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finding my way back to Hotel Klassik
Saturday, September 14 2024
location: room 305, Klassik Hotel, Berlin Germany
Gretchen slept pretty well despite the thumping music coming from "da kub" all night. There had been periods of quiet overnight, but then it would begin again, and it continued until as late as 9:00am this morning. But that wasn't the only noise in our janky hotel room. There was also the mournful crying of either an abused wife or an unhappy child. Before we got going, I heated up the leftover french fries in the room's microwave oven and ate them. They weren't great, but they weren't as bad as expected. I also made myself a cup of black tea from a teabag I happened to have. (Strangely, on this trip through northern Europe, the coffee one normally expects to get with hotel rooms was consistently not being supplied.)
On our way to rent bikes, Gretchen asked the woman at the counter if I could have a cup of coffee. She cheerfully made me one with her coffee robot, and it was pretty good.
At nearby Radwelt Berlin Friedrichshain (a bicycle store), it took awhile for an employee to attend to us, so I was looking over the fancy new bikes. Interestingly, the latest bikes no longer have tubes with a circular cross-section. Instead they're flattened vertically. This must make them stronger for their weight, which is almost always the explanation for every new style of bicycle structure. When an employee managed to find us a couple rental bikes, they were fairly crappy three-speeds that didn't have a method to secure a smartphone to the handlebars (necessary for the navigation we'd need to be doing) and didn't even have a way to adjust the heights of the seats without an allen wrench. The employee offered to sell us a little silicone blob for attaching a phone to the handlebars. It cost fifteen euros, but, as I saw it, what choice did we have? Evidently the key to greater bike rental revenue at Radwelt Berlin Friedrichshain is renting super-crappy bikes.
First we headed to a world-famous nightclub called Berghain just to see if a line was already forming of people who wanted to get in tonight. There was no line, but bleary-eyed young people were sitting around socializing, perhaps still cranked up on the MDMA they'd taken last night (or looking to score some more).
Eventually we ended up at Berlinische Galerie, a museum of the works of mostly Berlin-area artists from the last hundred or so years. The first exhibit we entered was the quirky work of Mariechen Danz, which featured a mix of organic and mechanical forms, some of which cast real shadows. But some of those shadows weren't real; they'd been painted on the wall. There was something about the metal shapes with cutouts that triggered something in me that has a fondness for gadgets, apparently even ones that have no function at all. Next we looked at a huge collection of photographs by Akinbode Akinbiyi, a British-born man of Nigerian origin who has lived in Berlin since 1991. Then there was an exhibit of various objects, including an igloo-shaped building, made mostly of panels made from fungus. (We were allowed to go inside that one, though we first had to remove our shoes.) After that, we split up and mostly went around the upstairs galleries on our own. There were some amazing photographs there of Berlin in the immediate aftermath of World War II. In fact, one huge panoramic photo from as late as 1952 still showed Berln as largely a ruin, though one with a few operating businesses. In that swath of destruction was a small section where people were seated at tables outside, evidently enjoying a pleasant café experience. It drove home the reality that humans can get comfortable in just about any situation. Also up there on the second floor was a fairly large exhibit of Dadaist art, which, to my contemporary sensibility, just looks like sophomoric attempts at provocation, ones that haven't aged particularly well.
Back on the first floor, I heard interesting music coming from a room that turned out to be a theatre, and there two short movies were playing on a loop. They featured Mariechen Danz, the artist who had painted the fake shadows in the first exhibit, as well as several other collaborators. They were performing a wacky art-music piece somehow relating the body, its organs, and such to... well, it wasn't altogether clear. People were wearing goofy outfits and occasionally lapsing into primitive growls. But now and then they would unify to make hauntingly beautiful music. Gretchen joined me as I was watching this, and she agreed when I said it made Miranda July sound like Taylor Swift.
Just before we headed off to the next thing, I got an oat milk cappuccino in the mueum's gift shop. And Gretchen installed a navigation app that had come with the 15 euro blob of silicone she was using to secure her phone on her crappy rental bike. We headed back east through Berlin, passing through a large park where a lot of African men were standing around, many of them by themselves. Before we got back to our hotel, we stopped at another vegan kabab place called Vöner for lunch. The menu languages there were in German and English, and the employees looked to be German, not Turkish. We arrived in the later part of lunch time and things were busy, so it took awhile for our food to come out. Gretchen thought hers was amazing, especially due to the freshness of the vegetables. But I didn't like mine as much as what I'd had at Doen Doen yesterday. We also ordered a side of cheesy fries, and they were very good (if a little bit gross).
After a little down time back in the hotel room, Gretchen and I went out again and rode our bikes down to the River Spree, initially looking for a place that sells tickets for boat rides up and down the Spree. When we couldn't find such a place, we went to the next destination on the list: the longest remaining remnant of the Berlin Wall. It's billed as an outdoor art gallery called the East Side Gallery and includes some famous murals dating to just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most of those paintings from that time were lost, though later they were recreated, and it was the recreations we could see today. This including the famous image of Leonid Breznev kissing Erich Honecker, which Gretchen remembers from the only other time she visited Berlin, way back in 1991. It was interesting to see the material of the wall itself, with its segments having an L-shaped cross-section so they could each stand on their own. But the fact that the murals on them had been painted, defaced, and repainted made most of them uninteresting to me. But there was a fairly big crowd of people all along it, snapping selfies or even being led in small groups by tour guides. And at some point a small fleet of Trabants drove by, honking their horns and leaving a cloud of exhaust fumes. That's the crappy (but now beloved) car that was manufactured in the old East Germany. They're loud, smelly, underpowered, and boxier than their contemporaries in the West.
At that point we biked across the Spree and back through that park we'd biked through earlier today, the one with all the African men. The destination this time was a visit "for drinks" with Leah, a woman we hadn't yet met but who is a cinematographer and friends with Gretchen's childhood friend Dina. But since we were running a bit early, we had time to kill in her neighborhood. We looked around in a Greek condiment store, checking out the olives, candies, cookies, and such before buying some green olives and some sort of tapenade to bring as gifts to Leah's house. Then we walked around the block, occasionally checking out an apotheke to see if it was open. Evidently German pharmacies are completely closed on Saturdays, which was unfortunate, since we knew that if we could find an open one, they would sell of diphenhydramine. Without that, it was difficult to imagine how we'd survive another night in a hotel room overlooking a German techno club. We walked briefly through another park, marveling again at how much better German play equipment is than the American kind. That alone will likely translate into better gross-domestic-product-per-human numbers in the years to come.
Leah's apartment was on the top foor of a five-story apartment block surrounding a courtyard. A glass-walled elevator had been retrofit onto it in the courtyard, which made for a fun ride. As for Leah's apartment, it was beautiful, with lots of light and roof access. She popped open some wine and we went up to the roof deck, where we had gorgeous views of the city. While we were up there, I was intrigued by a single photovoltaic solar panel, which Leah said wasn't really being used. She then drew our attention to a solar hydronic setup that supplies hot water "eight months of the year," which seemed about right. Interestingly, Leah and her husband had had to put trays of some sort of plantings in various places on the roof to make her part of it into something of a green roof. Leah explained that the rules in Berlin are that if you make an attic space liveable, you are required to make an area equal to that liveable space on your roof "green" with such plantings. And potted plants on a roof deck do not count.
Eventually we were joined on the roof deck by Leah's husband, a German electrical engineer, at which point we started asking them questions about things that had mystified us about Berlin. What, we wanted to know, was up with all the graffiti? Most buildings are covered with it at street level, and it continues in places up onto decks and roofs. But people go about their lives as though it's just part of the scenery, much like people in the photo from 1952 of the still-ruined city I'd seen earlier today in the museum. Leah explained that people can try to cover it up or wash it away, but it immediately comes back. The government and churches have enough stamina to get rid of it, but not the private sector. Then she admitted that she herself had done her own graffiti. Initially, she'd just sprayed over some annoying graffiti she could see on a nearby wall from her roof deck. But when that didn't work, she painted a large picture of an owl, which has graphically occupied the space well enough to keep graffiti away. She says that she had to do her graffitiing covertly, of course, since she didn't want to piss off whomever owns that wall.
A question I had was about the hooded crows, which I'd noticed behave like just another urban bird, as underfoot on the sidewalks as pigeons, but much bigger. I wasn't sure American culture would tolerate crows behaving this way on the streets of the United States. Perhaps the culture is more accepting of big scary birds in Germany? Leah's husband said that the hooded crows are a characteristically Eastern European bird and did't really start behaving like pigeons until about twenty years ago. I'm not sure what cultural change happened at that time, but perhaps it happened entirely within hooded crow culture.
Another topic was the tall radio tower we'd walked past at Alexanderplatz and that we'd been able to see in the distance from pretty much everywhere. Leah and her husband said that it was erected by the East German government and that now people love it, which seemed to indicate there was a time when people hated it.
Most of our conversation, though, was us reacting to things Leah was saying. For some reason, she was very defensive about her level of wealth, as though she thought perhaps we might think less of her because she wasn't wealthy. I'm not sure why she had this attitude, since we looked like slobs and were using Android phones, but perhaps she'd picked this up from something Dina had said. Leah spent a lot of time talking about her oldest son, who is now a student at Harvard. He's having a miserable time partly because he is of limited means but living in a dorm room with the son of a billionaire and the son of a millionaire. And the billionaire's son has more than one yacht. So socializing with those douchebags is kind of impossible. But then when Leah's son wants to sign up for some club or event, there's always a brutal admissions process designed to make the clubs or events more exclusive. So he's having a miserable time. Leah said she hopes to cheer her son up by flying his now long-distance girlfriend out to visit him, but ultimately the problem seems to be Harvard itself and its stuffy exclusive WASPy culture.
Periodically as we talked, we'd hear crowd noises and megaphones off in the distance. Leah said that those were people protesting against Isræl's ongoing mistreatment of the people in Gaza and on the West Bank. She said that tensions related to that issue, which are fueling the rise of the extreme right in Germany (not that anything bad could come of that), sometimes makes Berlin itself feel unsafe and that she's lucky to have a rooftop apartment to retreat to. As she said this, I realized that Netanyahu's selfish need for continual war (so he can stay in office and avoid prosecution, much the way Donald Trump hopes to) is not only destabilizing the Middle East, it's also destabilizing Europe.
When we told Leah about how noisy our hotel room is, she insisted that we check out of that hotel and stay in one of her guest rooms immediately. That would've been logistically tricky tonight, but we said perhaps we'd be doing that tomorrow. I was pretty sure I didn't want to do that because, truth of the matter was that I didn't like Leah. She seemed like someone with a chip on her shoulder. When, for example, I mentioned something about which I had some expertise (that is, deploying that one photovoltaic solar panel she has), she insisted somehow that the panel was incompatible with all manner of methods for hooking it up (which seems impossible to me) and even sort of gave me a menacing glare. I dropped the subject immediately.
We left Leah's place just as Leah's son's girlfriend (the one they'll be flying to Harvard) was arriving for dinner. Not knowing Leah, she'd only allocated a little over an hour for our visit, and then it was on to the next thing.
We pedaled our crappy rental bikes some distance before arriving at Stella Nera, a vegan pizzeria. Our friends Simon and Cathy from the boat were there waiting for us at an outdoor table. But Gretchen had made a reservation, so soon we moved to an indoor table. We all ordered beers (mine was a mediocre pale ale) and individual pizzas, which were a little over a foot in diameter. Both Simon and I ordered mushroom pizzas, which came without even any faux cheese. Gretchen and Cathy's pizzas had faux cheese on them, but they were in little dollops that I found somewhat unappetizing. I wouldn't say the pizza was especially good, though the crust had the great brick oven quality that we all love. I don't remember what all we talked about, but in there somewhere was us exchanging invitations to our various places in our respective home countries. After we all had limoncello, and then it was time for Simon and a Cathy to take an Uber back to their hotel and for us to bike back to ours in the dark.
I'd been a little nervous about biking in Berlin at night. But our bikes, for all their flaws, had motion-activated LED lighting, so they were highly-visible to cars, which gave us plenty of room as we zoomed down the bike lanes. Usually Gretchen takes the lead, since she's the one doing all the navigation. But for some reason I charged out ahead, turning around often to check in with Gretchen. But I was going too fast, she said, and she couldn't keep up. Not only that, but we'd just overshot our turn. So we turned around and I followed behind her as she wanted. But at that turn we'd overshot, she was over in the middle of traffic and I couldn't see her well from the rightmost lane (the bike lane) that I was in. And then I noticed she'd completely disappeared. There were three possible directions she could've gone, but I didn't know which it was. So I stopped and waited there on the sidewalk for her to realize I was no longer with her. I waited and waited and slowly came to the realization that she really doesn't check to see that I'm behind her when we're biking. It was an infuriating consequence of her inability to maintain an appropriate level of attention. After awhile, it was clear that she would've put in far too much distance from where I was to ever find me, so I was going to have to navigate back to Hotel Klassik on my own. If I could get WiFi, maybe I could message her. But there was no open WiFi hotspot there on that lonely corner.
Fortunately, I'd dropped a pin on Hotel Klassik earlier this morning, mostly so I could know where it was when I needed to write about it later. I didn't have enough connectivity for my phone to give me navigating instructions. But the map was in the memory on my phone, so I could map out my own path, assuming I could figure out what direction I was heading (my phone is a cheap one that lacks a built-in compass). So I started pedaling up the street crossing the street I'd been on at the intersection where I'd lost Gretchen, watching what my blue dot was going. When it seemed to be going the wrong direction in a park (probably Volkspark Hasenheide), I turned around and went the other way. I soon found that navigating myself on tiny surface streets was too difficult, since I had to do so while biking one-handed and looking at my phone (I didn't have that silicone blob thing to attach it to the handlebars of my bike). The little streets tended to be cobblestone ones that made the bike vibrate uncomfortably, rendering the phone impossible to read. So I found my way to a big road called Kottbusser Dammm and took it north to Kortbusser Tor, and then went east on Skalitzer Str., which would take me all the way back to Hotel Klassik. When I got to the Spree, I wasn't sure the road crossed it at grade, since there was a high trestle there carrying commuter rail cars. As I tried to figure out how to proceed, I realized I had free WiFi from the commuter rail station. Gretchen had sent me some messages, eventually concluding with one saying I was probably navigating home on my own. I told her I was at the Spree "nearish" the hotel and made the observation that she "really doesn't" check to make sure I am following her when we're biking.
I was back in our room in Hotel Klassik not long before midnight. Gretchen thought I'd be furious at her, which I had been. But after she explained how, in the darkness, she might've mistaken other cyclists for me, what happened started seeming like more of an inevitability. Gretchen said that after she'd figured out I was no longer following her, she did backtrack, worrying that perhaps she'd find me in the ditch with a broken arm. She eventually went into a "bodega" (though that's not what they're called in Berlin) and got an employee in there to give her WiFi by making his phone into a temporary hotspot, and that was how she was able to send me messages.
In preparation for another night of punchis punchis punchis, Gretchen and I inserted earplugs into our ears and put strong sleeping medications on our bedside tables. (Mine was ambien.) The earplugs felt irritating after awhile, and they didn't seem to be doing much about the bass coming through my bones. So I eventually took that ambien, washing it down with some booze. After that, I slept like a dead man.
Our view from the Hotel Klassik this morning.
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Out in front of the Berlinische Galerie.
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The fungus igloo at Berlinische Galerie.
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Gretchen and me inside the fungus igloo at Berlinische Galerie.
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A "house of cards" sculpture in Berlinische Galerie.
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A panoramic photo of bombed-out Berlin in 1952 at Berlinische Galerie.
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A series of paintings at Berlinische Galerie.
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A fancy high-tech unisex bathroom in Berlinische Galerie. Hello, little one indeed!
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Our view from our table in front of Vöner Kebab today.
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The remains of the Berlin Wall.
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More remains of the Berlin Wall.
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The remains of the Berlin Wall with a passing fleet of Trabants.
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Famous commies kissing on the remains of the Berlin Wall.
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The Spree waterfront through a break in the remains of the Berlin Wall.
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