Hullo! my covey, what's the row?
Hey all, it's been awhile since I rapped at ya, but I been real busy.
Way, way back earlier this year, I'm talking July, I went to Germany for a wedding. I wrote down a bunch of shit about it in a notebook I was carrying with me. I'm including it below:
July 5th, 2013 (German time)
Roni, the Soups*, and I just boarded a "metra" train bound for Espelkamp. We met up with the Soups outside of Alexanderplatz, a tourist-y area near a train stop. (Aside: The Soups were Kristen's (Editor's Note: The bride in the aforementioned wedding) host parents when she was an exchange student.) We had to reschedule our original train ticket, which was a direct line, due to construction on the track. Getting onto this train was a weird experience - Roni got super furtrated because the train was labeled 848 and our tickets are labeled 858 with different stops/destinations. Last minute, Roni double-checked with an attendant who assured us that this train is, in fact, the 858 and we needed to get on it. We MAY be in the first-class section, whether because that is because those are the tickets we bought or because the attendant just rushed us onto a car at the last possible moment is anyone's guess. My guess is the latter. Anyway, with all of that bullshit said, I may as well use some of this downtime to highlight our trip thus far (well, until we get kicked out of this section/off of this train):
Monday, July 1st
Let's try writing this in cursive. (Editor's Note: I actually started writing in cursive at this point. Every once in awhile I'm taken by the idea of starting to write all of my notes and shit exclusively in cursive. I just prefer the way it looks and, in fact, wrote almost exclusively in cursive from the time I learned it in, what? second grade? until eighth grade. So just pretend that the following is written in considerate, flowery-ish cursive.) Roni and I arrived in Berlin Monday morning and took a taxi to the apartment we were renting - pretty sure the street name is Griefswelder...? Something like that. The owner/primary renter (not quite sure which) was in the midst of cleaning up from his previous renters/subletters, so we kept our shit with him and killed the next few hours walking around. We wanted to Alexanderplatz (mentioned above) and stopped at a cafe called Coffee Fellows. I had a sun-dried bagel with mozzarella + tomato - "caprice," if you will - with water and a chai tea. Roni had grapefruit tea and I want to say a salad...? We wandered around Alexanderplatz a little while longer and then headed back to the apartment. The owner/primary renter, a nice gentleman by the name of Dark Mavies*, gave us the tour - it was a pretty goddamn swanky place. Very IKEA/minimalist, but nice. The kitchen, bathroom, and living room were all on the first floor. An office was on the top floor, reachable by a spiral staircase with a lofted bed directly over the top of the stairs. The bed sucked - when I woke up on Tuesday it felt like someone had been kicking the shit out of my back all night, but I am getting ahead of myself. After showering and shit (and taking a short nap), we opted to walk aroudn the area, but this time in the opposite direction of Alexanderplatz (Side note: The ticket-checker woman just came by. We're cool in this car/on this train. She even helped us figure out our transfer ahead of time). By now, we had probably walked 5+ miles since we had been to Coffee Fellows and I was fuckign starving. We continued walking around a bit, checking out the menus posted outside of the restaurants and cafes. The more we walked, the hungrier I got, and the less likely it seemed (to me, at least) that we could find a vegetarian-friendly place. I finally prodded Roni into going to an Indian restaurant we had walked by earlier during our walk. There was a dude sitting there with what looked like his family and he was wearing a Cancer Bats shirt ("There's a special place in hell for people like you"). I was wearing my Comeback Kid "Winnipeg Jets" shirt. He and I simultaneously looked at each other's shirts, then up at each other, and then gave each other a head nod. UPx THAx PUNXx (Editor's Note: I know I must have written that in jest, but even in jest it is fucking stupid. Fuck you, July, 2013, Dead Tether. Dong.) I had curry vegetables, Roni had something similar to what she gets at home - I don't remember what - and we split garlic naan. Afterwards we went back tot he apartment and basically passed out.
Tuesday, July 2nd
Roni woke up a little early to run to the grocery store before we had to meet up with Kristen and Lars (Editor's Note: Kristen = bride, Lars = groom.) We met up with them late, due to a few public transportation mix-ups, but mostly due to my own inability to be anywhere on time. Wheenver I die, I hope people show up late to the funeral. We found Kristen and Lars near this gate around the German parliament building and the Museum for the Dead Jews of World War II. We walked around for an hour or two before Kristen and Lars left to pick up the Soups from the airport. Roni and I went to th emuseum and holy fuck...I knew it would be depressing, but goddamnit. The museum was actually underground and on top of it was this sprawling series of rows/columns of pillars, all at various heights. It felt like it was approximately 50 square yards. When you exited the museum, yhou walked up a set of stairs into th emiddle of the pillars. Maybe it was the fact that I had just spent an hour or two reading and observing about the horrors of the Holocaust, but exiting into the field of pillars made me feel small, agoraphobic (or whatever it is to be scared of being small) (Editor's Note: Agoraphobia, according to Merriam-Webster, is "abnormal fear of being helpless in an embarrassing or unescapable situation that is characterized especially by the avoidance of open or public places." I think what I was feeling was probably more akin to claustrophobia. I don't know. I'm not a doctor.), and lost. I am not sure if I have ever experienced that kind of emotional reaction to public art before. (Editor's Note: I also included the following starred note: The Berlin Fashion Week was hosted near the arc. You can always tell the fashion majors or "high fashion" enthusiasts because they have no sense of fashion.) We headed back to Alexanderplatz to meet back up with Kristen and Lars and the Soups. We grabbed something to eat real quick (Roni and I had falaffel wraps, the Soups had, like, cuts of pork and fries, ...not sure what Kristen and Lars had) and then walked to the East Gallery. That shit was also fucking crazy. It's a section of the Berlin Wall that remains standing, but artists from all over the world were invited to paint sections of it. I would guess that the wall is about 15 feet high and that it stretched .5 - 1 mile. Gotta look that shit up on Wikipedia! (Editor's Note: According to Wikipedia, it is 1.3 km long, which is about .808 miles long. Pretty good guess, July Dean Tether!) Kristen and Lars were saying that developers were trying to have the East Gallery torn down in order to put up apartments or some shit like that - lame. Kristen and Lars had to catch their metra train to Espelkamp, so Roni and I (99.9% Roni) took the Soups back to Alexanderplatz because we (she) had more or less mastered the public transit system. I can't recall what we had/did for dinner. (Editor's Note: I remember now - we went to a vegetarian place. It was a pain in the dick to get there, but it was delicious. Seeing how it's been nearly six months since Germany, I'm at a loss as to what we ate. Sorry, d00dz.)
Wednesday, July 3rd
A girl that Roni know from Kent/shows (Falling Stars/Skies Bleed Black) named Erika lives in Berlin. She saw some of Roni's pictures/posts on Facebook and got in touch. She is an "English nanny" and her host family is on vacation, so she was off work all week. We met up with her at Alexanderplatz and then wet out to a Salvador Dali exhibit. As she was on her way to meet up with us at Alexanderplatz, she was caught by a "controller" with an unvalidated train pass, which was a 40 euro fine. What's interesting about public transportation here is that it largely operates on the honor system. You are supposed to buy a ticket, get it validated (stamped) at a tiny little kiosk thing, and then it expires after a certain period of time (day pass, trip pass, etc.). Erika had a pass, but never got it stamped. She had been riding with the unvalidated pass for months, hoping that if she was ever caught by a controller (basically a person that hangs out randomly in cars and may check tickets at random) she could feign foreign ignorance. That controller was not having any of that, though. ANYWAY, the Dali exhibit was most impressive. I know little about him, aside from his "melting clocks" painting and his silly mustache. He also did a shitload of badass prints, sculptures, and illustrations. I was super into all of it. After the exhibit, the three of us got basically Chinese food from this cafe called FBI - who the fuck knows what the acronym stands for. I had a red pepper-ish soup with sprouts, carrots, and a few other vegetables and rice. Roni had the same thing, but with a mango soup. Erick had chicken soup. When I later went up to buy a second bottle of water, I clumsily thanked the employee in German. She shot me a smile and a wink and said, "You're welcome" in German. I was like, whoa, dude! I got a wink! From a cute German girl! She must find my clumsiness/vain efforts charming!
And that's where my journal update ends. I was really tired and succumbed to a nap. I remember the story I was trying to tell about the cute German girls winking at me, but I'm gonna have to look at pictures/talk to Roni about what else we did with the remainder of Wednesday and then Thursday/Friday/Saturday. The winking thing happened to me a bunch more over the course of the trip, but I eventually concluded (or was told...that detail is hazy) that it is a cultural thing that German women do. Or maybe German babes think I'm a hot-dicked American beefcake. Gotta double-check on that one.
Anyway, iff you're like, "Man, reading that was more boring than going through someone else's vacation photos," well, you're right. I NEVER PROMISED I WAS ENTERTAINING. I'll finish the recap after Roni and I rap about it/get the events in order.
Live responsibly and lovingly. Be positive and creative. You're beautiful. Peace.
Yours, etc.,
<3dane
xoxo
* - Names changed to protect identities.
Way, way back earlier this year, I'm talking July, I went to Germany for a wedding. I wrote down a bunch of shit about it in a notebook I was carrying with me. I'm including it below:
July 5th, 2013 (German time)
Roni, the Soups*, and I just boarded a "metra" train bound for Espelkamp. We met up with the Soups outside of Alexanderplatz, a tourist-y area near a train stop. (Aside: The Soups were Kristen's (Editor's Note: The bride in the aforementioned wedding) host parents when she was an exchange student.) We had to reschedule our original train ticket, which was a direct line, due to construction on the track. Getting onto this train was a weird experience - Roni got super furtrated because the train was labeled 848 and our tickets are labeled 858 with different stops/destinations. Last minute, Roni double-checked with an attendant who assured us that this train is, in fact, the 858 and we needed to get on it. We MAY be in the first-class section, whether because that is because those are the tickets we bought or because the attendant just rushed us onto a car at the last possible moment is anyone's guess. My guess is the latter. Anyway, with all of that bullshit said, I may as well use some of this downtime to highlight our trip thus far (well, until we get kicked out of this section/off of this train):
Monday, July 1st
Let's try writing this in cursive. (Editor's Note: I actually started writing in cursive at this point. Every once in awhile I'm taken by the idea of starting to write all of my notes and shit exclusively in cursive. I just prefer the way it looks and, in fact, wrote almost exclusively in cursive from the time I learned it in, what? second grade? until eighth grade. So just pretend that the following is written in considerate, flowery-ish cursive.) Roni and I arrived in Berlin Monday morning and took a taxi to the apartment we were renting - pretty sure the street name is Griefswelder...? Something like that. The owner/primary renter (not quite sure which) was in the midst of cleaning up from his previous renters/subletters, so we kept our shit with him and killed the next few hours walking around. We wanted to Alexanderplatz (mentioned above) and stopped at a cafe called Coffee Fellows. I had a sun-dried bagel with mozzarella + tomato - "caprice," if you will - with water and a chai tea. Roni had grapefruit tea and I want to say a salad...? We wandered around Alexanderplatz a little while longer and then headed back to the apartment. The owner/primary renter, a nice gentleman by the name of Dark Mavies*, gave us the tour - it was a pretty goddamn swanky place. Very IKEA/minimalist, but nice. The kitchen, bathroom, and living room were all on the first floor. An office was on the top floor, reachable by a spiral staircase with a lofted bed directly over the top of the stairs. The bed sucked - when I woke up on Tuesday it felt like someone had been kicking the shit out of my back all night, but I am getting ahead of myself. After showering and shit (and taking a short nap), we opted to walk aroudn the area, but this time in the opposite direction of Alexanderplatz (Side note: The ticket-checker woman just came by. We're cool in this car/on this train. She even helped us figure out our transfer ahead of time). By now, we had probably walked 5+ miles since we had been to Coffee Fellows and I was fuckign starving. We continued walking around a bit, checking out the menus posted outside of the restaurants and cafes. The more we walked, the hungrier I got, and the less likely it seemed (to me, at least) that we could find a vegetarian-friendly place. I finally prodded Roni into going to an Indian restaurant we had walked by earlier during our walk. There was a dude sitting there with what looked like his family and he was wearing a Cancer Bats shirt ("There's a special place in hell for people like you"). I was wearing my Comeback Kid "Winnipeg Jets" shirt. He and I simultaneously looked at each other's shirts, then up at each other, and then gave each other a head nod. UPx THAx PUNXx (Editor's Note: I know I must have written that in jest, but even in jest it is fucking stupid. Fuck you, July, 2013, Dead Tether. Dong.) I had curry vegetables, Roni had something similar to what she gets at home - I don't remember what - and we split garlic naan. Afterwards we went back tot he apartment and basically passed out.
Tuesday, July 2nd
Roni woke up a little early to run to the grocery store before we had to meet up with Kristen and Lars (Editor's Note: Kristen = bride, Lars = groom.) We met up with them late, due to a few public transportation mix-ups, but mostly due to my own inability to be anywhere on time. Wheenver I die, I hope people show up late to the funeral. We found Kristen and Lars near this gate around the German parliament building and the Museum for the Dead Jews of World War II. We walked around for an hour or two before Kristen and Lars left to pick up the Soups from the airport. Roni and I went to th emuseum and holy fuck...I knew it would be depressing, but goddamnit. The museum was actually underground and on top of it was this sprawling series of rows/columns of pillars, all at various heights. It felt like it was approximately 50 square yards. When you exited the museum, yhou walked up a set of stairs into th emiddle of the pillars. Maybe it was the fact that I had just spent an hour or two reading and observing about the horrors of the Holocaust, but exiting into the field of pillars made me feel small, agoraphobic (or whatever it is to be scared of being small) (Editor's Note: Agoraphobia, according to Merriam-Webster, is "abnormal fear of being helpless in an embarrassing or unescapable situation that is characterized especially by the avoidance of open or public places." I think what I was feeling was probably more akin to claustrophobia. I don't know. I'm not a doctor.), and lost. I am not sure if I have ever experienced that kind of emotional reaction to public art before. (Editor's Note: I also included the following starred note: The Berlin Fashion Week was hosted near the arc. You can always tell the fashion majors or "high fashion" enthusiasts because they have no sense of fashion.) We headed back to Alexanderplatz to meet back up with Kristen and Lars and the Soups. We grabbed something to eat real quick (Roni and I had falaffel wraps, the Soups had, like, cuts of pork and fries, ...not sure what Kristen and Lars had) and then walked to the East Gallery. That shit was also fucking crazy. It's a section of the Berlin Wall that remains standing, but artists from all over the world were invited to paint sections of it. I would guess that the wall is about 15 feet high and that it stretched .5 - 1 mile. Gotta look that shit up on Wikipedia! (Editor's Note: According to Wikipedia, it is 1.3 km long, which is about .808 miles long. Pretty good guess, July Dean Tether!) Kristen and Lars were saying that developers were trying to have the East Gallery torn down in order to put up apartments or some shit like that - lame. Kristen and Lars had to catch their metra train to Espelkamp, so Roni and I (99.9% Roni) took the Soups back to Alexanderplatz because we (she) had more or less mastered the public transit system. I can't recall what we had/did for dinner. (Editor's Note: I remember now - we went to a vegetarian place. It was a pain in the dick to get there, but it was delicious. Seeing how it's been nearly six months since Germany, I'm at a loss as to what we ate. Sorry, d00dz.)
Wednesday, July 3rd
A girl that Roni know from Kent/shows (Falling Stars/Skies Bleed Black) named Erika lives in Berlin. She saw some of Roni's pictures/posts on Facebook and got in touch. She is an "English nanny" and her host family is on vacation, so she was off work all week. We met up with her at Alexanderplatz and then wet out to a Salvador Dali exhibit. As she was on her way to meet up with us at Alexanderplatz, she was caught by a "controller" with an unvalidated train pass, which was a 40 euro fine. What's interesting about public transportation here is that it largely operates on the honor system. You are supposed to buy a ticket, get it validated (stamped) at a tiny little kiosk thing, and then it expires after a certain period of time (day pass, trip pass, etc.). Erika had a pass, but never got it stamped. She had been riding with the unvalidated pass for months, hoping that if she was ever caught by a controller (basically a person that hangs out randomly in cars and may check tickets at random) she could feign foreign ignorance. That controller was not having any of that, though. ANYWAY, the Dali exhibit was most impressive. I know little about him, aside from his "melting clocks" painting and his silly mustache. He also did a shitload of badass prints, sculptures, and illustrations. I was super into all of it. After the exhibit, the three of us got basically Chinese food from this cafe called FBI - who the fuck knows what the acronym stands for. I had a red pepper-ish soup with sprouts, carrots, and a few other vegetables and rice. Roni had the same thing, but with a mango soup. Erick had chicken soup. When I later went up to buy a second bottle of water, I clumsily thanked the employee in German. She shot me a smile and a wink and said, "You're welcome" in German. I was like, whoa, dude! I got a wink! From a cute German girl! She must find my clumsiness/vain efforts charming!
And that's where my journal update ends. I was really tired and succumbed to a nap. I remember the story I was trying to tell about the cute German girls winking at me, but I'm gonna have to look at pictures/talk to Roni about what else we did with the remainder of Wednesday and then Thursday/Friday/Saturday. The winking thing happened to me a bunch more over the course of the trip, but I eventually concluded (or was told...that detail is hazy) that it is a cultural thing that German women do. Or maybe German babes think I'm a hot-dicked American beefcake. Gotta double-check on that one.
Anyway, iff you're like, "Man, reading that was more boring than going through someone else's vacation photos," well, you're right. I NEVER PROMISED I WAS ENTERTAINING. I'll finish the recap after Roni and I rap about it/get the events in order.
Live responsibly and lovingly. Be positive and creative. You're beautiful. Peace.
Yours, etc.,
<3dane
xoxo
* - Names changed to protect identities.