Memories of Jetlag

Reading back through my old posts from this winter I’m overwhelmed by how vividly I feel the jetlag I had when I first arrived. The lack of sufficient daylight lead to me never getting over my jetlag the entire month I was here. I would wander up for breakfast at 7:30 at night, or 10:30, and find a pretzel at a pub, or make myself one of Erik’s frozen’s pizza. My diet was similar to his diet then. Lots of fresh bread rolls, thinly sliced meats, and salted butter for mid-day meals, frozen pizzas for dinner, and abundant clementines at breakfast, with yogurt and banana-flavoured soy milk. Lots of vodka-pudding whenever Erik left it over. Other things are remembered. The mushroomy smell of people’s boots right outside their doors, moist from the snow and sweaty from too many socks. The cold inside my cheeks that never went away, that followed me home, that turned into pneumonia. Even when I was cured and I woke up early to go online and catch a skype conversation with Johannes, I would listen to music from the winter and my cheeks would swell with the Berlin cold.

Berlin, January 1st 2009

My meals since I’ve moved here are very different. I eat lots of hummus and hallomi. I boil potatoes and save them to put my spreads on top of. In the morning I will pull a boiled red potato out from my fridge, heat it for a few minutes in the oven, and cover it in tomato basil spread, or in quark. Meat is disappearing from diet. I eat blueberry tortes at the local bakery with my fake family, with my fake kids. Johannes and I eat lots of Falafel döners together from Turkish imbisses we pass by. We split our baked potatoes wedges at a vegetarian bar over tofu and wheat burgers. We go to bed late drinking Polish beers in his loft bed, watching a film on his large computer monitor below. We wake up late and practice piano separately on his electronic and acoustic pianos.

In winter my anxiety made me crave salt. Now my homesickness urges me towards tropical fruits and food colouring. I miss mac-and-cheese from the box. I miss avocados slathered in lime and doused in salt and chased by a Corona. I miss single bottles of apricot beer drunken quietly under the extra blankets I kept on the couch. I miss my view of the Berry Good fruit stand, especially during the summer when dogs and bicycles sat unlocked in the makeshift parking lot.

My summer here is ending and the smells of winter are coming on, the cold feeling in my cheeks I now recognize as love, and the world I’ve been building for myself is slowly materializing. The Expatriate parlor/bookstore I’ve discovered may lead to more work, possibly an internship at the ExBerliner. The owner of the small bioladen where I buy my groceries gave me a bouquet of the summer’s last blumes on Monday. These mundane details are my privilege, my memories of midnight meat in December a pinch at my cold cheeks. Johannes and I: our meals now being the largest physical gap between us aside from the table we eat across, we grope beneath our tablecloth for each others’ hands in the dim kitchen. And here in the middle of the table, where our cold hands meet, I am at the middle of the blue-bridge again, where we met half-way to eat lunch, me from the east and him from the west. That is love the only way I know it, the half-way point underneath the table, over a bridge, between two languages, the summer in between our two winters and any more that come.

Back in Berlin

Here are a bunch of pictures from the host family’s house in Berlin.  The house is located in the Kreuzburg district.

I plan on uploading a pdf version of my thesis here soon.

Short Announcement

I haven’t posted for a while. That’s because I’ve been having a lot of strange thoughts and feelings.  I also haven’t been writing much.  I hope this short video explains things, for now.

Der Morgen Nachher

But last night…

Song of the Day

German Love, by Starfucker.

For Johannes, who spends today at a music technology convention in Alexanderplätz.

Meanwhile, I wander around and continue to draw everything.

Here are some drawings I’ve made so far.

view from Erik's flat

The Bad News and The Bad-Ass News

I missed the Ellen Allien concert.  It ended up being incredibly hard to get to, and didn’t actually start until 2.00 in the morning, and it was an all-night dance party, and my brother was feeling really tired and hadn’t bought the tickets yet.  This probably would have been the coolest music experience of my life.  Also, yesterday I lost my awesome green/yellow hat that all of you hated so much.  That thing was awesome. But.

I found a boy. Redheaded Johannes. Er ist sehr schön, glaube ich. Have some pictures.

German Daywalker.

Guten Morgen

twisted

Hope your holiday breaks are as interesting as my foreign love affair.

Frou Weihnachten

First of all, some gifts for you.  These are a few songs I’ve been listening to a lot and that are in some ways representative of my current state of mind.  Download this directly off my heart.

“The Warning” – Hot Chip

“Shadows” – Midnight Juggernauts

“Milk Man” – Aphex Twin

“Erdbeermund” – Ellen Allien

“Distant Lights” – Burial

“Die Krise” – Stereo Total

“Sonnendeck” – Meinrad Jungblut

“Eisbär” – Grauzone

“Avril 14th” – Aphex Twin

While you download, I’ll tell you about my holiday.  I spent Christmas Eve at my brother’s flat with his mom Erika, her husband Gusbert,  Nadja, and my brother himself.  We ate goose with beet-slaw and potato dumplings, and we drank a lot of wine.  I gave Christian a salt and pepper shaker that are shaped like two people walking.  I gave Gusbert a salt and pepper shaker that are shaped like two sparrows. I gave Nadia a stripey sweater from the Buffalo Exchange.  Erika got a necklace with a branch and sparrow on it.  I got German Mozart chocolate, a body-wash/lotion set, a Berlin travel guide, a compilation CD of the contemporary Berlin rock scene, and a ticket to the Ellen Allien show (forthcoming).

So after that, we wandered over to his friend’s flat to celebrate said friend’s birthday.  After a few drinks and a lot of other people showing up, we all drove to a club — Blah Blah.  At Blah Blah, we danced and drank until 9.00, as the sun was rising, at which point we wandered over to the separate Blah Blah after-bar, where Christian, Erik, and Nadja had their last drinks.  I made postcards here and was much more sober than anyone else there.  Men around me looked very lonely and I had to keep relocating because they would accost me and try to get me to follow them home.  I explained I was 16 and from Argentina.  This wasn’t especiall helpful, as it prompted most men to attempt drunken Spanish.

Finally Erik decided we might go home, so we walked to a main street to look for a taxi.  Erik isn’t a big fan of the Ubahn.  We got home and I heated up a frozen pizza in the oven for breakfast.  I went to bed around 10.45.  I woke up a few hours ago, that is 12.30– I slept nearly 14 hours.  It’s now 4.40 on the 26th of December, everything is closed, and the sun has yet to rise.

I caught Erik just as he was getting to leave, and he offered me some vanilla pudding with vodka in it. It is supremely tasty, though maybe not the best breakfast food.  Erik is out at Blah Blah again for the night, and tomorrow night (or I guess technically later today tonight) my brother and his friends are taking me to a German karaoke bar.  Apparently Americnan’s are extremely popular at karaoke bars here.

While I surfed the internet and caught up with the folks left side of the Atlantic, I washed my laundry and hung it up to dry over various heaters and hooks.  I really do need a camera to make these updates more interesting. Until then, you’ll have to live with photobooth.

om nom nom.

More updates to come, boys and girls!

Two Days Later

Okay, I did lie —

I did not write for a few days.  I do not have access to the camera I’m going to borrow from my brother yet, but I do have a few anecdots.

First of all, not everyone speaks English, or at least not a lot of it.  This is a myth I heard from nearly everyone in America, that Germans mostly speak English.   Because of this I am lost nearly everywhere I go, being that my Deutsch is sehr schlect.  I am getting better at my spoken German quickly but am not capable of speaking very often or  very much.

The first night I got in, I went to a industrial metal concert where Erik and his band, Scram, played.  Erik is a sound-engineer friend of my brother, who I am staying with in Schöneberg.  The concert had a low turn out, but I suspect this might have been a bad venue — they played in  youth theatre in Potsdam.  After the concert we went to a techno club, Fabrik, where I watched people, danced, and quickly realized that the only way I know to pick boys is to talk to them. As an official mute, I found myself at a loss on how to get a boy to dance with me.  After Fabrik, my brother and his friends already very drunk, we went to a bar in a beat-up neoclassical-y building off the side of a hill in Potsdam.  The smoke was so thick I couldn’t see five feet in any direction.  Lots of metal kids.  There was a small pool table, a bunch of little round tables, and people smoking.  Most people here were old and not my type.  All beards and bellies.

So here a bleached blonde girl, wearing a Metallica shirt, blows smoke into my face while I’m dancing, and I ask her why she did that to me.  She responds that she does not speak English.  I keep dancing.  Then this girl puts her cigarette out on my arm.  My brother, who is extremely drunk, sees this and goes to talk to her.  She thinks I’m Turkish.  My brother calls her a neonazi, to which she is very offended — she is a skinhead, not a nazi.  But she has a full head of blonde hair.  Another man who is wearing a shirt that says “Skinhead” is angry and comes over later.  He explains not all skinheads in Germany are racist like that blonde girl.  He claims to be a liberal skinhead.  Like, no racism, no sexism, no homophobia.  Okay, but that blonde girl was racist.  So I nearly got in a fight with this blonde girl but it seems calling her a nazi was enough to get her thrown out.

Sorry if I’m rambling here, but the bar was in a back room, and when I went out of it to look for the bathroom, I stumbled down a very long, low-ceiling’ed hallway made of bunch of stones, and very wet and drippy.  I didn’t find the bathroom but instead stumbled into a smaller bar, not so smokey, where a few teenagers/young-twenties called me over.  When I explained I didn’t speak German very well, they became interested.  I explained I came from America.  When they asked where I had to explain that Portland is south of Seattle.  Seattle immedialtely set off discussion about Kurt Cobain, and they asked questions in broken English and German that I couldn’t respond to.  Among these young people there was a young boy with long red curly hair, named Johannes.  Johannes, only 18, but especially beautiful, had a very short but managable conversation with me, after which we switched emails.  My brother came in and interrupted us looking for me.  Being now profoundly drunk, he wanted me to get ready to go home.  Erik was going to drive us (Erik – not so drunk – important for you to know!).  I said goodbye to Johannes.  Somehow it took us another two hours to leave after this, but most of that time I spent waiting for Erik and Christian to say their goodbyes. We got home at 8 in the morning.

The next day, Saturday, I spent ill.  I went out in the middle of the night and ate a German pretzel at a pub when I woke up.  Pretty much the tastiest thing on earth.  Salty, puffy, and warm.

Sunday I was supposed to meet Christian and his girlfriend, Nadia, at the Hakesharmarkt at 14.00.  However, I woke up at 13.50, and it took me an hour and a half to make my way to the Hakesharmarkt through several Ubahns and Sbahns.  I arrived at 15.30, and it was too late to go to most of the musuems.  We saw many neoclassical buildings from outside.  We went back to Christian and Nadia’s flat near Alexanderplätz and we made a fancy dinner, before I went back home on the Ubahn.

When I got to sitting in my bed here I got lonely, and decided to go downstairs to the bar and see if I could get something small to drink.  It was closing time.  I wandered down the street and decided I wanted to drink an Ayran – this Turkish drink my brother made me try, mostly yogurt with some water, salt, and a bit of pepper. An older woman saw me wandering and started talking to me.  She told me she loved my hair.  Her name she said was Sandra.  We spoke for many an hour, and she took me to a Turkish restaurant that was still open at midnight, where I got an Ayran and talked about why I came to Germany.

I went to bed around 2 in the morning, and I woke up around 7:30 and talked to some friends on the internet.  It’s now noon and I’m still just sitting in the flat, feeling extremely tired.  Earlier I was extremely sick and thew up, but I think resting has done me a bit of good.

Oh, and I look forward to this (Meriam, you are going to hate me): I am going to see Ellen Allien live at a dance club in Berlin on the 27 ob December at midnight.  I will waste 20 Euro on this.  I will do everything in my power to bring back something from this.

More to come, hopefully with pictures – and soon I’ll an emergency cellphone number.

Berlinette

Night of Olivian Spectres: My Stay at Hotel Clavijo

The best song to play on the piano when you’re wasting the night away in a New England college town is Chopin’s Waltz in B Minor. Jhon Clavijo, a Columbian photographer/film-maker, was the coordinator for Project Eye-to-Eye at Brown University until he graduated recently. Now he kicks it with actors, artists, musicians, and sometimes writers like me (when he’s not taking artistic pictures of his crotch and posting them to facebook).

A cool collaborative opportunity Jhon and I are considering: filming my trip to Berlin to find my brother, making a short documentary about the experience. I’m in the process of looking into creative grants that might fund or cover any of the expenses.

I’m waiting in Boston’s Logan Airport to take my flight back home. I’m stopping in Philadelphia. I have a new story in the making that I will be working on during the flight. Today Charlie Szuber, the template for every lead male character physically (see Charlie Without Violins) in my writing, would have been 19.

I’m excited to welcome anyone who has found me here at Forgets through my reading for Project Eye-to-Eye. I now have an airplane to get on.