everyone else has one so i may as well join the throng. and besides, it seems to be the thing to do at this time of year. so here's my list of things i want to and should do before the new year is up.
1. get off my arse and learn german and spanish. i've been here in germany for 3 months now and i still haven't learnt anything new apart from random words. and i still don't know how to form a sentence in spanish. although i have learnt the word for pimp, which can only be a good thing.
2. become one of the employed masses. although i am enjoying taking an extended break from the workforce, i am starting to get paranoid that a credit card company may be able to track me down and demand some kind of payment.
3. make some german friends. although i did make some friends in frankfurt, with german transport being close to the price of a moon landing, it seems a little hard to hang with them any time soon. plus it would be nice to go out for coffee with someone who could help me learn about the culture and language.
4. write more. i'm not talking about this blog, which i must say i am impressed by the fact i've kept it up even if i don't think anyone is reading it. and irish pete told me that my blog writing wouldn't last! ha to you! (note, he wasn't saying it in a mean fashion, but just an observation on his own blog writing ability when in melbourne)
5. travel more. i know, it sounds stupid coming from a melbournian in germany, but i would hate myself forever if i didn't take the chance to visit paris, see portugal, check out spain and chill out in roma.
6. find some worthy postcards to send back home. this one may seem a little trite compared to the rest, but i hate basic postcards and i don't want to send just anything to my nearest and dearest. every postcard here is the same and it's started to really bother me i can't find random and tacky, just upmarket drek for the well-to-do. where are the bum-titty-bum-bum cards with the naked girls? where are the classic german liederhausen cards? do i have to go to bavaria for this nonsense? at least that'll appease thing to do number 5 i guess.
7. try some new food - possibly german. i have eaten so many different foods here, but most of it is either stuff i know already or cuban/spanish in origin. just about the only thing german i have eaten is bakery sweets and wurst.
8. try to be less harsh on the whole american occupation thing in germany. i know the germans did bad some 60 odd years ago and probably deserve some of it. and i know the americans that are here now aren't to blame, it wasn't them who set this occupation and base thing up.
9. stop being on the internet so damn much. big call i know, especially for someone who's keeping a blog going, but i still don't understand why i am addicted to reading all the articles and forums on IMDB, or why i keep reading the age online religiously. i know it probably has something to do with the fact that i can't understand german tv or papers, but i really must stop.
10. stop comparing everything to back home. it sounds a little simple, but it really is hard to not compare things to what i've known for teh last 28 years of my life. and it's made even harder by the fact that people who aren't that excited about being in germany ask me all the time about what australia is like.
17 Jan 2008
15 Jan 2008
one club is not the same as another
let's talk about a club in berlin. i wont bore you with the details of berghain just yet, but what i will talk about just briefly is the kitkat club. this club is one of the stranger ones i have been to. it feels like a rave club, yet plays like a fetish bar. it's one of those places that are very welcoming, full to the brim of extremes and yet somehow still has a hint of innocence. i don't know how it's possible either, but they did it.
a friend of a friend had told us on christmas day, that if we aren't doing anything that night we should head out to the kitkat as they were having a christmas rave. i jumped at the chance, as i had wanted to check it out since first learning we were going to berlin. what's a trip to berlin without the decadence? all i knew was that it was a place with interesting dance music, leather and pvc party goers and a malaise of sexual fantasy thrown over everything. how could i not want to check it out? after all isn't that one of the reasons i'm in europe? to check out everything i possibly can that either isn't allowed or frowned upon back home? so after a massive meal, some red wine and a stop off at a local pub for a beer or two we went. you don't go out in berlin until at least 1am and even then, the clubs don't get pumping til about 3-4am.
upon arrival you walk through the doors and enter a coat room. this is where we obviously put our coats, but others were taking off more than that. one guy stripped down to his underwear and then put on a santa coat. not done up, just hanging losely around his undie-covered body. a girl near him took off nearly all her clothes and strutted around in a leather bondage outfit, complete with arseless chaps. allthough i felt a little weird having all my clothes on and not having had at least fifteen animals die to give me said clothes. i felt alright once i got in there though. (which is an interesting notion in itself - feeling odd wearing clothes. how novel indeed!) other people had not taken the dress code too seriously either and were in civillian clothes as well. to tell you the truth though, if it was one of those places where you had to be naked or close to it to enter, wild horses could not have dragged me there. this pale and pasty body is not for public display. i may be in germany, but that does not mean my sensibilities and prudishness get thrown completely out the window.
inside the place resembled a pretty average dance bar. flouro decorations everywhere, couches and seats strewn all over the place. the only big diffrence in berlin, as opposed to frankfurt clubs, is there's never anyone at the door to the toilets demanding you pay to use the facilities. something which i get sick of very quickly. paricularly because i have yet to see a toilet that is pristine enough to warrant paying for the privilege of releaving your insides. although i have seen many that deserve to be crapped on, but that's a whole other kettle of fish. once inside the music on this night reminded me of the music they play in revolver. not the crazy dance once the sun comes up, but the stuff they play in the pillow room before everyone gets hearded into the pool room. although there is two rooms in kitkat (the other room's music was pretty similar to the first one's, just less places to sit), we stayed in the first.
i had two surreal moments in kitkat. the first was entertaining the fact that pot is legal in berlin and rolling a joint for all to see. it was very odd. i can remember sitting at a table and rolling a fat one when one of the barstaff walks over to clear the table. my first instinct was to hide it, which would have been stupid, given that even though the joint is hidden, the bag of pot is still directly in front of me. and besides, how does that old song go? 'you don't get caught if you don't act funny.' so i just continued to roll. the guy clearing tables just walks over, smiles at me and takes all the glasses off our table. of which there were a few, we were sharing tables with another group. a group it seems had more pot than a columbian drug lord. not only did they spark up constantly, but i swear to god they rolled the biggest joints i have ever seen. i just got high off their second hand smoke.
the second surrealism happened when i noticed what was to the side of the dancefloor. there was a bed set up with a massive sign saying 'fuck for forrest' on it. i'm not too sure what conservationism has to do with sexual intercourse, but if that's how they want to help, then at least they're doing something i suppose. it wasn't until about half-way through the night that i saw this piece of kitkat in action, but once it started it seemed to go on constantly. two girls making out and 'fooling around' while various members of the opposite sex stood around and pleasured themselves. not only did i see a guy in a miniskirt jerk off to these hippies sans clothes, but i also saw a guy with one arm only dressed in tight-fitting leather pants sit to the side and tweak his nipple. i remember wondering if the only reason he was doing that was that he needed help with his belt, but that's just mean.
this wasn't all i saw in kitkat, but it does give you the idea of the kind of christmas day that i had. it wasn't traditional by any means, but i had fun dancing around, drinking beer, smoking pot and being a total voyuer perve. i'm glad i went. the only thing that was slightly disappointing was that i was told that if it wasn't chritsmas there would have been more fetish stuff going on, but most of the fetishists were probably with their families enjoying the chirstmas break. but i did see a few of them. guys in nothing but jockstraps, girls in small miniskirts without underwear. i even saw one of these girls get fingered by a guy dressed as a woman.
a friend of a friend had told us on christmas day, that if we aren't doing anything that night we should head out to the kitkat as they were having a christmas rave. i jumped at the chance, as i had wanted to check it out since first learning we were going to berlin. what's a trip to berlin without the decadence? all i knew was that it was a place with interesting dance music, leather and pvc party goers and a malaise of sexual fantasy thrown over everything. how could i not want to check it out? after all isn't that one of the reasons i'm in europe? to check out everything i possibly can that either isn't allowed or frowned upon back home? so after a massive meal, some red wine and a stop off at a local pub for a beer or two we went. you don't go out in berlin until at least 1am and even then, the clubs don't get pumping til about 3-4am.
upon arrival you walk through the doors and enter a coat room. this is where we obviously put our coats, but others were taking off more than that. one guy stripped down to his underwear and then put on a santa coat. not done up, just hanging losely around his undie-covered body. a girl near him took off nearly all her clothes and strutted around in a leather bondage outfit, complete with arseless chaps. allthough i felt a little weird having all my clothes on and not having had at least fifteen animals die to give me said clothes. i felt alright once i got in there though. (which is an interesting notion in itself - feeling odd wearing clothes. how novel indeed!) other people had not taken the dress code too seriously either and were in civillian clothes as well. to tell you the truth though, if it was one of those places where you had to be naked or close to it to enter, wild horses could not have dragged me there. this pale and pasty body is not for public display. i may be in germany, but that does not mean my sensibilities and prudishness get thrown completely out the window.
inside the place resembled a pretty average dance bar. flouro decorations everywhere, couches and seats strewn all over the place. the only big diffrence in berlin, as opposed to frankfurt clubs, is there's never anyone at the door to the toilets demanding you pay to use the facilities. something which i get sick of very quickly. paricularly because i have yet to see a toilet that is pristine enough to warrant paying for the privilege of releaving your insides. although i have seen many that deserve to be crapped on, but that's a whole other kettle of fish. once inside the music on this night reminded me of the music they play in revolver. not the crazy dance once the sun comes up, but the stuff they play in the pillow room before everyone gets hearded into the pool room. although there is two rooms in kitkat (the other room's music was pretty similar to the first one's, just less places to sit), we stayed in the first.
i had two surreal moments in kitkat. the first was entertaining the fact that pot is legal in berlin and rolling a joint for all to see. it was very odd. i can remember sitting at a table and rolling a fat one when one of the barstaff walks over to clear the table. my first instinct was to hide it, which would have been stupid, given that even though the joint is hidden, the bag of pot is still directly in front of me. and besides, how does that old song go? 'you don't get caught if you don't act funny.' so i just continued to roll. the guy clearing tables just walks over, smiles at me and takes all the glasses off our table. of which there were a few, we were sharing tables with another group. a group it seems had more pot than a columbian drug lord. not only did they spark up constantly, but i swear to god they rolled the biggest joints i have ever seen. i just got high off their second hand smoke.
the second surrealism happened when i noticed what was to the side of the dancefloor. there was a bed set up with a massive sign saying 'fuck for forrest' on it. i'm not too sure what conservationism has to do with sexual intercourse, but if that's how they want to help, then at least they're doing something i suppose. it wasn't until about half-way through the night that i saw this piece of kitkat in action, but once it started it seemed to go on constantly. two girls making out and 'fooling around' while various members of the opposite sex stood around and pleasured themselves. not only did i see a guy in a miniskirt jerk off to these hippies sans clothes, but i also saw a guy with one arm only dressed in tight-fitting leather pants sit to the side and tweak his nipple. i remember wondering if the only reason he was doing that was that he needed help with his belt, but that's just mean.
this wasn't all i saw in kitkat, but it does give you the idea of the kind of christmas day that i had. it wasn't traditional by any means, but i had fun dancing around, drinking beer, smoking pot and being a total voyuer perve. i'm glad i went. the only thing that was slightly disappointing was that i was told that if it wasn't chritsmas there would have been more fetish stuff going on, but most of the fetishists were probably with their families enjoying the chirstmas break. but i did see a few of them. guys in nothing but jockstraps, girls in small miniskirts without underwear. i even saw one of these girls get fingered by a guy dressed as a woman.
8 Jan 2008
my new-found love of hoodies
i have recently (read as the last six months) have begun to champion the hoodie as an item of clothing. (link is another stupid and pointless wikipedia entry, but for the uniformed you get what a hoodie is) previously i have hated and despised the things for years. they seemed so american and so common that i really had no time for them. not that i hated america, but i didn't see the point of an australian, or any other nationality, wearing something that had a great big USA stretching across the back or an american university that i haven't had the (dis)pleasure of attending. that coupled with the fact they started to become popular when this whole rap/hip hop explosion started, thanks to the likes of eminem and other such 'artists', i just didn't see the point of joining in with the masses to line up and get me mine.
now some time has passed, however, i am in a tumultuous love affair with them. from never wearing anything but jackets and jumpers, i am now the proud owner of four hoodies, a hooded jacket and an anorak (with fur hood, no less). my most recent acquisition being a hoodie that is reversible, black on one side, yellow on the other and sporting a neat zip up front. i found it in berlin on boxing day and it was 20% off! bargain! still with the euro conversion, it would be a modest buy in aust, but with 20% off and the temperature reaching a horrid -6 degrees at night, i thought it was a fair and reasonable purchase. the only reason i mention all this hoodie madness is to impart some wisdom to you all. if you ever venture out into the unknown world of northern europe, get yourselves a hoodie. you'll need it. not only does the weather here prompt ownership of one, but they look great under a leather jacket or pinstripe suit jacket. but don't you be stealing my style when i'm around or there'll be trouble. and please stay away from the jackets that have hoods sown into the top of them. you're only cheating yourselves on style. plus everyone can tell you're just a fashion tourist when you wear one. ie you look cheap and somewhat of a twat.
anyway, as pointless as this post is, that's all i want to say for now.
tchuss
now some time has passed, however, i am in a tumultuous love affair with them. from never wearing anything but jackets and jumpers, i am now the proud owner of four hoodies, a hooded jacket and an anorak (with fur hood, no less). my most recent acquisition being a hoodie that is reversible, black on one side, yellow on the other and sporting a neat zip up front. i found it in berlin on boxing day and it was 20% off! bargain! still with the euro conversion, it would be a modest buy in aust, but with 20% off and the temperature reaching a horrid -6 degrees at night, i thought it was a fair and reasonable purchase. the only reason i mention all this hoodie madness is to impart some wisdom to you all. if you ever venture out into the unknown world of northern europe, get yourselves a hoodie. you'll need it. not only does the weather here prompt ownership of one, but they look great under a leather jacket or pinstripe suit jacket. but don't you be stealing my style when i'm around or there'll be trouble. and please stay away from the jackets that have hoods sown into the top of them. you're only cheating yourselves on style. plus everyone can tell you're just a fashion tourist when you wear one. ie you look cheap and somewhat of a twat.
anyway, as pointless as this post is, that's all i want to say for now.
tchuss
7 Jan 2008
reflections of berlin
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as my last post states - i was in berlin. i was there for a total of ten nights, eleven days. i stayed at a friend of a friend's house just round the corner from yorkstrasse station and saw many a sight and had many an experience. the only thing i was a little disappointed with, was having no internet for the time i was there. how could i keep up my facebook friendships? how could i communicate with those back home without wasting all my handy (mobile) credit? (which i did anyway!) and how could i remember everything to let you, dear reader, know just what went down? the last one had me a little worried. you see berlin had the tendency to make me drink. not get drunk on ye olde gluhwein like one painful evening in heidelberg, but let's just say the beer and wine and scotch were plentiful and flowing a little too easily. but anyway, here i am back home in heidelberg and starting this blog writing business again. now my first thought was to just purge everything on here and let you guys sort out the mess, but then i thought that would be unfair and i might be asking too much from a casual reader, so i scrapped that idea. my second was to write eleven entries and have a day for each, but that would be doing an injustice to places that really need more than just a few lines hurriedly written in my failing english. (you see, even though i am still yet to learn german or spanish properly, the effect of talking to non-english speakers constantly is starting to take away from my rather pompous and educated english.) so i've decided to just write and see what i feel like writing about when the words start flowing. i doubt i'll talk about everything to do with berlin (i still haven't talked about my beloved schloss or france!), but at least you'll get a good idea of what i experienced and what i'm up to. so here goes...
berlin is an odd city. i went in expecting a massive sprawling city with skyscrapers and crazy big city things going on everywhere. berlin is not one of those cities. at first i was kinda disappointed by this. that's what i liked about frankfurt. it had skyscrapers and still retained some of it's altstadt charm. i spent the first few days thinking, 'where's the city? are we in the middle? what's going on here?' now berlin has roughly the same population as melbourne, so i expected something similar, not in appearance, mind you, but at least in size vertically. it wasn't til a couple of days later that i figured it out. berlin isn't about the city, it's about the vibe, the small places and what you can find hidden away. this became only to apparent when alexis and i went out for the day by ourselves, and after going through the abysmal new jewish synagogue (i don't recommend it unless you really want to go), we found a large courtyard full of trees and shops and cafes near oranienstrasse. it was beautiful to just stumble across this piece of tranquility amongst the urban sprawl that is the graffiti-soaked berlin main strasses. this seems to sum up berlin perfectly. it's an ugly bitch with nothing much on the outside but 'urban art' to interest you, but dig deeper and you'll find the city's real heart. and it has got heart, you just need to get past the gruff german exterior to find it. everything seems cold (literally and metaphysically, -6 degrees is a killer), but there really is a great liberal atmosphere that makes you think that you could do anything and no one would bat an eyelid or even care. i became very aware of this after spending new year's eve in berghain, but that's a story for another day.
by the end of my time in berlin i had grown to love it. i stopped wondering where the city was and starting taking it for what it was. however i still don't agree with berliners calling everything alternative underground. if your club has advertising everywhere on the streets and it's a very well known and sought after place to get into, it is not underground. that's called successful. at least where i come from it is. it's like calling revolver underground. it's not, it's just alternative. but when does alternative become the norm? is it when you get so popular you can turn people away for no reason at all? or there's an hour long wait in a que just get in? but that's beside the point and not really what i wanted to talk about here.
berlin is now one of my favourite cities, however i don't think i'd want to live there. it's way too depressing and cold, and just like that ugly bitch with a heart of gold, sure you want to be friends, but do you really want to see them everyday? nope, melbourne is still my one and only true love. that city has left a permanent mark in my heart and it wont go away by cheating on it with a euro substitute. however, if heidelberg was the size of melbourne i might be persuaded to take a german lover. just don't tell dear old melbs i said that.
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