July 4th CS (couchsurfing) in Berlin
After sight seeing with Briana, I made my way down to Potsdam (the Round Rock of Berlin) by express train. I was questioning whether I should CS so far out of the city but I figured it’s a free place to stay for 10 days and would help out the budget which I was a bit over at this point. Met up with the person hosting me at the train stop. I’m pretty new to CS, so wasn’t sure what to expect. Met this girl online and she and her roomates were excited to have me come and stay. Well, this was one of those weird but hospitable people you come across while traveling. Imagine a troll doll…dark skinned, blue hair, short, a little round. I don’t care what people look like, but now combine that with the personality that goes with it (a bit of Mimi from Drew Cary). So I immediately questioned my decision again, but decided to go with it. We walked up the hill to her shared flat. Europe is definitely a bit outdated in terms of appliances, showers, toilets, etc. and I got to experience this first hand. The flat is 2 bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom (no other rooms) and a large balcony off one room. No air conditioning but I guess that’s not that uncommon. The toilet has a little shelf built into such that when you take a crap, it just sits there and doesn’t go down into the water….the idea being that in the old days you could inspect your own feces for disease or worms or something like that. This sucks because you have to smell the shit sitting there and you also inevitably end up looking at it afterwards. The good news is that you don’t get the toilet water splash on your ass so I guess there’s that. Bathtub has a shower head but no curtain and it doesn’t hang on the wall at all. So you end up having to like kneel down and hose yourself off awkwardly. And of course you have to hang your clothes to dry which is fine, just different.
The girl (Olivia) was living with her German boyfriend. Imagine Willie (for those of you who know him) but with a german accent and my sister’s hair. That’s Johann. He’s in training to become a Tonemeister which is the term for a sound engineer or something in Germany. Olivia wore the pants in the relationship. Olivia was living on a Nanny’s visa but wasn’t really nannying anymore because she kept getting fired. She complained that one family gave her a bad recommendation but she failed to see why. If I had a baby (that I knew about anyways), I would probably not hire Olivia. One of the families said she could work, but just not touch the baby…in other words a maid. I guess its hard to describe exactly what is annoying about her unless you’ve met her. I will say that twice I walked in on her applying deoderant to her inner thighs and she described out she chafes (sp?) and therefore has to apply deoderant. All this aside, I spent more than a week hanging out with her and they were all very hospitable…just a bit different group than I am used to. I guess that is part of the point of traveling though….to get out of the norm and meet different peoples. The other flatmate was from Toronto and pretty cool. He was living paycheck to paycheck as a waiter. Not normal paycheck to paycheck like most people….this guys rent and bills were like $100euro per month and he was having trouble paying rent. Kind of slobby, drinks soda and eats cake but pretty laid back and overall seemed much happier in life than me. I slept on a small, spare mattress on his floor the first night. It was super hot so you had to leave all the windows open at night. But, you could not have any lights on because thousands of bugs would come in. So, bascially we walked around in the dark all night. There was no TV of course, so all 4 of us just sat around on our computers each night...sometimes for like 8 hours at a time. Johann would practice piano intermittently and play video games at times. After the first night, I pulled the mattress out to the balcony and ended up sleeping out there for the next week or so. Nice breeze, a little prviacy, own table/lamp/electrical outlets. Just the perspective I needed…living on a balcony with no TV and probably enjoying myself more than when I’ve lived in crazy nice houses or condos with surround sound and hot tubs, etc.
My first day there was after partying in the hostel, so I immediately took a nap but was still a bit hungover. It was 4th of July so we headed to a park where there were about 20 people from ToyTown (an english speaking online community in Germany with meet ups and language classes and stuff). They hung an american flag from a tree so that we knew where to meet. Brought a few bottles of beer and some sausages with us. Borrowed some burnt bread from someone as we didn’t have any buns. Water ballon/water gun fight broke out but I wasn’t in the mood. Neither were the people in the park surrounding us that kept getting splashed but rude, drunk, and high americans. We got yelled at by some sort of eastern europeans. As it got dark we busted out some sparklers and a little american flag cake. A few other americans rode by on their bikes and joined us for some beers. This hard core german metal guy walked up with a can of spraypaint and painted an anarchy sign right on the American flag even though he was out numbered like 20 to 1. None of us thought much of it and in fact we all posed for pictures with the flag. I guess I can understand his perspective, but I can’t really see doing that to some german kids if they were hanging out and flying a german flag in a park in the US. He can hate america all he wants, but at the end of the day its not like we killed 6 million jews or something…
July 5th-8th
3 nights that week we hung out at Andrew’s restaurant. Andrew was a Louisiana native who opened a cajun resturant in Berlin. He hosted a lot of Toy Town events and was the sort of home bar for the people I was with. Watched a few world cup games there, had drinks with like 20 other english speaking people….most were weird of course. There was one large British-Indian dude who appearantly finished like 5.7 out of 6 years of medical school then dropped out to go to Berlin and party or something. My guess is he got kicked out as his story didn’t add up. I actually hated talking to Americans at most of these places. I did like the people who had just taken off and disappeared in Berlin. It is definitly a cheap place that you could show up in and just hang out….thus why I opted to stay for 2 weeks. At one point I even looked at renting a flat and just staying there the rest of the summer.
Olivia did tell me several subway stories that I wish I had the privlage to experience. One guy was just standing on the platform waiting for the train to come and pointing at the little digital display that tells you how many minutes until the next train. His pants were down and he was masturbating of course. As the minutes ticked down on the display, he got louder and louder, eventually screaming when the train arrived as he beat off and pointed at the display. He proceeded to get on the train and sit down and go about his current buisiness. Eventually a big German guy hit him and told him to shut up and the guy just stopped and chilled out. Another guy got up in the middle of a train ride, walked over and took a dump at the end of the train car and then sat back down. Nobody did anything but at the next stop everyone got off and just moved to the next train down. Olivia said she fell asleep on train once only to be awoken by a dirty old man rubbing a feather on her thigh. I will say that I never saw the police in Berlin….I get the impression you can kind of do what you want to some degree….but maybe this is the same in big cities everywhere…
Friday 9th: Potsdam
Watched the Germany/Spain game in Potsdam at the central town square. They had a massive like 30 foot display setup. Gates to enter of course so no bottles or vuvuzelas of which we had both. We hung out in front and drank beers and sang some songs with a guys playing guitar. We opted to stash our beer and vuvuzela on the top of one of the statues in the little park we were at…so I climbed the statue and hid our things in one of the crevises. Everyone else left theirs at the gate again. Got inside, sate down for a bit then decided I wasn’t drunk enough yet so went to the beer cart. Too many people crowded around and too few people pouring beer. Also, couldn’t see the screen so went to the other beer cart across the way and this one had a line…but again not moving. The beer pours like super slow from the tap so it takes like 1-2 minutes per beer and people were ordering like 6 at a time. After the line didn’t move, went way across to the other beer cart in the back of the courtyard which I figured would be less people and still get to see the screen. 10-15 minutes hanging over the bar at the beer cart before thowing my cup in frustration and storming off. Basically I spent the majority of the first half waiting in line for a beer. At half time we met up at the statue at halftime to drink. On the way out of the gate, I grabbed like 4 beers from the ground so made up for the first half of sobering up. We drank and went back in to finish the game which was depressing as the Germans lost. On the way back out, grabbed a few more drinks including a bottle of champagne. I had hoped to save this for the next day, but Johann wanted to pop the cork so we opened it up and that led to a shitty hangover the next day. I really had to piss at this point, but there were no bathrooms and we were in a fairly crowded park type thing with some security people around. I snuck deep into a thick, tall bush to hide and pee. As I get in there, like 5 german pull up to the bush and start peeing right on it…with me inside! I popped out of there pretty quick, but my german lei got ripped off by the bush.
Johann is a vegetarian so we made various meals I would normally not eat…. Veggie kebabs, fried cheese, eggplant, etc. He do the weird coffee thing called Turkish style. Instead of filtering the coffee or using a french press, he just dumps a scoop of grounds into a cup and fills it with hot water. The cup is a mess with floating coffee grounds…gets in your mouth and is a bitch to clean out of every cup ( I know this because I did their dishes all week).
Went to the grocery store a few times and it was always great to see all the slightly different things….thick cheese slices (like kraft singles) are called “dick cheese” as dick means thick in German (I guess). Milk isn’t refrigerated, it comes in boxes on the shelf and is good for like 6 months or something. Beer is about 0.75 eurocent each, 1 liter box of wine is 1 euro. Very little chicken available….just loads of pork products. They have little escalator ramps like 10 feet long so you don’t have to push your cart up a small ramp. They don’t have sunscreen with SPF >20. They recycle bottles for real cash (like 15cents each) so people line up out front. The checkers get to sit down and dress casually….and they definitly don’t bag your stuff for you. In fact, they don’t even give you a bag, you just bring your own or you have to buy a bag to bring your groceries in. I have no idea why checkers in America have to stand up. The german recycling is pretty good. People have like 5 separate trash cans and you sort it all yourself. Also, as in most of europe, you don’t add tax onto things, its incorporated into the price. So something that costs $1 is $1 instead of $1.0825. I bought a cheap cell phone but in Germany it is called a “handy.” So when Johann asked Olivia where we were going, she said we were going to get Anders a handy.
Johann recommended taking a bus to Prague instead of a train….buses have a steward, air conditioning, screens that play DVDs, free coffee, and 1euro soda, red bull, and beers on board. They even have wifi on some of the routes. All this for like ½ the price of trains. Time wise, it actually takes the same amount of time on a lot of the routes. So, I opted for the bus to Prague Tuesday afternoon for 23 euro/5 hours. Pretty good deal and pretty comfortable ride with lots of leg room. Got to watch a Vince Vaughn movie and the Taking of Phelam. Only problem is that I ended up screwing off drinking beers and watching movies instead of writing my blog….which is now about 10 days behind L.
