Day 54: Soviet Bowling, Toilet Burgers

I feel like I'm writing an advertisement for the Berlin Board of Tourism. "So I'm standing under a bridge, eating a bacon cheeseburger at what used to be a public toilet." But hey, man, I'm just telling it like it is.

 

Christophe, Lotte and Nils, my couchsurfing hosts, have decided to take me with them to celebrate their friend's birthday. The "Birthday Woman" as Nils hilariously transliterates, hasn't arrived yet, but we decide that it's probably okay to go ahead and get a hamburger, on the understanding that we can always order another one when other people show up. Between mouthfuls of delicious bacon (I'll be vegetarian again next week) I ask them what we'll be doing after we eat. Lotte adjusts a hot water bottle against her stomach, which she explained before was for her appendicitis and not, as I suspected, because she is a crazy street person. "Bowling," she says. Great, because this is why I came to Berlin: to do something not particularly amusing that I could just as easily have donein New Jersey. Maybe afterwards we can go to a Greek diner and drink coffee until 5 in the morning. Of course, the fact that we're going bowling is not the fault of my German hosts, but rather can be attributed to the gang of British friends we're about to meet. Decisions like this, I'm told, are typical of British people, in addition to doing things like going to English yoga classes and Liverpool themed coffee houses. I try to decide between saying something scathing about German people and taking another bite.

The hamburger is good but not great, mostly because it's been cooked medium well. My theory is that this is the problem with ALL transplanted cooking: foreigners thinking the taste is about the technique and not the ingredients. Why is Italian food so delicious in Italy? Is it because they have some magic, virtuosic Italian chefs that fly on Bolognese wings in a ringing heaven of polenta clouds? Of course not--it's because they're in Italy and all the ingredients of Italian cooking happen to grow there. Same goes for the States: we've got delicious cows and our best hamburgers are really nothing more than seared packages of hot raw beef. But while I'm as much a gastro-snob as the next trendy, unshaved Ivy grad, I'm not above eating a giant plate of food simply because it's food, and by the time the rest of our birthday contingent arrives I'm halfway though a post-burger pizza.

Our bowling destination is nothing if not a little surreal. The alley itself is on the sixth floor of an enormous, unused commercial space; we have to take not one but two freight elevators to get there from the ground floor. We watch bare light bulbs and and yawning blackness float past us as our metal cages slides ever upwards. As is often the case with "fun" establishments housed in dire settings, our bowling alley needs to constantly remind us that we're on the right path with a never-ending series of "EAST SIDE BOWLING--THIS WAY! ONLY 134 METERS!" and the like.

Of course, just when we've seen enough bare concrete and exposed rebar to decide that we're more likely to find a body than a bowling alley, we round a corner and come face to face with a giant disco ball. This, I think you'll agree, is a little bit silly. Here we are back to writing that tourism advertisement: "I'm singing drinking songs with a gang of British expats, at a laser bowling alley in an abandoned mall."

Turns out Christophe, Nils and I all suck about equally at bowling. Lotte, in spite of the fact that she needs to have an organ removed, puts all of us to shame. Although her mood seems somewhat soured by her condition; every time she gets a strike her facial expression explodes in enthusiasm from visible anguish to just veiled anguish. We get through about four frames before our lane breaks down and we have to switch to another one. Our new lane breaks down after three. Christophe decides that he might as well walk out on the lane and take a few pictures, in spite of my opposition. I explain that this is literally the only rule of bowling alleys: do not walk on the lanes. You could probably take a dump in the ball return tube or stab a guy in the bathroom if you wanted to but walk on the lanes and you're likely to get yourself hurt. Christophe doesn't understand me, or ignores me, or both.

It's around this time that team Britain gets sick of bowling and decided to switch to drinking. The German assembly participates but with less enthusiasm, citing the "outrageously expensive" two euro pints. This, more than anything else, defines Berlin: locals not appreciating how goddamned cheap their city is. Anyway, bowling quickly dissolves into forceful debate, into shouting and into being asked to leave the bowling alley.

Finding our way out, without the awkwardly enthusiastic but nonetheless helpful signs to guide us, was quite the challenge.

Day 53: A different sort of place

Something you should know about Berlin: It's not Paris. I know, this seems incredibly obvious and certainly appears to be something that one could learn by spending eight seconds looking at a map, rather than dropping $1100 on a plane ticket. But there's a difference between knowing the difference and seeing it for yourself, between understanding that two different places have two different names and actually feeling the cataclysmic historical divide that must separate the two cities. I've been to a few European capitals: London, Paris, Moscow and Rome, and while each one feels very different they all share some common atmosphere. Each one feels like a capital; everywhere you go you're assaulted by monuments and history and art and culture, delicious food at extreme prices, tall, thin and well dressed people and the like. Even Yerevan, a much, much poorer capital than any of the European giants already mentioned, had that same kind of capital-smell about it. But Berlin is different, somehow.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on Karl-Marx-Allee, the long street through Friedrichshain and Mitte built during the era of the East-West divide. An interesting bike ride starts back near the Tiergarten at the height of Berlin Touristisch and heads east all the way to Franzosiche Tor at the end of Karl-Marx-Allee. You will be amazed how aggressively the architectural style as ornate, Deutsch estate homes give way to the towering, Sovient-era human warehouses that line the Allee. It's exactly this kind of thing--the visible historical struggle behind the cultural mask--that I think makes Berlin so different from other European capitals. To me this actually seems like a very American city, like a city defined by where it's going rather than where it came from. Although don't take that the wrong way, Berlin, you're still very impressive and not at all like Poughkeepsie, I promise.

I go to get lunch Nils, my new Couchsurfing host. Over a plate of not-at-all-vegetarian kebab he tells me that he can just remember living in Berlin before reunification. Apparently his older brother used to ride the S-Bahn to school, back when some stops were East flavored and some West, and if you got on at one there were nice men with guns waiting at the other to make sure you didn't get off by accident. Unbelievable, I think between bites of surprisingly tasty chicken cut from a giant cone, the immediacy of what feels to me like very distant history--of course the Berlin wall coming down is part of my history too but not my personal history. It's a date and a talking point, not a guy with an assault rifle waving me through a checkpoint. Nils tells me that he can actually still tell which of his friends grew up in the East and which grew up in the West. Their personalities are still that different.

Ayran is a pretty tasty drink make from yogurt and milk. Someone unfairly jokes that it tastes like semen, and this makes me upset.

Day 52: Maxgarten

Wait, fucking seriously?

That's a little close to home

Today we're finally heading out to the Garden. We set out from Neukölln heading first to holy fuck the best Bäckerei in the whole city, a little place at the corner of Warschauer Straße and Grünberger Straße, where we buy something like two pastries and one loaf of bread apiece. Next we bike south along the east side of the old Tempelhof Airport, continuing until we get out of the city center and into Mariendorf. Our destination: the Maxgarten.

Bro, that shit is motherfucking charming

First etwas history, although you're going to have to take all this with a giant grain of salt because I'm just spouting off what I remember and I'm certainly not going to do any research. The long and the short of it is that at some point, Berlin came into a whole bunch of unused farmland just south of the city. Rather than sell it off or try to run it publicly, the city decided instead to partition the land into small chunks and to distribute it among Berlin's industrial working class. The idea was that workers could tend the individual plots as a way to do some supplemental subsistence farming. Of course, these days there's very little subsistence farming going on. I mean, people are certainly growing food, and as I cycle by a nice old lady decides to celebrate the fact that I can't speak a word of German with a giant cucumber, but I don't think an early frost is going to see any starving Berliners. Like everything in the post-work trans-topia that is 2012, it's all about the recreational drudgery. "Look, I planted a whole row of beats. Isn't that nifty? Let's drink."

Jeremy (right) and Joshua (socialist) set the table with meats, cheeses, silicon

 So these days what was once a shared community of food plots is now a shared community of aggressively charming picnic houses. Ours, the Maxhaus 5000, has two apple trees, a blackberry bush, a healthy supply of beer and blazing fast WiFi. It is actually the single best place on the planet earth. We came here to work, and yet I think between us, aggregated over the entire day,we probably spend about six total minutes writing code.

Stefan debugs the lawn

We spend the rest of our day going through a literally endless rotation of meats, breads, cheeses, vegetables, beer and ice cream, a veritable endurance-brötzeit that last probably something close to eight hours. The usual dialog goes something like this:

Party A: Hey, it's time to grill the <miniscule amount of exotic meat>

Party B: But we just ate <tiny amount of some other grilled meat>

Party A: Sure, but I don't want to waste the coals.

Party B: Then let's grill! More cheese spread, anyone?

"I don't want to waste the charcoal"-- right up there with "The ice cream's going to melt anyway." and "We could always make another one." Anyway I'm stuffed by about the halfway mark; by the end I no longer need to consume food, ever. You've heard people speculate that if they spend 40 percent of their life sleeping, maybe they could just get all that out of the way right upfront, then spend the rest of the time awake? Well that's what I did, but for food.

Brötzeit post-zeit. Actually kind of reminds me of that trash sculpture I made.

The evening wears on. Joshua tries to undo our overwhelming consumption with a little yard sport--I can hear his calorie-counting app laughing at us as it reports the figures for "Badminton, light". Eventually we run out of food and have to bike home, which we do fucking trashed. I actually have a crisis moment where I forget who I am and where we're going. There's also a flash of surrealist wonder as we pass Tempelhof--it's not every day you see a Christmas light sculpture of two cows fucking on an abandoned tarmac. Unless, of course, you live in Berlin.

I'll miss you, WiFi Garten. Auf wiedersehen.

Day 51: Pretty sure this is San Francisco

Stop me when this starts to sound familiar.

An enormous garden, in the middle of the city, growing nothing but sustainable food, under possible zoning conflict, cared for cooperatively by members of the local community with an overpriced, limited seating, pop-up restaurant once a week. Something you've heard before? Were it not for the silly accents I would be absolutely convinced that I'd woken up from a Euro-themed acid trip back in good old San Francisco. I'm also drinking a delicious beer and talking about gentrification, which certainly isn't helping.

Yes, I am dining in the Prinzessinnengarten, a "mobile" urban garden on the corner of Prinzenstraße and Moritzplatz. What exactly makes it mobile? Well, as you can sort of tell from my shitty iPhone pictures, the whole garden is planted not in the ground but in burlap sacks and milk crates. From the about page I guess this all figures into some kind of urban farming experiment, though I've heard from reliable sources that it has more to do with the farm's somewhat unclear future. As in the city could at any moment say, "Well hey, that was fun, huh? Okay, time for you sleeveless longhaired troublemakers to get the fuck out." Obviously, as I finish the rest of my delicious beer and promptly order another in the shade of a flowering pear tree, the last thing I want is to see the farm close, but at the same time it would be highly entertaining to see an army of volunteer farmers carrying an entire city block's worth of produce to... where exactly?

Wait a second, is that the Fuckparade I hear in the distance? It can't be.

Box wine, meet box corn

I got to hand it to the Berliners, man, they really know how to take it easy. The whole city is filled with this energy--it's hard to put it into words exactly but the best way I can think to describe it is an overwhelming sense of fine-ness. As in "I'd like to open a community garden in this vacant lot." Fine, go for it. "My fellow homeless artists and I are going to squat in this abandoned apartment building and paint murals on all the walls." Okay, fine, you totally should. "This giant public structure? I'm going to climb to the top of it and plant a slightly suggestive flag." Sure, that seems fine. It's not the kind of place where things have to be registered and regimented and filled out in triplicate before they get done. First something happens, and then maybe later someone comes along and funds it. Or at least doesn't shut it down.

This probably goes a long way towards explaining the claims that Berlin is the new Paris or San Francisco--the place where do-ers from any field, be it art or business or technology, can come to find the resources they need to get things done. It all boils down to the fact that the city hasn't peaked yet. It's still a gray blob of protean city-mass; like a bowl of wheat grass soup it's not much to look at but it's got all the building blocks of something great. Contrast this with Paris, where just to find affordable housing you have to move out to the middle of nowhere, like Montreuil. Berlin has cheap-as-fingernails housing and light industrial space right in the heart of the city. You say you've got a couple hundred a month lying around? Get ready to host your own fur-fetish roller disco parties until six in the morning, every morning; I'm willing to bet you'll probably get a tax deduction on your floor wax.

This picture didn't come out very well.

Am I pushing hard enough yet? COME TO BERLIN! BUY NOW! PRICES LOW!

Day 50: Mauerpark

The sign reads: Don't startle the horses. Someone could die.

Anyway, like I mentioned before our little hotel on Oderberger Straße is right near the Mauerpark.

This is just one of many, many public spaces in Berlin whose origin story goes something like this: Wall goes up, scary shit gets built, wall comes down, city says "Fuck it, it's a park now." All you need to know now is that the Mauerpark is really big, really pretty and really raw. Actually it's given me new appreciation for Central Park, which I think hits a perfect balance between the pretty but anal retentive French ideal and the German extreme of being wild and free but also kind of scratchy. Wandering from one end of the park to the other I stumbled through not one but two patches of nettles, something that I was happy not to have done in a long, long time.

My personal Mauerpark highlight is the long stretch of original Berlin Wall that runs right down the center of the park. Like its big brother down at the East Side Gallery, this chunk of once divisive concrete is now covered in some really extraordinary graffiti, although the bit in the Mauerpark swaps out the loud tourists for plenty of good sitting grass and a couple of really choice swings. Joshua puts me to shame by jumping off from maybe a billion feet in the air and landing with the effortless grace of a styrofoam cat. I get sand in my hair.

That alien spacecraft looking thing (it might just look like regular stadium lighting to you, but to me it definitely looks like some alien space-shit) is part of the Jahn Sportpark, which might be significant in some way, I don't know. 

 
Pretty, huh? Again, we'd like to stay all day but then who would write all this delicious code?

Day 49: Fuckparade

First off, a little history.

What is this, some kind of fucking parade? Oh.

So the Fuckparade. Basically, way back in 1989, right before the wall came down, a man named Matthias Roeingh was sitting down at a plate of pancakes when he thought, "My god, these pancakes are so good they're downright political." He decided to throw himself a birthday party with the motto Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen, or Peace, Joy, Pancakes. Revisionist historians later decided that the motto was to be taken figuratively, with Peace standing for disarmament, Joy for music and Pancakes for food production. This, obviously, is quite silly, and even a casual examination of the record makes it perfectly clear that the original Loveparade was very much a celebration of breakfast.

Anyway, Loveparade grew and grew, ultimately becoming the largest breakfast-themed electronic music festival in history. Party-goers would follow a caravan of trucks equipped with water-cooled sound systems, enabling the concert to get quite audible indeed. In 2001 the parade was so loud that it caused widespread diarrhea among animals at the nearby Berlin Zoo. Obviously, the zoo had to be declared a Superfund site and in 2010 was destroyed from orbit by a laser satellite designed specifically for the purpose. After demolishing the zoo, the laser misfired, hitting a flour factory in southern Berlin. Millions were killed, but among their remains were several metric tonnes of perfectly cooked laser pancakes.

Then disaster struck. In 2010 the Loveparade found itself with 1.4 million attendees, well eclipsing the 400,000 believed present by the Berlin police. In an attempt both to celebrate shared history and to feed the tremendous crowd, the American restaurant chain IHOP elected to airlift in a 40 ton pancake made from high protein flax seed and anodized steel. High winds over Berlin and poor communication caused the pancake to collide with a 6000 gallon drum of Canadian maple syrup. At least 20 people were crushed in the resulting catastrophe, thousands more were fed. Out of respect for the dead the event has been cancelled ever since.

Loveparade changed dramatically between its inception in 1989 and its closure in 2010, most notably by way of a growing corporate influence. The sonic-terror trucks at the heart of the event were originally forbidden from displaying anything other than advertisement for local electronic music, but the tremendous cost of fitting every truck with both a water-cooled sound system and a working grill forced truck owners to seek more lucrative sources of ad revenue. This increasing corporate involvement ultimately led to the genesis of a counter-love parade, Fuckparade.

First, possibly the most important video on the internet, techno viking.

Basically, Joshua and I made our way back to the hotel after yet another extremely excessive breakfast only to discover our path blocked by an army column of ear-inverting techno. You might well be wondering, "What a feat of engineering that all those trucks could play at the same time and yet still remain intelligible." If so, you're an idiot. Standing in the middle of all those trucks was like being digested by a rusty metal whale. I could actually feel my forehead pulsing in and out like the lid of a jar of marmalade. From what I could gather this particular event had an extra shot of juice owing to political motivations. Pussy Riot had just been sentenced, for one, and several trucks called for both the peaceful liberation of the imprisoned protesters and the not at all peaceful doing of very unpleasant things to Mr. Putin.

What a likeness!

The other political grievance lay at the feet of GEMA, a German music rights organization that solicits royalty fees on behalf of musicians. In other words, dickheads. Recently GEMA has sought and won legislation that changes the measure used to determine how much money a music venue must pay in royalty fees. The fee used to be determined by actual number of club patrons, whereas the new law would require clubs to pay a fee proportional to how many people could possibly be in attendance. This number, though made of speculation and cotton candy, is apparently easier to calculate than the actual number of countable people that actually, physically show up. GEMA's new law is especially rough on small and underground clubs, many of which occupy unused, light industrial space, which is huge but sparsely attended. Ten people dancing in a warehouse are expected to pay prices comparable to a giant club, and people objecting to the new legislation rightly point out that if the law remains in effect then soon giant clubs will be the only ones left.

But, much as we would have liked to spend the day dancing with vikings in a breathable atmosphere of head-crushing techno, Joshua and I had to make our way back to the Cave for some intensive coding. Although the Fuckparade was still in full effect when we emerged, several hours later, to look for dinner at a cozy vegetarian food garden.

Fuckparade über alles

Day 48: Nerd Cave

Okay, so you should know that possibly my first week in Berlin is going to be pretty dry when it comes to tasty morsels of local culture and biting sarcasm regarding the German way of life. Sad but true: the first few days here will be spent in the Nerd Cave.

The poorly named Nerd Cave is actually five stories off the ground.

Part of my reason for coming to Berlin in the first place was to have a chance to meet Jeremy and Stefan, two Cycling '74 employees working at the Ableton Live office and spending most of their time on Max for Live. Stefan hails from Austria, where all the women are strong, all the beer is good tasting and all the Knödel are above average. Jeremy, on the other hand, came to Berlin after living in New York because "fuck it". His German is ridiculously, unnecessarily good, better even than my French by the time I was leaving Paris. Not only is his accent flawless, but also he has total mastery of the intricate tone poem that is conversational German. When he leaves the Bäckerei in the morning, Brötchen in hand, he not only says the parting "tchüss", he actually sings it.

The view from the Nerd Cave

Like any well-run city state, activity in the Nerd Cave breaks down evenly into two main components: production and consumption. We alternate with almost prescriptive regularity between drinking coffee and writing code, eating ice cream and drawing control flow diagrams. Just kidding, no one has drawn a control flow diagram since 1980.

I'd like to say that we spent our time down in a cafe, hyped to the point of hallucination on double espressos, opining on the avant-garde engineering tools that will power the future of music composition and punctuating our assertions with wild gesticulation. This may come at a later date; we passed most of the time in the nerd cave eating cheese spread and debugging memory corruption. Although we did touch on a top secret new feature of the Max language that I can't really talk about here, suffice it to say that it would address topics as far reaching as concurrency, memory safety, hooks for web and mobile and programming for the masses. Of course, it remains to be seen if the powerful new tools we design for the broader public actually arouse any interest in said broader public. Personally, if I had to boil the Cycling '74 mission statement down to a single sentence, it would be "Here's something we really really really hope you'll figure out how to use."

After a hard day eating and coding, it's finally time to eat. Just for kicks we decide to make our way down to Alexanderplatz, which might actually be the ugliest place on the entire planet. Our objective is to find a restaurant called Dolores, a new joint opened by two dudes from San Francisco with a mission to bring authentic Mexican food to Berlin. We make the journey with high hopes. We end the journey with this:

Jeremy turns to me and says, "You didn't come all the way to Berlin to eat at a fucking Chipotle." Joshua, who I should mention has an affinity for alternative lifestyles and generally aligns with an anti-capitalist agenda, just shakes his head in mute horror.

No

We leave.

Next door, over a beer and some dumplings, I'm lucky enough to meet Marco Kuhn, a Max for Live content creator from Ableton. He is both a musician and an awesome; we agree to meet at some point to talk about touch interface design. As long as we don't meet at a Chinese restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg called Mission, I'm all for it.