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.