Swedish Guests

In Paris, Katherine and I found a few friends our first night in that god awful 'Friends Hostel.' This past week, they happened to pass through Berlin and while Katherine was in Vienna with her girlfriend Anna, I showed the new friends around Berlin (the abandoned amusement park and the Sowjet Ehrenmal) and Potsdam. The decrepit and deteriorating amusement park offers few clues to its state of disrepair. Signs all around announce "Privatgrundstueck" and rusting rides and overturned dinosaurs are pretty ominous. One could think of a few stories to explain it: the fall of the Berlin Wall, a mini Tilt-A-Whirl Chernobyl, a polizei raid...

Fact is, the best story I've heard is the one that's said to be true: The former owner imported a lot of the rides after the fall of the wall from all over the world. One of those rides happened to be a Ferris Wheel - from South America (location unspecified...but does it matter?). Apparently pieces of the Ferris Wheel were inspected by customs in Germany. Apparently they found cocaine hidden within. The owner was arrested and went bankcrupt while the park folded.

Annikas and Emelie left rural, western Sweden around two months ago for a train tour of Europe and Berlin was their last stop. They're 22 and have known each other since age 7. This was somewhat of a discovery trip for them. I see my own trip to Berlin in a similar way as well (at least sometimes), and it was a provoking intersection. In terms of traveling for an extended period of time I could really see the advantages of having a partner in crime. We spent a few days just relaxing in parks and a few nights checking out the kneipen (bars) in Kreuzberg (Barbie Deinhoff's, Sofia, etc). It was nice being a tour guide here and Berlin is pretty much known to me now. Even though we only hung out for a week I already miss lazing around in the sun, talking about Swedish vs. English and the best ways to travel. They left at 5 a.m. this morning and I spent the day in the park with my books and a beer.

Pictures from the Game

Berlin Thunder Game at Olympiastadion

Berlin Thunder Ho-oooooh.

Today was the big day! Today was the home opener for the Berlin Thunder! If you haven't already heard, the Thunder is the NFL EUROPA team for Berlin. I was pretty excited for today because not only did I manage to get a free ticket (oh yeah) but the game was at Olympiastadion. This is the spot where Zinadine Zidane headbutted the Italian (don't remember his name, and frankly he can eat a D anyway..) and pushed France toward losing the 2006 World Cup Final. More importantly however, this stadium was the keystone to the 1936 Berlin Olympics that saw Jesse Owens win the gold medal over a Japanese runner and a German. From where we sat today I could see where Hitler must've been seated when he saw his Aryan ubermenschen crushed by an African-American.
So that was pretty cool. All in all its a really well designed stadium and the beers come in .5 or 1 liter sizes. God damn. It was like a pitcher of beer just asking to be chugged.

Pointless sidenote: At the White House Correspondents Association dinner a few days ago Rich Little, a Canadian comic who does a lot of impressions, bombed pretty badly. Luckily, I googled him and came across his homepage, where you can buy his sweet tribute drawings of celebrities and presidents. A different kind of impression I guess. You have to buy a membership and then you receive a drawing periodically in the mail. Sounds awesome. I want Tom Cruise first though.

Post Script: Yes I wore my Buffalo Bills T-Shirt. I'll put some of the other bizarre photos on flickr asap.

My WG, My Bike, A Trip to the Deutsch History Museum

So, I finally got around to snapping some pictures of my WG and my new bicycle. I life just to the right on the ground floor. That's my 4€ soccer ball from a small Turkish bodega on Wrangelstrasse.

On Friday I took a trip to the history museum - by bike. I'm finally getting a sense for how to get around this town, even though I still get turned around. There's really only one building on the skylineline - the TV tower - in Alexanderplatz and it looks the same from all sides. So you can make a guess about which side of it your on, but frankly I have problems sometimes.
Speaking of that damned needle I made a trip to its base and came across a really old church that seemed to have been pretty bombed out during the war. In trying to recreate a stained glass triptych they were having tourists and members of the congregation buy bits of number coded, colored glass and use sticky putty to afix it to glass panels with a crucifixion scene. It was pretty striking, bizarre and mildly offputting. But I'm getting used to these historical churches having gift shops offering memorobilia, so why not a Paint-By-Numbers Jesus?

(notice how everybody wants a piece of Jesus, not so much the leper)

The German History Museum featured a pretty interesting installation comparing and art and propaganda in Italy, Germany, the USSR, and the USA from 1930 to 1945. It was pretty striking to see how the art converged and diverged from images of the leader through images of development and industrialization through renderings of the ideal citizen and then in images of war and battles. A French roommate of mine, Pierre, had problems with the way the exhibit put all the regimes kind of on equal footing concerning versions of ideals embodied and evenly numbering collections. Basically he was arguing that putting idealized renderings of Hitler in the same room as those of FDR was kind of intellectually lazy (probably as lazy as that last section) and allowed the ideals of each regime equal footing. It was more like an art exhibit than one with historical inclinations perhaps. I agree to an extent. I found myself admiring Italian Futurist art celebrating war, Stalinist Pan-Soviet Murals celebrating disastrous collectivization, and Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia. I noted that something about the American art genuine and truthful to me - I'm not sure if this is because those war time images from Life magazine or Norman Rockwell are any less propagandistic or because they're part of my own identity. In any case it was good to get out of Kreuzberg and see something vaguely intellectual and interesting.
The top two floors of the museum housed an exhibit about every day life in the DDR (East Germany) with posters, tv broadcasts and objects from typical homes, stores and schools. I'm finding that conflict between East and West to still ride on the minds of a lot of Germans, so it was cool to see the paraphenalia considering my own estrangement from the situation.
Upon leaving the museum I headed down Unter den Linden Strasse and promptly found myself at the Brandenburg Tor - the complete opposite direction I had intended. With the help of a city map posted at a bus shelter I found my way back to Sorauer Strasse and was home.
Sorry I haven't been posting much, lots of stuff is happening but frankly I'm too lazy.
Today it's Easter Sunday and I'm feeling pretty homesick. Not that I'm even Christian or anything. I just miss getting chocolate bunnies and seeing all the lame American Easter decorations at Walgreens.
I'll get more on the ball about it soon though and you may be able to find new pictures on my flickr page without there being a new blog post.