasted away their youth and not only. You can of course make nice blocks, functional ones, maybe even beautiful ones, I have seen quite a few of those in Scandinavia- yet I still shudder at the thought of the thing. The best part about these blocks is probably that they can be graffitied without remorse- and if they’re covered in enough drawings, they might even look presentable.

Speaking of graffitis- apparently nothing is out of reach- or holy enough, for Berlin’s artists. I am a bit more confused about this one than the block of flats though- that colour on the bell towers was pretty to begin with and blended so nicely with the sky. But then again, it must have been a challenge too good to resist. 

So they’re at it again- but I couldn’t help it, the writing on the top goes ‘Freiheit’, and I found it very fitting that the bird flew into the picture. Birds are really good at that, photobombing, mostly positively, except sea-gulls, who are super evil and will first poop in your fish and chips then fly through your seascapes at the worst moment, possibly pooping. The opposite experience is waiting for a flock of birds to take off and cross the frame- they’ll never do it in the right formation, or when the light is right. Or they’ll just scamper off in the opposite direction. 

I realized I took way too many gratuitous sky shots, and decided to get rid of this one. But then I didn’t have the heart to do it. So here it goes, in case you haven’t reveled enough in it’s baby blueness: the Berlin sky.

Berlin is a great place to do a great many things, among them have specialty coffee. I had actually printed a thick list of recommended coffee shop addresses, and then naturally forgot them at the hostel on the morning I set off with dark purposes. But luck favours the silly, and just as I was approaching Checkpoint Charlie, I bumped into Westberlin. Westberlin is everything a coffee fiend desires, minimal design, niche magazines, people working on Macs. And very good coffee. Also, they mercifully provided me with a map of Berlin specialty coffee houses which I actually managed to efficiently hold on to for the next couple of days.

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: modern tourism in it’s sight hunting, selfie snapping, tacky souvenir hoarding form gives me the severest of creeps. Travelling is great, learning from it, even greater, being the umpteenth oaf holding up the Tower of Pisa- not so much.  Berlin, at least on a not overly sunny and hot early summer weekend, wasn’t overrun with barbarians in the way Paris, Barcelona or London usually are.  Checkpoint Charlie was the one spot which was borderline crowded, and provided the questionable entertainment of two mock soldiers fingering their mobiles in between grinning for photos.

Okay, so I know, it’s easy to find fault in others but consider all your silly endeavours as staples of exemplary human behaviour. I’ll try to be fair and admit that shooting your coffee in different splendid arrangements, not unlike other half million folks on Instagram might be a tad tiring. And it’s often very misleading as well- here’s my lovely latte with a bunch of roses (also, I am late, I can’t find my keys, I have a headache and the dog the guy at the other table was instagramming drooled on my ankle.) But this time I’d just had great coffee, had no major concerns to speak of and was about to set off on a leisurely walk through Kreuzberg. Sometimes life IS almost Instagram-perfect. 

There’s actually not very much to be seen in the classical touristy sense at Checkpoint Charlie- there’s the wooden shack, which had actually been replaced by the time the Wall came down plus the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, which functions as a museum and is warmly recommended by Berlin guides. I however usually shun away from rambling in museums during city breaks and plan such activities either for longer stays somewhere, or for second, third and so on visits. Berlin, maybe more than other cities, is a place where the things you have to ‘see’ first are actually the unseen, that which is not visible to the naked eye, but lies beyond the surface, in the texture of the city’s present and past. 

One aspect which becomes quickly obvious about Berlin it that it can accommodate very many different things without being dissonant and this is true for architecture as well. While some cities have a core of old buildings which make their more modern counterparts, even well-made ones, look alien and almost bothersome, you accept the same set up for Berlin without batting an eye. 

I grew up in the pretty rural bit of a small town (it used to classified as mid-sized in our geography classes, but a spot of travelling revealed that to be mere illusion of grandeur), and vegetation was the most natural part of everyday life, excuse the cheap pun. We had a garden, so did our neighbours, streets were lined with trees and bushes. After I moved for Budapest, for quite a while I would occasionally stop in my tracks when I felt something odd in my environment, and very often, it was on streets which completely lacked vegetation. It took me some time to realize it though- luckily my own neighbourhood was rather leafy, but up to this day I bear an irrational grudge on ‘dead streets’.  Streets with trees are great, and streets with grass on rooftops, even better.

I found this mural only because I took a wrong turn- well, as wrong as a turn during an aimless walk can get. I was in that pleasant state of contentment you have when you think you’ve figured out the map and then you confidently turn onto a street, only to discover it’s a totally different one, with a different name, possible from a different dimension of existence.  But this is a pretty intriguing piece of street art, and in the end I actually made it to where I’d set out to, so all in all the mission can be called a success. 

So I conducted an intensive Internet research to find more info about this series of red and blue graffitis I bumped into here and there, and found nothing conclusive. Which plunged me into a state of deep irritation, as these days we take it for granted that the web has an answer for everything. So much of the world is at our fingertips but we’ll still be most intrigued by that which we cannot reach. (In case anyone knows something about them, do let me know.)

Every now and then I look at one of my shots and get inspired to give it a fanciful, small Dutch master inspired title. Young Couple with Toilet Seat, Kreuzberg, Berlin, 2016.

I already mentioned the specialty coffee shop list I picked up in Westberlin- well, I obviously found DreiKaffeebar without it, for the simple reason that at that very time I was not looking for a coffee shop. It was however very fortunate that I did, because I could test the output of the Nürnberg based Machhörndl roastery and it is quite excellent plus I could also indulge in trying to correctly place the accent on German words, so they sound real. It’s quite intriguing (and often disheartening) to observe how a foreign word, although technically correctly pronounced, will not be understood by natives if the accent is out of place- and of course, more than often, it’s the accent that’s out of place when you speak another language. I’m still no expert in confidently pronouncing Machhörndl, but after a few bottles of Berliner Berg Pale Ale, also to be found at Drei, I might just be.

Told you much of Berlin is hidden, now this is confirmed in Spanish as well.  My Internet search has been more successful this time, and I discovered several older pictures of this particular place, which show the evolution of the door from a simple blue something to its present graffiti covered state.

In one of those fortunate coincidences I happened to bump into a Berlin themed article these days, where I found the very well founded observation that ‘Berlin is a paradigm for an increasing approximation of cultures’-and being an open city doesn’t stop it from being very much itself, which is the great fear of those who assume that welcoming others means losing yourself. If such things dangerously derail your identity, then it probably wasn’t the soundest to begin with. 

Northern people have a slightly different view of what is to be considered heat- temperatures which for us, those living in the parts of Europe which become positively tropical in summer, are to be considered pleasant, are often branded as unbearable scorches. Though, as mentioned previously, they are pretty naturally less afraid of rain and a bit of a chill. It’s just that the threshold is different, I guess.  People might object to Berlin being branded North, actually, but I am the minute version of those geocentric dumbarses who sent poor Galilei to his untimely end: the centre of all experience is to be found in Western Romania, you’re to the North of that, you’re a polar bear, to the south, a camel or something.

It's like two birds (ducks? chicken? pigeons?) equipped like Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and one of them has a hat with a pocket and two mushrooms in it. What's not to love here?!

This one is next to the above chicken, and somewhat more ideologically charged. It would have actually been totally exciting to have the chickens holding the flag as well. Just saying.

Friday afternoons are by all means the best part of the week- they're idle, full of promise, a beginning which has not yet fully begun. This should of course only apply when you're working on Monday to Friday schedule, but I nevertheless feel a strange attraction to Friday afternoons even when on holiday, and liked them more than other bits of the week even during college years, when technically any time was just time to be in the cafeteria instead of class.

I take odd pleasure in photographing people who unwittingly perfectly fit their environment. It's like a small moment when a fraction of the universe aligns in a special, fleeting way.

Barlove: Blaznavac Kafe-bar

I have these grand ideas every now and then, which look shiny and beautiful, and I promise myself I’ll start working on them, tomorrow, and soon they will be born and when materialized, will be as shiny as beautiful as the original thought.  Doing a photographic review of my favourite haunts is such an idea, and I have been toying if for a long long time. And now I sort of started it- not because I have a cast iron will, but accidentally, because I liked a Belgrade spot so much, and many pictures of it were taken. Now comes the hard part, of course- sticking to the project, but before all that, here is Blaznavac in all it’s glory.

I generally like reading in coffee houses and bars- I’m one of those savages you see sprawled alone at a comfy table for four, lost in some roman fleuve that might keep them in that corner until the next geological era. So I was more than delighted when in Belgrade’s Blaznavac I found a pretty lengthy read right in the menu. Given that I’d had a couple of drinks and felt bold and reckless, I even ventured into the Cyrillic version of the tale, which accounts the many (mis)adventures of General Milivoje Petrović Blaznavac, who might have been a prince’s illegitimate son, and most definitely alienated the fiancee of another.

I won’t ruin your day with spoilers, there is an English version available as well, which you might dig into while waiting for your drink. For that part I suggest a dark Nikšićko, which is one of the rare breeds of mainstream beers that actually have some personality.  Or you can go for the cocktails, though we have not tried those- top travel tip: always skip something really exciting, so you have a good reason to be back.

Further to the drinks, you might go for the grand tour of the establishment, which includes alligators, horses, elephants, tigers, sharks, obviously Gavrilo Princip and an octopus-like creature staring at you from the bathroom ceiling. 

Berlin Photo Diary- Part One

Since the Internet is awash with factual and practical travel advice about Berlin, I decided it would be pointless to add another spoonful of water to the sea, so I went for a strictly personal diary of photos and impressions which can hopefully still come in handy should someone feel a devastating urge to visit Berlin. (It's a very correct urge and it should therefore be followed.)

Booking accommodation in cities you don't know, especially last minute, is always a bit tricky. What you think is central might not be quite so, then there are some central neighbourhoods which might not necessarily be your dream destination-looking good on the map is one, looking good in real life, quite another thing. In Berlin we got lucky though, Moabit, albeit the former home of a prison with pretty bad rep from Nazi times, is absolutely enjoyable and close to the centre even by foot, though in the long run it's probably best to take the U-bahn.

Berlin is very green, and pretty proud to be so. I couldn't help but think that there are other ways of running a city than covering it with shiny slabs of super functional concrete, a new found hobby of Budapest's city fathers. It was a total joy to meet an absolutely real, though admittedly brown, rabbit pottering around Tiergarten, whose speed sadly eluded my camera.

I'm usually more than suspicious when it comes to visiting the seats of power and administration, but just as one has to give in to the Houses of Parliament, there's no avoiding the Reichstag. Which is again one of those things for which the Germans have their own super descriptive expression, which no one else can master, much less divide into syllables, to the smugness of natives. So here it goes:  Deutscher Bundestag - Plenarbereich Reichstagsgebäude.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: no city is the real deal for me if it doesn't have either a proper river, or a proper sea. For a long while Berlin seemed suspicious, because the Spree didn't feel proper enough on the river front, being a mere tributary of the Havel, which is the tributary of the Elbe, and yes only the Elbe is finally the proper river. Seeing it personally has however convinced me of the charms of the Spree, and I am sure the Spree is now deeply relieved to have received a pass as a river worthy of a real city. Totally incidentally, travelling by train allowed us to hurtle through the valley of the Elbe at the German-Czech border and conclude that it's totally spectacular. 

It's fair to say that you'll bump into the remnants of the Wall pretty quickly no matter in which area of the city you are. And it's a sobering bump- each time I saw it, I had this nagging thought of how humanity is just insane, like really INSANE, with really capital letters. Why build a wall among people and have them die trying to cross it when you can happily cycle to Copenhagen instead. 

Forgive me if I'll keep comparing Berlin to Budapest, I guess we all do that when travelling, measure the new place to the one we live in, and see how they fare. Well Berlin fares better at the what's written on walls and lampposts- I have of course not had the time to scrutinize it quite as I do with Budapest, but the incidence of offensive messages is much lower and that of thought provoking ones definitely higher.

When the essential truths of life hit you in the solar plexus: Unter den Linden is actually under lindens. Also, the Brits call the tree lime, because, why the hell not. Or maybe because they can confuse everyone else since lime trees most definitely do not have anything to do with lime fruit. There you go, useless lexical wandering of the day. Which however led me to discover that Budapest fares better than Berlin at wi-fi connections- many coffeehouses and bars did not have them at all, or offered a measly fifteen minutes or so of traffic, which is really nothing when you have to unlock the mysteries of English vocabulary and such. Yes, I know- read a book, and read a book I did, whereupon my guide graciously informed me that the Adlon was the hotel where Michael Jackson dangled poor Blanket out of the window. 

A friend of mine who happens to travel a lot by boat told me that her ultimate dream is to sit at the bow one day and cruise through the breeze, like Jack and Rose do in Titanic. (She is less convinced about the impending arrival of the iceberg, though.) Which in turn made me think that what I would like to do most is stand on the Brandenburger Tor next to the Quadriga, like angels in Der Himmel über Berlin- I hereby again protest against the English title of Wings of Desire. Because the sky over Berlin is a wondrous thing- it has that slight Northern touch about it which makes it bluer and crisper. So I'd have really nothing to complain about if I could stare into that every now and then, with the side perks of being eternal and all that. 

The more I walked around Berlin the more it dawned on me how much I knew about it from films and literature. Though of course the literature part is a bit thwarted by my German being of the wurst and knödel ordering variety, just one of the many defeats I inflicted upon myself in the course of my short existence. I did however succeed in the rather art college kid endeavour of watching Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz in one go, but that was with the help of like minded people, who nudged you into wakefulness when drifting off and narrated the bits you missed when on a bathroom break. Since the original novel has, by all accounts, a pretty shabby English translation, I might as well sign off now and go figure out my der, die, das-es. 

The central part of the city is under pretty intensive re-building and prettifying, which will, I am sure, benefit the inhabitants of Berlin in the long run, but was just a little bit unwelcome when providing sonic backdrop akin to a fighter jet taking off to my morning coffee.

Much as I like Rome, my overall experience can be summed up as about fifty churches too many for my taste. Berlin mercifully has less, the Dome is big and bulky, I gave it a side glance and then prodded off towards the much more interesting Fernsehturm. That's the TV tower, but allow me to wallow in the few German words I can spell off the top of my head. 

Berliners didn't strike me as weather hysterical, in the good tradition of their Scandinavian and Dutch relatives. 22 degrees with a chance of rain calls for a light raincoat at the most, not the entire Eastern European arsenal of two cardigans, a rain coat, a thicker coat shoved in your bag to make it bulky and break your shoulders, spare socks, wellingtons and a little scarf just in case. 

Trivia you find when your Internet is fast and furious: Berlin Verlag is the German publishing house of both Péter Esterházy and Péter Nádas, and also of Nobel prize winners Nadine Gordimer and Elfriede Jelinek. Their building also sports this pretty sign which spins around, thus causing you to block traffic waiting for Berlin to turn into the right spot and mildly anger Berliners (because Berliners are actually people and not donuts) who actually have meaningful things to do with their day.

Case in point, the young gentleman is probably headed to a specialty coffee shop for a cascara. Also of note, the traffic light with the Ampelmännchen, the typical East German symbol, which differs from the classical ones in West Germany and most of Europe in that it wears a hat. After reunification, attempts were made to standardize traffic lights all over Germany, but people wanted their old guy back, and back they did have him in most areas.

Berlin has candy cotton coloured houses (just like Vienna) and wild flowers spontaneously deciding to grow here and there. 

It's well obvious that you are in the Eastern part of Berlin when you see such a bonanza of cables. Communist states just loved their cables which ran in an insane and senseless zig zag all over cities and villages. I still remember being slightly worried about Finland's functionality when upon visiting it I noticed how they hardly have cables compared to what I was used to. Also, the ones they have actually serve a purpose, but that's another story.

It took me a good week or so to notice that one of the murals on Kazinczy street had been re-painted- being in a familiar environment often leads to slacking, of the body and mind. So when I travel I always walk to exhaustion and try to look at everything, the details of buildings, the faces of people, the things they do differently. It's a phyisical and mental workout that I love- though it has the downside that once back in the old haunts I am sort of hungover and dissatisfied with the old, less demanding environment. 

Since Berlin is the second city I visit during rose season- and rose season is great because it lasts longer than most other flowers, I came to the super scientific conclusion that whereas Belgrade favours a peachey-orangey coloured rose, Berlin often comes up with this pastel pink. Also, Budapest roses tend to be blood red.

Volkspark Friedrichshain was gingerly recommended as a popular gay cruising area by our guide, though it looked decidedly more demure in the midday sun. I also marked it mentally as a spot where one could do a bit of jogging, though maybe not in the later hours, so as to avoid uncomfortable run-ins.

The park also gives home to the Märchenbrunnen, of which I just saw a snowed upon picture which awoke an urge to visit the city in winter. Returning to our fountain, it is decorated with the statues of fairy tale characters, some of them looking odd, to say the least, raising within me general questions about the enjoyability of most sculpture, on the one side, and the intense quirkiness of German taste, on the other.

With the risk of being lambasted by purists- I am not a big fan of German beer. I suspect that, albeit it was a great idea to being with, the Reinheitsgebot (the beer purity law) also has the effect of making most German beers absolutely similar, and in my opinion absolutely average. I have often enjoyed German beer as a pleasant companion to food, or a sunny day, but never have I been in love with a German beer. The situation is totally different with pretzels. If there is heaven, it also includes pretzels of two varieties: the traditional Romanian sort and the German one doused with lye. The establishment where the unknown staple food of Valhalla was consumed was the buffet version of the Schönbrunn restaurant, which was warmly recommended as excellent, though sadly, I was unable to try their food. Because pretzels.

It dawned on me that I really like the idea of tram tracks with vegetation in between. I just made a mental note of that, and of also loving the word flâneur, or should I say flâneuse, because women often get left out of such lofty ideas. And then it also dawned on me that the original iteration of my wandering aimlessly around happened to have taken place in a city with vegetation between the tram tracks.

I love side streets, especially the ones which are popular with locals, but less so with tourists. And I particularly love them at off hours, early morning, when you meet the insomniacs, dog walkers and dead beat party animals, or midday, when they are deserted and you hear the incessant rattle of crockery and the unified smells of many dinners envelop you.

A good side street gets even better when there is a restaurant populated with regulars- I'm even happy to have an indefinite all local language menu and a waiter taken aback by the arrival of aliens. I'm also of the unorthodox view that German cuisine is great, because dumplings and cabbage make me happy in a way no foie gras ever will.

They drew the line of the Wall on Bernauer strasse and divided people's homes. It seems so utterly ridiculous, looking at people casually strolling by, bikes, cars rushing through the afternoon traffic. People once died here because they wanted to cross the street, and we have learned nothing, and still think that building walls is a solution.

Free is probably a different word to someone who still felt the shadow of communism. I was lucky enough not to be stunted by it, the way my parents' generation sadly was, but I'm probably part of the last generation who retains an inkling of what it was like to be trapped in the delusion of crazed leaders. I remember how my heart fluttered the first time I crossed from Hungary to Austria without stopping at the border, and it makes me immensely sad to see one of the best things of a unified Europe being brought into question again. 

We think there's nothing more straightforward than going round the block with your mate for a beer, a smoke, a chat. We take our freedom for granted. We mustn't.

One of the ugliest things I've ever seen. But pieces of it should be left there, and hopefully they will mean something to at least a few of those visiting them. Though judging by the number of grinning selfies on street corners where people landed to their death, we're doomed. 

One of my earliest, and strangely fondest, childhood memories is perusing German 'fashion magazines'. Don't think in terms of Vogue and Elle, these were actually the mail order catalogues of mid-market retail chains, such as Otto or Neckerman, with the occasional excitement of an actual IKEA catalogue. The decadent pieces were smuggled into the country by those having the sublime privilege of occasionally travelling abroad, and were then worn thin by being passed around and used by seamstresses to create a semblance of Western fashion in the drab land of Romania. I was particularly struck by all the strange knick-knacks, statuettes, gnomes, colourful pots and other varied receptacles, plastic flowers and the likes which seemed to be means for these strange, alien, ideal people, the Germans, to decorate their gardens and balconies. I am happy to inform you that some things never change. This time around there is also a unifying theme in the Nationalelf's EURO participation, which, quietly but resolutely, is expected to go all the way, Jogi Löw's pant antics notwithstanding. 

Worst advice in Berlin. Or provocation. Or just random French text, like the long lost scribble from the now defunct underground passage at Margit island, declaring that the writer loves French fries and your mum's boobs.