Der Morgen Nachher

But last night…

Partir Ou Mourir

Today is the last day of the year.  I am making more postcards.  I am meeting new people.  I will have a resolution by midnight tonight, Berlin time.  Writing for my next project has begun, small progress as it might be.  Tonight my brother and his friends are going to take me out, though I don’t know where (please God, let there be electro, and cute French boys to watch).  We start off drinking some glühwein here at Erik’s apartment.  Then I don’t know where exactly.

Last year my new year’s resolution was to find my brother, and here I am in Berlin.  I did my work.  In case you forgot, or didn’t know, last new year’s was spent at a New York City hipster house party where yours truly shared a giant pink mess of jeger and champagne all over the walls and some coats.  My resolution then was also to forget about Viriginia and that entire mess, or at least write about it and then get over it.  Now I have to come up with something to pacify my nightmares.  When I graduate, when I publish Everything That Never Happened To Me, when I live in Portland and come back with memories from Berlin, then what?

I have a few ideas, specifically from strange dreams I’ve been having.  I have this one dream where I keep cutting my own hair and braiding it, and giving the strands to a blonde boy whose face I cannot see.  He has long blonde hair and birds are always stealing strands of it to build a nest in a nearby apple tree.  The first line that keeps appearing is, When I die – . The setting for my work might be something a bit from a dark fantasy of one’s futue.

Meanwhile, I’ve set up my reservation at Alcatraz near Senefelderplätz, in the general area where my brother lives.  When I went to put in my deposit I met these two nice French boys, one of which immediatley started talking to me about the Silvestern (the new years).  I felt embarassed talking to a French person and letting them know I’m American.  You always think of the French as the latest in fashion and food, maybe a bit stuck up, but face to face you are just struck by how simply a conversation can go.

I leave you with a German song by Stereo Total, “Ich bin der Stricherjunge.”

Speak to you soon, my merry canner friends.  A thousand friendly kisses.

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.

Berlin

More about this when I wake up, but I spent the night going to bars and clubs with my brother and his friend Erik (who I am staying with). I have been awake for nearly 40 or so hours with traveling and then spending the whole day and then the whole first night here in Berlin up.  But that’s not really awake all those hours, since I passed out on the plane when I just stopped being able to hold my uncomfortable little body up.  It’s now 8 AM and the sky is lightening up.

View from my room.

I’ll wake up and write I’m certain of it.

This Adventure Merits a Photograph of My Current Location

I am at a Sports Bar in the JFK airport.

I ordered a bloody mary and some chicken strips with a side of fries.  I paid a very stupid 5.00 to get on the internet.  An old French guy (okay – not so old – like maybe 35?) asked me if I was French in French.  I responded in Spanish that I was from Argentina.  There’s lots of people with really thick Boston accents that work as waiters (or am I hearing things?).  Also, I left my cellphone at the PDX airport, so I don’t know when I’ll see that again.  Because of this I couldn’t get in contact with a friend I was supposed to eat lunch with in NYC.  Instead I have been forced to surf the internet.

Let this be a warning to you.  Bad ideas can only lead to losing yourself in enormous interntional airports and being cold and bummy as hell in a foreign country.  In short, if you have a crazy idea, I encourage all of you to die in Berlin, but to make sure you stop in the JFK for your lay over.

UPDATE: Brilliant move losing your bank card right before heading to a foriegn country, Olivia.  You’ll have a fuck-all time trying to live off 130 Euros for five weeks.  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.  And Wells Fargo isn’t trying to help at all when you call them.

Fly Girl

God created the ass hour of the morning at 4 am.  If the day could take a shit, it would be out of the 4 am hole.  That is the hour at which I woke up.  However, this is the coolest shit ever and even though I am falling asleep in the PDX airport, I am thrilled about whatever is about to happen to me.

My plane leaves here at 6:30 AM and I arrive at JFK around 2:40 New Yorker time.  Then I have  a 5 hour layover, after which I have a essentially a red-eye to TXL, Berlin.  I arrive there at 10 AM there time tomorrow.

Basically I’m telling you this because I can barely believe it, and even as I write it down I feel completely shocked.  It’s almost as if I can get someone else to believe my life, I can justify living it.

What I should be doing, really, is buying myself corporate coffee or yet another book from the airport Powell’s.

It Came From The Sky

Thanks to Molly Gingras for this excellent photography. 3 days until Berlin.