Sorry for the title. This blog is just about my recent trip to Berlin. I didn't even eat any sausages, which, given the Germans' fine vegetarian sausage-making skills, was probably the wurst decision of my life (PUN!). But I needed to lure you in and I know all my readers yearn for phallic objects on a regular basis.
My trip to Berlin began with a consultation with the world’s most enlightened and progressive soul. A kernel of knowledge. A whirlwind of wisdom. An ethereal star in the cusp of the cosmos. His name was Shaikh Jalal, the Highest of All Spirits in the Midlands, and he spoke to me from the magazines of the Birmingham to Stansted train. Unfortunately, it was such a transient experience that I won’t be able to convey it in words to mongrel mortals like you, dear blog readers, so therefore I shall merely post the photo and ask you to respect my deep religious convictions.
In the meantime, I have divided this post into several sections:
- Last minute Berlin
- The Dacha
- Knives and casual psychopathy
- Shake your ass!
- SWEATY AIRPORT DRAMA
Feel free to read those which sound most sexy and appealing to your individual tastes.
Warmth, warmth
D
xx
Last minute Berlin
I came to Berlin to provide some distraction for a friend of mine in a difficult situation. A kind-souled thirty-something Russian woman with a tendency towards depression and beautiful madness decided that inviting a little Irish boy to the city for a few days would be a good way to improve her mood. The conversation went like this:
‘I’m depressed again.’
‘Do you have money?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fly me over and let’s talk about it.’
A week later I was in Berlin. My friend greeted me with miniature bottles of wine and my very own welcome sign. Before I had even left the airport premises I understood something important about the city. Visually, everyone seemed to fall into four categories: gay, hipster, hippie, punk or a combination of the above. Of course, these categories are silly and superficial, but they help capture the atmosphere of the city centre: young people in various ‘subcultural’ styles with a semi-ironic friendliness. Not wide smiley friendliness and that Hollywood ‘I’m so happy to see you’ face, but a sort of pleasant ‘do whatever the fuck you want’ indifference. People smoked in the bars, drank on the streets, made music on all the corners and graffitied all the homes. I was never referred to as ‘Sie’ (the formal German word for ‘you’) for the duration of the four day stay. I was totally du'd.
My mood generally varied between feeling free and fabulous to wondering whether I was an imposter who would never be as hopelessly creative as the surrounding strangers. I didn't busk, I didn't have tattoos and my shoes were not a self-ironizing statement on post-colonialism in the Nile Delta. Luckily, the voice of reason and the fact that beers cost only one euro helped my self-confidence prevail. I was dressed in tweed and my glasses were nerdy, but in a world where everyone looks a bit hipster, being geeky was sort of...alternative. A middle-aged gent in a clothes shop even winked at me repeatedly like an epileptic on crack and told me I looked ‘suave’. I was flattered.
‘Dacha’
My friend -- let’s call her Betty -- immediately took me to a restaurant opposite her home. Its name is ‘dacha’. For my English-speaking readers I should explain this concept. A ‘dacha’ is a country house. It is the summer destination of almost all Russian families, who spend their winters locked up in their apartments in the frozen city and their summers frolicking in mother nature's breasts. The dacha is a source of fresh air, once-a-year contacts and plentiful harvests. An elderly Russian woman cannot claim to be a true babushka unless she has spent 3 months a year on her knees growing potatoes, making ‘kompot’ (a type of fruit juice) and blending jam for the winter. In the Soviet Union people were taught that hard labour is both a useful and cleansing experience and no one enjoys a bit of harvesting more than the pensioned classes.
This ‘dacha’, however, was no country house, but rather a cute restaurant where members of the Post-Soviet space and Russophiles gather to eat home cooking, drown themselves in dill* and drink vodka by the gram.
We ordered 100 grams of vodka and some dumplings (‘pel’meny’) and began to discuss the soul, the body and the mind. By the end of the night we had laid God and the Universe to rest. Everything made sense. Betty fell asleep drunk whilst hugging her cat. I stayed up late watching drag queens on youtube and feeling blessed.
*The Great Russian herb/weed which is applied to every meal because of its mythological healing properties. See: https://www.facebook.com/groups/186326061392049/?fref=ts
Knives and casual psychopathy
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| This is a picture of a knife cutting bread. You're welcome. |
Betty banned me from cutting bread. She was afraid I might die. This is nothing new. I have spent a lot of my life dealing with terrible hand-eye coordination and to a certain extent I have developed ‘learned helplessness’. This is a process whereby a child learns that instead of performing certain fairly mundane tasks, he can receive help from sympathetic adults. I don’t have the best natural hand-eye coordination to begin with, but my problems were worsened by two defence mechanisms:
- If you can’t do it, then pretend you never wanted to do it in the first place.
- If you can’t do it, let others do it.
I never learned to tie my shoelaces. I was tired of being laughed at for my frustrated attempts. For eighteen years I pretended that I just prefered laceless shoes. During my adult life I gradually learnt the movements (thank you internet!), but along the way cute boys and sympathetic strangers stepped in to do it for me. I was so embarrassed, I would pretend I was drunk or distracted. Somehow claiming I had alcoholic tendencies seemed less embarrassing than the truth. The same applied to many other vital practical skills: cooking, cycling, tying ties and participating in any form of coordinated movement.
Betty initially just wanted to get me the fuck away from bread. She observed my perilous cutting technique and immediately stepped in. After all, my health was at risk. Later on, during a conversation about these issues, she changed her mind and slowly taught me how to position my hands, which direction to cut and how to butter the bread. I wish I had had the courage to demand this kind of patience from people when I was younger. But then again, delayed learning leads to waves of delayed pride. Life is somehow amazingly beautiful when at 22 years of age you walk out onto the streets of Berlin with your head held high at the thought that -- finally- you have become a bread-chopping ninja. Tis the little things...
During the course of my stay, Betty also introduced me to another psychological ‘trick’. In Russian the slang term ‘психовать’** (Psikhovat’) describes a state of temporary insanity wherein an individual acts like a bit of a hysterical crazy person. Betty believes that it is important for highly emotional or creative people to take half an hour a day to be insane. That way we can let our energy out gradually and in a stable manner rather than festering until we explode and spend four days eating pie on the floor and hating ourselves. As a result, for half an hour each day Betty and I took time to do ‘insane’ things: cry hysterically in the corner, have existential monologues with the cat, lick household objects, write mad poems, swear at the universe, dance in ridiculous and exotic patterns and generally feel free. After 30 minutes the insanity egg timer would go off and we would continue our serious affairs. I put on my tweed jacket and my indifferent Russian bitch-face and went off to admire local graffiti and meet natives through tinder and couchsurfing; Betty continued her work as a translator, read literature and drank gin.
**(I needn’t explain the link between the word ‘psycho’ and ‘psikhovat’, making this, unfortunately, a very unkind and stigmatic word for the mentally ill, but one which Betty, having suffering from mental illness, has re-appropriated for herself. I would compare this to the members of the LGBT+ community who reclaimed ‘queer’ to mean something inclusive rather than discriminatory, but I’m not sure whether it was a conscious decision on her part or just another example of her fabulous sense of irony.)
***We psikhovatted separately and at different times of the day. One must coordinate one's madness.
Shake your ass!
One of the most memorable Berlin encounters occurred in the middle of the night in a corner bar. I woke up at 11.57 pm with a disorientated feeling that I had left something undone or forgotten something important.
Betty was lurking drunk in the darkness.
‘Daniel, I’ve just been to a bar with a strange American man. Come with me immediately!”
We soon became the long lost table buddies of a group of eclectic strangers. Behind the bar stood a French man who had lived in Kiev for many fears and was now rhymically pouring free drinks past closing time and singing along to the Russian bard, Vladimir Vysotsky. Betty almost fell from her chair in delight: unidentified Frenchie was sexy, stubbly, edgy and sweet. He could even throw together a few fairly coherent Russian sentences. In the mood lighting and under the increasing influence of wine, it seemed that they were the perfect couple. I hope one day they reproduce and make copious amounts of culturally savvy multinational babies. But we shall see.
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| Drunk Ginsberg man told me that if I did nothing else in my life I should listen to this Cape Verdean woman. I did. She made me cry with beauty. |
Our other drunken soul mates were an impossibly lively blues singer from New York, a drunken Ginsbergian type who looked like he would say deeply profound things if he wasn’t completely off his tits, an Irish man who had previously studied English literature in Oxford and a German girl who did nothing but stare enamoured into the former’s milky, milky eyes. Having vowed to always be honest to strangers (the ‘if you don’t like me, kindly piss off’ philosophy), when asked why I intermitted from Cambridge I replied that I was depressed and everything felt empty. This led to a very odd conversation wherein the intoxicated blues singer repeatedly told me that he can’t imagine that such a thing like depression exists and that yes, he has had sad moments, but he has developed the perfect defence mechanism:
‘Every time I feel sad, I just shake my mother-fucking-ass.’
I didn’t try to explain the biological foundation of depression, but instead chose to just smile along as he sang many a song about ass shaking. Sometimes it’s just not worth it. And who am I to judge such an approach to life? I wish I could get horribly sad, write beautiful heart-wrenching poetry from the depths of the soul and then, when I felt tired, just gently frisk my derriere in order to return to a life-loving mood. Alas, things aren’t that easy.
We soon parted in mild frustration. I was annoyed that I had missed my chance to have a meaningful table conversation with my co-patriot (the noise and the enamoured girl were unsurmountable obstacles), Betty was drunk and tired of ass-shaking man. There is a limit to booty vibration.
SWEATY AIRPORT DRAMA
Unfortunately, I must leave many pieces of my experience in Berlin untouched. I could tell you more about the nice Russian man who made me laugh for hours, or the multi-lingual Spanish actor who loved Slavic culture so much that sometimes he pretended that he was the orphan of a gypsy woman from Dnepropetrovsk, or the Icelandic trucker, or the Slovak who lived on the street where ‘das Leben der Anderen’ was filmed, made me cocktails and told me about the parallel universe theory. But unfortunately, those things may have to await a future blog. I’m tired and even my fingernails smell of coffee.
Therefore I shall end my Berlin narrative with a brief image of my airport stress.
Imagine the following:
2 hours of sleep.
Rush hour in June.
Lack of cash.
Losing your boarding pass in your back pocket.
Disapproving stares from pensioners as you frantically search through your luggage on public transport.
Running to the front of the queue and apologising profusely to German strangers.
Dropping your passport 6-8 times.
Sweating like a nun in a sex shop.
Falling asleep in an upright position.
It wasn’t pretty, but I made it home.
And I will always be grateful to the nice Russian Betty who took me into her life for four nights, showed me some beautiful corners of Berlin and taught be to ‘act insane’ for half an hour a day. I expect this shall be a useful skill.
