Bratwurst and Techno
Tuesday, September 30th, 2003Berlin was not all that special. Maybe my impression was colored by being woken up on the train into Deutchland by a kick to the head by a German police officer while he shined a flashlight in my eyes. He may have muttered something like “sorry” as he moved on to the next compartment. But curled up on the floor of our non-sleeper compartment with my legs alternately falling asleep and cramping, squeezed in beside three other frugal travelers, that’s not what it sounded like.
Berlin looks a lot like Boston with straighter roads. It was comfortably boring. If we didn’t look too closely we could swear we were home. I had always thought that some sections of Boston looked liked they were designed as Soviet bunkers, now it seems I was correct. The resemblance was uncanny. Berlin is undergoing massive construction. Every part of the city is being torn up and redone in steel and glass. With some decent attempts at architecture too, not just boxes.
There was a big Marathon happening the weekend we showed up, so all the hostels we tried to phone ahead for were full. So we were wandering along with our backpacks through a kind of crappy wasteland that seemed to be given over to street artists and junkies, wondering where to sleep and we looked up to see the words:
We walked in through the airlock and rented beds in a cabin on the first deck. The decks were future white and the facilities were oddly modern. All of the Heart of Gold’s laundry and lavatory facilities were designed by the Sirius Cybernetics corporation and included “Human Friendly” instructions cards on their somewhat quirky operation. For a small deposit you could borrow towels (of course) and a variety of Sens-O-Matic sunglasses. A selection of alien drinks were available at the bar.
After Paris, is was nice to see individuality in dress return. There’s this funny hair dye thing goin’ on in Europe. A small minority of ladies will dye half their head, right down the middle. Mostly its the brown/blond thing you’ve seen before, but the older generation does white/red. I saw a 16 year old girl with white/red too. It was more common in Berlin than anywhere else. Old guys are still wearing the Hitler mustache. Traditional dress was present in the big city, but pretty rare. We only spotted a couple leiderhosen and one traditional blouse. The jean jacket with blue jeans is still a hit over here. Germans like all the cheesy American music from twenty to fifty years ago. The obnoxious cars blasting music at the stoplights put out boring techno, not hip-hop. There’s not even bass to rattle the windows.
We went out to this restaurant that advertised “Tradition Deutche Kitchen”. I’ve never really liked sausage or saurkraut, but they did an amazing job on this stuff. They had a red cabbage and clove sauce that went perfectly with beets and shredded beef. We also had wonderful taut bratwurst popped open in our mouths and soft, pleasing sauerkraut. We finished with an apple strudel and grapes, kiwi and whipped cream. We payed 7 Euros a pop for entrees that just aren’t available at home. Local traditional cuisine is just so many kinds of good. I had this bizarre drink: Berliner Weisse mit Shisse und Juniper. Green juniper flavored wheat beer. Good, but strange. The regular ales and lagers cost fifty cents for a half liter. This cheapo bottled beer was rich, tasty and better than most fresh brewery beer in the States. But you can’t ship it because there’s no preservatives. We drank a lot of it.
Feeling the pinch of Western European prices and the sinking dollar we jumped on a train for Prague…
Amsterdam is outrageously small and cute. Built around concentric canals, the houses are wedged along the water mingled in with cafes and shops. The narrow cobblestone spoke streets gradually give way to avenues outside the medieval center, but the first thing you notice is the bicycles. Everyone seems to be on one of these black utilitarian boneshakers. Hordes of them fly by at speed down the ubiquitous bike lanes. Canals or trams get the center of the street, cars are squeezed in beside them, and the bike lanes take up the road until the skinny sidewalk.
Amsterdam is a very fun place to be. There’s always a cafe to stop at, boats to watch and something going on in the street. We saw contact jugglers and excellent street musicians. We stopped to watch a chess match on a giant sized board where the players furiosly hauled the pieces around while yelling challenges at each other. One of the best things we bumped into was a really nice antique shop full of old devices mechanickal: Astrolabes, telescopes, coffee grinders, weird complicated gadgets we couldn’t puzzle out; all of the most meticulous craftsmanship and usually older than the United States.
The vulcan rock of the island is sharp, raw and fresh. Everything is jagged and porous. The “fields” are all knee deep in glacial debris. The peaks jut up out of the landscape without foothills. The crunchy boulder strewn ground is covered in 7 inches of thick, soft, bouncy green moss. It looks like candy and just begs to be stomped around. Its like a mold experiment let loose on Mars. There are no real trees, but if you hunt you can find small copses of lonely dwarf birch and evergreen. Mostly its just small patches of moss vainly trying to crawl up the steaming, sulfurous mountains.
When you leave the city the human habitation just ends. There are a quarter million people on this island the size of Britain. More than half of those people are in Reykjavik. So really its more like a hundred thousand out here, widely scattered. There are many underground mound homes and a few shops tucked into the earth like hobbit holes. The people out here leave their villages, run off into the mountains and stick a pipe in the ground until steam shoots out of it. The horizon is dotted with little puffs of steam where someone decided to start a miniature Icelandic pony farm.
We spent most of our time attempting to drive to Sights. Mostly we’d drive for a bit, get distracted by the amazing scenery we’d bump into along the way, pull over and run off to chase sheep and ponies up into the mountains. We’ve pictures of Geysir and Gulfloss, we also went swimming in the Blue Lagoon hot springs. There’s this silicate mud that gives the water there an eerie milky blue color. We sculpted big white horns on Mandy with it (French girl: “You are like zee bull”). Its supposed to be good for your skin, but it turned my hair in to one giant dreadlock. Nappy. It fell out in handfuls.