And the Winner of Best 404 Error Goes To...

Vitamin D

C.I.L.L. Da Landlord (Part Zwei)

Best Berlin quote since 'Ich bin ein Berliner.'

 “Hey, I know you’re charging me too much, and I’m finally doing something about to because, as per law, I can do just that (Arschloch!)”.

A Wicked Game Indeed

You Had Me At 'Bacon Donuts'

Even though I left Berlin after 6.5 years (hipsters drove me out) and now live in Prague as a Wide Body Jetsetter, I STILL miss mein dunkin' berliners.  Therefore, I will continue to post about All Things Donut. Because once a Dunkin' Berliner, always a Dunkin' Berliner.

Attack of the Killer Donuts!

It was only a matter of time...

 

Donut Worry, Be Happy

Donuts: My Ball and Chain

Mmmmmm.... Donuts

NEW BLOG!!!

 The Dunkin' Berliner Rolls South to Prague; Gathers No Moss

In case you were missing a dose of my usual silly-ass bitching (Brit Eng: humourous whinging), you may find my lardy ass at my new blog, which promises to share all the travel stories which barely fit into a standard airline seat at:


WIDE BODY JETSETTER


Now GO.

This Is The End

The desk fan goes whuppa whuppa whuppa in the humid Berlin bog.  I take my donuts in my left hand and prepare to leave the place where thousands have come and gone before.  I stuff them in my mouth, verily, one at a time, in remembrance of Berlin.  The thousands first, then the donuts.  I am voracious.

Where?  The Next.  The next cheap place where creative people go to piss about and throw fairy dust at the sky while waiting for the wrecking ball. We won't be assimilated.  There was a respectable time in human history wherein one could live and die in fields or coal mines.  Now there is only the sad promise of a sad cubicle in a sad office space.  Moving up?  Nosir.  Moving down.  Give me black lung disease, motherfucker.  At least my body will die before my brain.

The Next Place will have donuts.  Yes, they will be the death of me, but I choose a glorious, deep-fried, jelly-filled sugar coma.  Alcohol will be my anesthesiologist.  He's the only one I trust.  I will go there, to The Next Place, and start another blog.

Maybe it will be titled something like Notes of an Old Fart.  I'm pushing 50.  It would be a good time to give up the donuts and go for the laxatives.

This is the end, my friend.

But only of my life in Berlin.  In the past 20 years in England, Ireland, Czech Republic and Germany, it has always been a bit unsettling when The Big Change comes round. Then I settle in.  Then I move on.

There will be other lives in other cities.

A Rolling Donut Gathers No Moss

Dunkin' Berliner's Last Few Weeks In Berlin

The time has come. This is The End, my friend. Leaving Berlin. There, I've said it. I'm not the first and I'm not the last. Every year I proclaim This Is My Last Year and then I stay. Six and one half of them have come and gone. 1492 donuts have gone down my tubes (probably more, I don't really count) and I am none the wiser. Perhaps donuts aren't brain food after all. I'm waiting for the pendulums of science and medicine to swing in my favor, much in the way that in one decade they declared that chocolate and wine will kill you, then turn right on around and say the same killers will now feed your brain and libido and you will live and love long time. Science is a fickle bitch, so I wait for her to tell me to eat three donuts per day.

I haven't posted much recently because I saw The End coming and I was numb. Mostly from drinking wine and waiting for the veritas. Haven't found much. Gentrification sucks, as always, mainly because the rents go up and the wages do not. What was once a cheap, barren, sandy beach for feckless, creative nomads (like me) is now fertile soil for money trees. Trustafarians and hipsters take the places of the old guard. They are multiplying and growing to fuse into one large beardbeast. There are now even subgroups within the hipster underworld, the most hilarious of the bunch being dubbed Lumbersexuals. Those are the ones, usually German, who wear blue jeans, hiking boots and red plaid shirts in addition to the ubiquitous big black glasses and beards. I'm guessing that Lumbersexual is a mashup of lumberjack and metrosexual. Perhaps they were cut out of the Woody Allen Sexcapade film featuring the room with the man getting it on with a large rye bread. Perhaps the Lumbersexual was next door having rough sex with rough wood. Splinters are not for everyone (ouch). Bollox. I call them Lumberjackoffs.

The Bellevue Saints

Today I was riding through Berlin for several hours on S and U bahns doing my weekly photo job for a tour company. Every Friday morning between the hours of 10 and 11 in the Ay Em, The Saints get on the S7 at the Bellevue Station stop. You will know them by the trail of dead lyrics. A band of gypsies with a beatbox on a hand cart and 3 guys playing trumpet, saxophone and accordion launch into the worst version of When The Saints Go Marching In you will ever hear.

"AAAAAAAhhhh Win da sints

Gah Martian inn,

Aaaaaaaah win da sints

gaa Martian inn,

Uuhhhh wah wan

Beeeee end dat numm-zah

Win da sints gaaaaah Martian inn!

Evvy botty nah!"

Then they clap and dance and shake their fucking cups in your fucking face. JAY zus. In over one year of seeing the same fuckers doing the same fucking song on the same fucking S7, not one coin goes into the cup (nor do they learn the lyrics). People stare forward in apathy, even when the gnarly McD's soda cup is shaken so vigorously under numb chins that soda crust and tobacco lint fly with the coins. And they do not. Change. The tune. They play exactly one verse, badly, then get off at Tiergarten Station. When they venture too far from Bellevue, their halos begin to tarnish. The trains run back and forth. The broken record spins, hiccups, repeats, repeats, repeats...

If that ain't dedication I don't know what is.

Dueling Douchebags

In the crux of the tunnels under the Berlin streets the accordions squeeze filth through their flapholes. With the unholy mantra of the Bellevue Saints still echoing through my early morning brainfog, a new earworm wiggles through my auditory canals. Yes, you guessed it: Dunkin' Berliner hates accordions. Not because the accordion isn't a real instrument, not because they are only played by drunken gypsy polka rejects in the dark tunnels of Europe—but because they are simply the most cheesy instrument on the planet. Even the shitty plastic recorders played by first graders high on Cap'n Crunch don't hold a candle to this shit. In the dark annals of history, someone glued a tiny piano keyboard to a fucking bellows, handed it to a gypsy and said 'Go forth!' (read: get the fuck out of town!).

Two accordion players plied their sleazy/cheesy trade. What is worse than an accordion? Two. One played 'rhythm' MEHHH...muh....MEHHHH...muh while the other lounge lizard's greasy fingers were slip-sliding away over yellow plastic keys. Sweaty armpits pumped away. I wanted them to stop, face each other, and give challenge. Yes, I wanted them to stop torturing commuters with dungeon dreck and start the duel. Like the scene in Deliverance with the guitar, the banjo and the Tard. I believe that when two hideous, backwoods instruments come together, they must duel. Dueling douchebags on accordions. Now THAT's entertainment. Maybe next year they'll even rise from the bowels of the U bahn, ride high over the city on S rails and topple The Bellevue Saints.

Building A Shorter America

Dunkin' Berliner Observation: Amis are getting shorter by the year. Each season when a new gaggle of Ami chicks pours out of the planes, trains and automobiles, I notice the shortness. The voices are still loud, and the ubiquitous LIKE has been newly adorned with UM and RIGHT? But they are losing an inch every year; the batch I saw today must have been around 5 feet 4. Last year they were 5 feet 5, the previous years 5 feet 7—you get the idea. So how is America breeding smaller people? Science (that fickle shit) tells us that tallness is a sign of a country with a high standard of living, and that the Nordic types are the tallest. So what happened to the standard of living in the U.S.A? Where are the Amazons? Sure, a lot of short-assed Mediterranean types dumped their genetic ooze into the American genepool, but there just aren't enough of them to shorten the entire population. Maybe it's the diet. I blame the kale.

Wild, Drunken German Yoots

One thing hasn't changed in all the time I've lived in Berlin: drunken teens on public transport. Passing through Hauptbahnhof today, a group of them were so loud in their drunken shouts, hoots and sieg heil—uh... hoorahs, that the entire train could hear them through closed windows. I'm guessing that they had just graduated high school and were letting off a bit of steam. There's where I envy the Europeans: a dozen boys barely old enough to shave board the S-bahn, drop a case of beer on the ground and begin the festivities. In the States the cops would be legally authorized to call in SWAT and hose 'em all down. One of the yoots is a boy of about 5 feet tall, whith a curly green mop on his head (maybe he's just finished a breeding tour in the U.S.). He hooks up a little amplifier to his phone, the beat rages, and the whole group joins in drunken falsetto: EVERYBODY DANCE NOW! And they do, as jiggy as their wobbly legs will allow. Green moptop looks a bit green in the face as well, and slumps back into his seat until the next chorus of EVERYBODY DANCE NOW strikes up.

How will I find such entertainment in one day anywhere else? Where will I go next? Stay tuned.

Happy Happy. Joy Joy.

 

I’m happy to live in Berlin.  Sure, I rant and rave about gentrification and rising rents on my various Blogs, but I am still proud to be living in a city in the midst of change. Yeah, the old hole-in-the-wall joint I used to eat/drink in has become a yuppie hellhole of yoga and whatnot.  But there are other holes in other walls.  Later they will become assimilated by the Yogaborg, but at least I WAS THERE. BEFORE.

Sadly, this is also the hipster mantra: ‘Um, like, I did this stupid ironic thing that I’m doing, like, WAY before it was, like, cool.’

As much as I hate hipsters and yuppies, I do realize that whenever an area in any given city is cheap enough, cool enough, and available enough—it is doomed.  So I might as well enjoy it while it lasts.  I am REALLY surprised that I have lived here this long.  Every year I take inventory of my meager accomplishments. Every year I get drunk and proclaim to all my (few) friends that This is the Last Year I Will Live in This Yuppie Shithole.  Then we all have a laugh and we all have a drink.  I am STILL amazed and the breadth and depth of my hypocrisy.

Still I am here.  Still, like a beat-down, son-of-a-middle-class-bitch, I rise.

The Overpriced Organic Grapes of Wrath

Food seems to be a big concern in rich countries recently.  Not that they’ve run out, not that they’ve sent it all to the starving African chilluns out of white guilt, but the worry is that They are putting Shit into The Food.  And We all know who They are: Monsanto.  Apparently, our very digestion is at stake.  If We eat food grown from seeds by Them, We are unwittingly condemning ourselves to bowel cancer on an apocalyptic scale.  You see, apparently, They fuck with The Food.

I’m no stranger to food scares.  Back when I was a starving student (O how I miss those days and so does my waistline) studying in London (I spent all my dough on the flight; hunger followed), I found a way to eat for free from time to time:  Hare. Fuckin. Krishna.  In the midst of the infamous SoHo red light district in London lies a Hare Krishna temple-slash-vegetarian restaurant-slash-your-hair-into-a-baldy-pony-tail.  I dragged my hungry ass there to sit and listen to their Krishna chanting and the rumbling bellies of others for an hour or so until they would feed us.  I was happy with this arrangement as I was a vegetarian at that time.  Nobody tried to convert me or cut my hair.  But I believe I caught a few of them looking at my long, flowing, hippie student pony tail with lust.

Then I took some friends there.  Then some bastard said to me: ‘You know They fuck with The Food.’

‘Waddaya mean, Bugsy?’ I says to the mook.

‘They put Salt Peter in the Krishna food.’

‘What the fuck, Chuck?’

‘Salt Peter makes yer wanger go all doughy like, see?’

At the time I was more concerned with my empty stomach than my salty peter, so I threw that particular conspiracy theorist on the woodpile with the rest of them who dared to disparage the starving student vegetarian life.

Back to The Now. Now people say that They are fucking with the global food supply.  I have to take issue.  My food supply is constant and unrelenting.  I have the 300 lbs to prove it.

‘The Evil Monsanto is doing evil things to poor little plants and making them into Frankenplants!  Genetic modification, boooooo!’

Like what?

‘Fish DNA in tomatoes and shit like that!  Mllleeegggghfffft!’

I don’t eat tomatoes.

‘But THEY.  Shouldn’t PUT. SHIT. In our FOOD!’

They pump all sorts of hormones in milk and beef and the women are milky and the men are beefy.  What’s your problem now?

‘I !     DO NOT!      EAT MEAT!     OR DRINK MILK!!!’

Ok, now I’m starting to get it.  You’re one of those silly little vegan fucks, aren’t you?  Well, good luck with the micro-organic diet.  I’m going to get a STEAK AND GUINNESS PIE and wash it down with EXTRA STRONG MICRO BREW STOUT.  Please enjoy your puke green wheatgrass tea and raw cabbage with the other sad little fuckers in the corner over there.  Take a sad selfie while you’re at it.  Then post it on a Change the World website.  Silly Rabbit. Don’t you know?  If we suddenly stop eating meat, all those cows and pigs will wander into traffic and be killed.  And here you say you care for animals.

Yes, I get it.  You’re worried about genetically modified foods, though your reasoning is about as sound as any twitching, undernourished hippie’s could possibly be.  The problem is with uber-Capitalism.  The bigger the farm companies, the more profits they need to make (rather than just food), so the more they need to tweak things to produce larger crop yields and larger profits.  They’re not spending millions on genetic plant research just to fuck with some uppity vegans (as entertaining as that may sound).  They are ‘probably’ (don’t really know and don’t really care) just trying to build a better tomato, one which is resistant to pests and maybe even allows the use of less pesticide.  Or it doubles the output and profits.  If you don’t like this idea, you could always grow your own veggies in a community plot outside of a squat in Berlin.  You won’t even need salad dressing; all of the puke, piss and vinegar from the punks will coat your sprouts for ya—in both chunky ranch and balsamic.

The Overpriced Organic Grapes of Wrath

Veganism started off as any religion does, with strict rules and practices.  Don’t eat this, eat that; dress this way, don’t dress that way. Fuck this way, not that way, and only this type of person—but only after this ritual.  Then it starts to propagate, like some bacteria in a Petri dish.  Soon it gets on some lab assistant’s coat, leaves the lab and now you have an epidemic trend on your hands.

When you walk into one of those organic / bio food shops, you’ll notice the price of this particular religion is quite steep. Who in the flying FUCK can afford these prices?  Maybe the twitchy little vegans in the corner taking selfies aren’t skinny from the vegan diet—they just can’t afford the fucking thing.  Have you seen the prices?  It is a huge scam.  The label says ‘bio’ or ‘organic’ so it costs double.  Why?  Because the lack of pesticide use cuts the crop in half, thus doubling the price?  No.  Because the whole organic thang is trendy, followed by trustafians, yuppies and other vapid individuals who like to think that paying more for something is better.  How do you know it’s organic?  Because it says so on the label? Damn, there really is a sucker born every minute.  Any fool with a computer and a printer can make a label.  There is no way to certify if something is truly pesticide free and organically grown as they say.  The government does not get involved in verifying marketing claims—they only occasionally check the rat turd levels in the sausages (which are tasty, by the way; that rich, smoky flavor makes EVERYTHING tasty).

So the big trend is to slap a BIO label on something and charge double.  And the suckers suck it down like tequila-swilling Tijuana whores.   Hell, it wouldn’t be so funny if it wasn’t so goddamned stupid.  I’ve even seen a kiosk in P’berg selling (ahem) ‘Bio Currywurst.’ 

So apparently, vegans aren’t the only fools falling for this BIO bollox.

Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be

The other day I took a stroll down memory lane.  Don’t ever do that, I’m telling you.

The familiar old neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg was home to me and my lovely wife for 5 years before we were banished to the Berlin hinterlands.  I only mention that my wife is lovely so you will feel sorry for us when I tell you how we got railroaded right on out of there by the gentrification scumlords.  If it were just grumpy old moi, myself und ich (or me and an ugly wife) who lost a place to live, you might just think ‘GOOD! Get rid of the grumpy old ugly fucks and let the new Rich but Sexy Berliners move in!’  As one does.

I initially went down to my old Helmholz kiez (Danziger-Duncker-Prenzlauer Allee) to pick up some second hand lights for sale.  A nice, waiflike couple was sitting in their empty commercial space waiting to sell me their old lights so they could embark upon their new voyage of their new image in their new commercial space.  I still don’t know what in the flying fuck they were selling. There was a counter, a mini espresso machine and some dishes.  And a cat. Their website is just as mysterious. Apparently that’s all you need in Berlin if you are a Trustafarian. The lights weren’t as advertised and I couldn’t use them.  So I thanked them for wasting my time (I did it in a very smooth way, I’m telling you.  The couple looked fragile and earnest, and this combo can still the harshest of tongues. Even mine.) Off I went.

I passed the closed Café Lyrik and remembered the spell cast by the Witch.  Free ‘music’ (using the term loosely) with overpriced drinks and a performance sounding something like a steel kitty in a blender (complete with metallic screams and feverish, glass scratching death knells), followed by a donation cup shaken so vigorously in our faces that everybody had to stop drinking and stare to see how much we WERE NOT putting in.  Apparently 15 EUR was NOT enough for the avant garde scheisse we were watching.  The Witch told me so.  And the Deutschbag at the next table scoffed out loud when I refused to give more.  I won’t say don’t go there.  If you are NOT a brain dead, self important Trustafarian with delusions of grandeur, you probably already have the good sense not to (Dunkin’ Berliner flash mob idea: everybody cram into that tiny ‘art/music’ space, don’t order a damn thing and then dump a sock full of pennies into the collection plate.  Smack those bitches up).

I continued my walk down memory lane (aka Danziger strasse) and passed the empty windows of the Fuss-feti-fisch.  This is a place where you can stick your feet in a fish tank and have swarms of little fish eat the barnacles and toe jam right off your sunken feet. There are aquariums in the windows full of feet sucking fish, lights and signs and benches with towels, but that place is NEVER open.  Meaning: MAFIA MUTHA FUCKAZ.  Don’t go there either.  Hell, if you need your toe jam eaten, let me know.  I know poor artists who will eat your toes out on a stage for loose change, I’m tellin’ ya.

No trip down Memory Lane is complete without a visit to your old flat, the place you used to call home, the place where some yuppie fucks are now living.  Gentrification is a BITCH.  I wanted to see the type of quality human beings who could possibly replace my loser ass, who could possibly be a better tenant than me, who in the HELL would want to pay more than 600 EUR for a studio apartment.  It couldn't be yuppies; they only live in large lofts, not studio apartments. This I already knew.  But I tend to read ahead in the script, so it was no surprise that the new tenant was just a number:  my old buzzer simply read ‘60’.  In fact, most of the flats in our old building were now part of the growing scourge of holiday rentals in desirable hoods. They weren’t even hiding it.  A large banner now hangs above Dunckerstrasse 90A and proudly proclaims BERLINER LEBEN HOLIDAY RENTALS.  Nine of the 12 flats in our building were already owned by Das Leben when we moved in. When we lived there, I do recall an ungodly amount of suitcases thumping up and down the stairs and late night screams in Mediterranean languages.  We were happy to endure it as proud members of the multi-kulti Berlin life (aka Berliner Leben). But we were forced out.  When our contract was ready to be renewed, they refused us (after paying rent on time every month for a year), saying in writing “It is a free market.  We can rent to whomever we choose.” Harsh words from harsh cunts. Why have regular tenants at a fixed rate when you can kick them out and charge 70 EUR per night as a holiday rental?  There is now only one of our original neighbors left in our building:  Riewoldt (pronounced ‘revolt’).  As I recall, the door to his flat had been kicked in a few times and there were blatant splinter/spackle/patch jobs done on the door.  Fight da powah, Herr Riewoldt.

There is a growing resistance to these types of predatory rental investors (scumlords, et al) and laws are being drafted as I write this.  As I was doing my due diligence (Googling), I discovered a fact that would be shocking if I were able to be shocked at this point.  The busy-bodied little man who dogged us the entire time we lived at Dunckerstr. 90A (saying he was the hausmeister) was in fact the very agent provocateur behind the Berliner Leben tenant ousting: Marcus Buthmann (whom we called Buttman) was talking seven shades of scheisse to the press about his proud holiday rentals.  That’s right: the same Buttman who helped us out the door; the exact same cocksucker.  And that’s not libel—the man does indeed suck cock.

http://www.thelocal.de/20140801/two-thirds-of-berlins-tourist-flats-now-illegal

In a city that changes as much, as often and as constantly as Berlin, nobody seems to notice that a very large rug is being pulled out from under our feet.  Sure, sluggish student paralegal interns are rising from their hangovers to wave the flag.  Too little, too late.  The scumlords are winning.

I crossed the street with the mixed emotions of knowing I was right and being powerless to do a damn thing about being wronged. Skinny old American fucks in suits talked on phones in lofty voices while a German teenager in hip hop attire trudged by in high swagger mode, oozing anger in his neo-yuppie hell.  Even the small courtyard recreation area across the street from my old digs was being torn up.  The ruins of the ping pong tables we used to play upon were lying on the ground beneath the plows of the machine.  CAT operators smoked and laughed in the midst of the mayhem.

I switched to high swagger mode and trudged past the usual sushi bars, trendy cafes and yoga holes of Yuppie Central.  Even my old hole-in-the-wall kebab joint had been renovated and neon-ensconced. Dunkin’ Berliner truth: the smaller and grungier the hole in the wall, the better the food.  The bigger the space, the more neon cacti, the more bland the food, the more yuppie it is. Period. This area used to be commie, punk rock, artist, drifter, and dreamer.  Now it is just another non-threatening place for yuppies and breeders to take root and grow money trees.  Because that’s what gentrification is all about: rip out the old, plant the new, harvest the money crop. We who choose to live our lives in pursuit of something other than money are not worthy of living in a cool neighborhood.  We don’t stand a chance. Because we have neither money nor power; nor do we want anything to do with any of that shit.  So They win. Again. Always.

Maybe one day, one of us will snap.  Necks.

The White Lights

I never thought I would celebrate Christmas again.  I put the kibosh on the whole charade 20 years ago.  I believe in neither God nor holiday capitalism, so what was the point?  A religious family which was dogging/godding me at every turn did not make for pleasant digestion, so I would spend my Eves at dive bars commiserating with the lonely barflies and spend my Days hung over.  The way it should be.

Then I got The Love, The Marriage and all dat.  My baby wants to celebrate Xmas, so why not?  Why let the Miserable Bastard ruin her Xmas?  This year she went completely Christmas crazy: baking dozens of batches of cookies in dozens of styles, combining ancient Czech recipes with ancient Google ones--and even rummaging through the forest for pine needles to make a hand made wreath.  I’m shocked.  In a good way.

Then came the Xmas lights. One day last week, a cheap handful of small colorful lights were dropped on my lap with the orders to hang them somewhere festive.  There they hang, in the side window of our garden cottage, just bright enough for the next door neighbors to witness our seasonal solidarity.

Then came the most unpleasant part, the ugly beast which I had sworn I had slain:  The Christmas Shopping.  You see, you can’t just have one of those fucking potato chips; you have to eat the whole bag.  Eight scrawny lights in the window weren’t enough.  We needed to bedazzle this bitch, apparently. Eight hours of shopping in at least 8 different places yielded the same result: no colored Xmas lights.  Apparently the colored lights hanging in our window were a one-off shopping deal at a small market.  Undaunted, our search raged on. We even ran the foul and frenetic gauntlet at IKEA with the other Saturday rats in the maze.  I don’t think IKEA makes a gazillion dollars because their pseudo-balsa-wood furniture is so goddamned chic.  They make a gazillion dollars because they FORCE you to walk through a sense-addling maze and view EVERY SINGLE FUCKING THING THEY SELL.  Even the ‘shortcuts’ are a ruse.  You just go back to another part of the maze you wanted to avoid.  You can’t get out of there without spending at least 50 EUR and that’s the trap.

We noticed a trend in Berlin; maybe it’s the same in the rest of Germany outside of our island of weird:  all of the Xmas lighting is white.  Try and try, walk and walk, bitch and bitch as I may, nobody had the goods.  When my baby asked the tall Aryan man in the IKEA vest where we could find colored xmas lights, he responded—in a loud and proud voice, I might add—“Nur weiss! (Only white!).

I’m not sure what is was that made that seem odd to me; maybe it was his blond hair, his blue eyes, or his square jaw hoisted in the air when he said ‘Only white!’ with pride.  White pride.  Or maybe I’m being paranoid.  Maybe it was the 8 hours on my feet with my goddamn dogs barking.  Maybe he did not in fact mean ‘You are here in Germany.  All we have to offer you are white lights.  Und you vill like zem.  Colored lights are for other countries with colorful persons and colorful personalities.’

You can have your xmas lights in any color you want--as long as it's WHITE.

But there is something weird going on here.  As we were dragging our defeated asses home with no lighting assets (and 10 EUR worth of IKEA shit we hadn’t planned on buying—HA-HA! We didn’t spend 50), we noticed that the very few houses on our block that had Xmas lights had only white ones.

Goddamn racist bastards.

THREE STREIKS, YER OUT MUTTA FICKA

S-bahn Strikes Rip Berlin Apart, Piss Off Donut Munchers

 

I try to love the Berlin Bear in spite of all the damage it does me when it hugs.  It’s a love/hate thang.  I get dazzled by the tutu dance, and then suddenly I want to set fire to the fur and watch it dance the Watusi.

Twenty five years after the Bear kicked the Commies out, dropped a wall and reunified a nation, they still.  Have not.  Got their shit together.  In this particular case I am referring to the crippling S-bahn strikes (German: STREIK! with an exclamation, screamed aloud for effect).  I think this blog post might be the hat trick for the number of colossal fuckups perpetrated by the BVG, Deutsche Bahn and the S-bahn. 

Your transport ticket may cover all modes of transport in Berlin (S-bahn, U-bahn, trams and buses), but this in no way covers the frustration, anger, missed meetings and lost time encountered when one of these independent-and-oft-uppity modes of transit goes terribly awry.  I’m talking constant construction (often more than once on the same stretch of the same line—in the same year), delays, and sudden failures of a particular line on a weekly basis and the general breakdowns.  And that’s not even counting when the Umbrella Corp shuts down one branch under its own soggy roof for (I’m not making this up) failure to do weekly train wheel inspections.

German efficiency, my pimply white ass.

And the cheeky motherhumpers have the SACK to raise the ticket prices once or even twice a year for 5 years in a row.  If I had a goat to get, this would be what got it.  I have been tempted to ‘ride black’ (a nice little Germanism for riding without a ticket; probably with some inherent racsim) in protest, but this is a hard position to back up in the face of groups of ticket controllers in your face in a cramped metal box hurtling toward the next station—where Gestapo and dogs await.  They shake you down for money on the spot (especially and specifically if you are an ausländer).

What I suggest is this:  since there seems to be no end to the gross incompetence inherent in the Berlin transport system, we need to get together.  Solidarity, mein soldaten. I propose that we gather in groups the day after the next time they have a 3 or 4 day strike and ride en masse (to confuse them with French) and Schwarz (black as the Ace of Spades, baby).  When the Ticket Kontroll goose-steps up to us, we give them The Fury Finger.

When we are asked to meet the Gestapo and their canine backup barkers in the next station, we’ll hold up signs saying FAHRER STREIK! KEIN GELD FUR SCHWEIN! (Riders strike! No money for pigs!)

Maybe they’ll even treat us to the super soaker water cannon tanks they usually reserve for riots and/or unwashed punk rockers.

Note: the blogger lives in the Berlin hinterlands and the only transport services available to his cranky ass are S-bahn service and some slow-ass buses to rely upon.  That and he is middle aged and probably hormonal due to Manopause.

Image credit: Cat de Leon, painting 'Lucky Strike.'

Swiss My Ass! Fear and Loathing at Zuri Faescht

(With a nod to the late Hunter S. Thompson)

“Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits — a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.”

- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

We were circling somewhere between Basel and Zurich when the booze began to take hold.  I remember saying something like “I feel a bit light headed; maybe the Captain should land…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge advertisements for chocolate, uberexpensive watches and little red pocket knives with endless accessories; the plane screens flashed crass consumerism in cramped tin compartments hurtling in a 666 km/h descent on Zurich.  And a voice was screaming:  “Holy Jesus!  Who are these goddamn animals?”

We were greeted in grand style in the Swiss Airlines airport lounge.  And by ‘grand style’ I mean there were a half dozen of us in the lounge; none of the other feckless fools standing outside with their noses pressed against the glass were allowed in.  I pushed passed the greeting committee and went straight to the bar.  Singapore Sling?  No.  Long Island?  No.  This was getting worse by the second.  Goddamn it, you swine!  I’m a doctor of journalism!  The barman poured me a white wine and I gave him a ‘this had better be chilled, or I’ll sick my Samoan attorney on you’ type of look.  It was.  So I didn’t. They dragged me out of the lounge after only 15 minutes and two rapidly swilled white wines. They pointed to their uberwatches and The Schedule.

There was no welcome wagon, no van and no minibus.  We were given a 3 day public transport ticket and taken to a crowded train.  I stuck my head into the Swiss Airlines swag bag and spied the little chocolates. There was a moment of chaos while the cabin pressure, the pre- mid- and post flight booze were wearing off, then a moment of clarity and a sudden burst of snorfling sounds as I sucked down the whole bagful of chocolate.  Next we had to transfer to a street tram to complete our journey to the hotel.   What kind of atavistic Hun made this schedule?

I was told by my editor to ‘be on my best behaviour.’  But since he included the British ‘u’ in what We Who Use the Modern English call ‘behavior,’ my inner attorney advised me that I had the perfect loophole to unleash the Gonzo Beast on these Chocolate Clock People.

We arrived at the hotel, a gaudy, modern monstrosity in a barren, treeless suburb.  There were strange, crudely drawn critters on the interior walls and a reception desk hidden beneath a godawful concrete stairway.  I started to see lizards crawling everywhere.  Then they wanted to put a lien on my credit card.  To cover the extras, they said.

“Extras?  What extras? Like room service?”

“We don’t have room service, sir.”

So I refused to give them my card.  How can a ninja go Gonzo and stagger around the hotel room with a snorkel full of Margarita if there are personal consequences?  After a spell, I got a pass from the Swiss Miss in Charge with a promise to only raid the mini bar if she was invited.  If only I had the time, Missy.  

I lugged my own bags into the room.  This was a ‘design hotel.’  Which meant you didn’t get room service, bellhops or any other of that other superfluous shit.  But you got a room with enough critters drawn on the walls to elicit the most heinous hallucinations and flashbacks. The only thing for it was to dive headfirst into the mini bar. The ‘mini bar’ had only two tiny bottles of beer and a huge amount of useless mineral water.  They were clearly fucking with me now.  Big mistake, Bubba.

Cocktails with True Grit

“But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country—but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that.”  - HST

After only 15 minutes at the hotel the cattle wrangler stuck the electric prod in.  We snapped to attention at the shock and were taken to meet our next guide.  His name was Marc and he was introduced to us as The King of Night Clubs.  I saw my chance.  Maybe this trip wouldn’t go completely tits up after all.

Marc welcomed us into a big dirt parking lot with stacks of shipping containers everywhere and a sign reading Frau Gerolds Garten.  He insisted it was an open air bar.  There were people seated on skip furniture laughing giddily with drinks in their hands, so I chose to believe him.  Minutes later we had two liters of Margarita in front of us, strawberry and raspberry.  He showed us the gardens from which the strawberries and raspberries had sprung and how the Swiss love nature blah blah blah.  I missed his speech while I was spitting a gob of fruit seeds into the bushes.  I wasn’t being rude; I was recycling.  Those seeds would take root and grow a Margarita plant one day…

We climbed up some makeshift steel stairs attached to the side of a huge shipping container.  On top of this was a smaller shipping container with the front cut out to make a bar and a large sun deck filled with many humans drinking.  Marc explained that the area was once a major industrial area full of warehouses and (apparently) shipping containers.  I looked around:  train station, warehouses and tall buildings. Yup, it looked exactly like Detroit in 1970.  I needed another drink. A line of gin and tonics appeared with sliced cucumbers and whole chunks of black pepper corns floating on top.  I horsed mine down and looked at my squeamish British compatriots.  What?  You don’t like flotsam and jetsam in your drinks?  I took the one slid over to me and horsed it down.

After leading us through liters of margaritas and ginormous amounts of gin and tonics, our fearless leader was showing signs of the drink; his tour jive started slowly sinking into complaints about the costs and hassles of running the bar.  “Why should I pay 30,000 EUR to make the bar containers fireproof?  I mean…they’re made of METAL…”  Marc mentioned that he was a lawyer.  “As your attorney I advise you to drink up and forget,” I offered.  “And don’t spare the gin, Jeeves.”

The evening continued very much in this manner, with Marc showing us one bar after the other.   At one point one of the Limeys mentioned the schedule.  And dinner.  Marc apologized for the lack of food at one of his river bars and ordered us some pizza.  “That’s ok, Marco,” I offered, “You don’t have to feed us.  You have to get us DRUNK!”  Those were apparently the magic words.  A whole bottle of gin, a bucket of ice, bottles of tonic and a cup of black peppercorns appeared.  The Limeys stared cross-eyed at the pepper.  The….horror. The…horror.  I reached for the bottle of gin and the ice.

Smoke on the Water (and Fire in the Sky)

After what seemed like a 10 mile walk, we wrapped up our evening with a fantastic fireworks show over Lake Zurich.  We flopped down on folding chairs flung against a wall of the Seebad Enge badi bar: a day time lake / swimming pool throws the hip waders and kiddy toys into a shed and rolls out the booze barrels at night.  My imagination staggered at the possibilities: drunks, darkness and water.  I dove into the booze and skipped the water.  Bottles of sparkling wine appeared and disappeared.  I did most of the heavy lifting; I owed these Huns for the excessive frog marching.  I guess they figured on ‘helping us’ by having us walk 3 miles between bars to sweat off the toxins.  Well, baby, I need to KEEP my toxins and the bastards now owed me double in recompense.

The fireworks filled the sky as techno music shook the speakers.  Somebody said something about sync.  I don’t see how you can match lake cannons with speakers squawking 120 beats per minute.

- Brit Blogger #1:  Does anybody think this (techno) is music?

- Me:  Only pitiful, young, ecstasy-addled fools.

Our first guide abandoned us to the lake creatures and empty bottles.  I glared at her as she walked away.  How in the holy hell were we supposed to get back to our nondescript concrete bunker in the suburbs without a semi-sober guide?  Sensing my confusion and discontent, Marc the Night Club King grabbed me by the elbow and led me in a wavering line up some fancy steps leading to a swanky nightclub with a killer lake view.  Swank has guards. In this case, a muscular thug in a tight fitting tuxedo and an earpiece.  Marc began arguing with the well dressed goon when he stopped us at the entrance.  The Swiss words began to flow like fondue:  hot, cheesy and heavy on the wine.  Marc insisted that he was partner in the nightclub in question—in fact, the bouncer’s boss—and that he would have no compunction whatsoever to drink champagne out of his empty fucking skull if he didn’t let us in (or my imagined Swiss equivalent).  The bouncer was having none of it, and I feared our Night Club King would get crowned.

‘Way-HAAAAYYYY!  Marc!’  I interrupted, ‘Don’t sweat it, man!  As a rule I never drink in any establishment with large, well dressed thugs at the door!’

He flashed me a drunken smile and apologized for the arrogant brute at the door.  As we staggered away, it became clear that nobody would be able to guide us back to our hotel.  In fact, only 2 of our original group were still in tow.  The others had fucked off to bed like proper working journos.  They would miss most of the booze and the entire bouncer thug story. Poor bastards.

  

Clockwork, My Ass

“No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.” - HST

The whole city of Zurich ground to a halt for their little festival.  Public transport was stopped in the city center after dark.  It was pushing 2am and nobody had told us.  They had flown us there, stuck us in a weird hotel in the industrial suburbs and abandoned our drunken asses by the waterfront.  Clearly they hated bloggers.  That could be the only explanation.  Did they think we wouldn’t write about it?  Did they think we were legally and morally bound to blow sunshine up their kiesters just because they gave us chocolate and booze?

I won’t go into detail about the trip back to the hotel—which I will call The Horror Show—but suffice it to say, there was no working public transport and a metric fuckton of walking.  I got back to the hotel at 4am.

Four full hours of sleep later and the next tour guide was knocking at my door.

A sweet and hesitant female voice ventured: “Craig?  We’re leaving in 20 minutes!”

“FUCK OFF, YOU SWINE!!!”

I pulled my underwear off my head and put it back on my behind.  I have no idea how it migrates.  I blame evil hotel gnomes.  And Nixon. I stumbled downstairs for the coffee.  Midway through my 2^nd cup I loaded up a plateful of breakfast buffet and sat down just as the other bright-eyed and bushy tailed morning people were getting ready to leave.  You’re not journalists or even bloggers.  You wake up early and you like it.  You are librarians at best.  When our new guide (how many do we need?) tried to beckon me to the door I wrapped my arms around my plate and growled like a badger with a bad hangover.  They backed away slowly and told me they would meet me at the second tourist trap on the schedule.  I would miss the chocolate factory tour. Well, fuck me. But as much as I love Oompa Loompas, I love my coffee and greasy bacon even more.

After the third tour guide had come and gone I noticed a trend:  Spanish, Italian and other Mediterranean ladies led us through the Zurich streets for the weekend.  Where are the Real Swiss?  Where are they hiding?  What are they hiding?  Give me a stout, blonde, yodeling mountain man with steel blue eyes and one hand on the alpine goat teat and the other on the secret stash of Nazi gold.  HE and only HE will take us to the treasure! Show me the hidden gold.  Fuck the fest.  YOU know what I’m talking about:  the vats of golden Jew teeth rattling around beneath these pristine streets.

Town and City

I plowed through the old streets of Zurich alone as I am wont to do.  Nobody guiding me, nobody telling me what to do, to see, to eat, to drink.  I decided that the best way to salvage this Swiss story was to do it as Frank said, My Way.  To its credit, Old Zurich is most charming and beautiful.  But the romanticism of the narrow, curving, cobblestone streets is stifled by the cold, antiseptic sting of the price tag.  Once you’ve spent ten years staggering and stumbling through lantern-lit Old Prague nights full of 50-cent-per-pint beer you are ruined.  No other suitor of any price or class has even half a chance.  Zurich has cleaner water, though.  In fact, it is the clearest water I have ever seen in my life.  In a continent full of thousand-year-old cities with mucky, medieval rivers winding through them, the Limmat River runs crystal clear and clean.  You can even see the rocks and pebbles on the bottom of the stream.  But no gold teeth; I strained and scanned for naught.

If only their banks were this transparent.

The rest of the trip was fraught with the usual peril:  walking until the feet were numb, passing hundreds of street stands selling crap that will kill you, followed by the inevitable abandonment at the water’s edge.  While Americans are well known for their loud complaints, by the end of the second day of this holy hell even the stiff upper lips of the British contingent were twitching like chipmunks in a mustard gas attack. On my last night in Zurich I was ready to pack it in, go back to my concrete bunker and drink that mini bar mineral water.  But my erstwhile comrades in arms, the stalwart British bloggers, wiping mustard gas from their eyes and picking peppercorns from their twisted, yellow teeth—convinced me to stay.  As I sat on a wooden bench I filled my swollen feet with as much alcohol as would trickle down my long legs, the Saturday night lake show was about to begin.

And then something truly magical happened:  I began to enjoy myself.  We were in the eye of the storm and it was indeed peaceful.  The giant speakers and the stage were set.  The sun was down, the moon was up and everyone looked to the sky.  We heard some whuppa-whuppa-whuppa sounds and the choppers were over us.  Fireworks began to shoot from below us and the helicopters were weaving between them.  One of the chopper pilots was clearly out of his mind.  He seemed to be flying lower than the others, faster than the others and closer to the exploding fireworks.  It was like a grandiose scene from Apocalypse Now.

“If they play Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ right now I am going to shit my fucking pants!”  I yelled at my British Blogger chum.

“If he flies any closer to us I will shit mine!” he replied.

The helicopters swooped upward out of the fury of the fireworks into the empty night sky.  And then the parachutes opened in a flash of red lights.  The music cued to the action perfectly as the Bond film theme “Skyfall” boomed from the stage speakers.  Dozens of tiny white umbrellas lit up in red circled the lake and began their swirling descent through the exploding fireworks and down to the water.  Soon they grew larger and you could just make out the humans dangling on strings; puppets dancing in red light.  The Swiss had finally done it:  they showed me something I had never seen before and would never see hence.  They did not play ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ and I did not shit my pants.  But after the whole ‘Skyfall’ experience, I may have let slip a drop of pee.

The Conspiracy

Once again, the long journey home was like picking up my own teeth with broken fingers.

Then there was the morning after.  Some atavistic Hun had decided that this was to be the way it was:  more endless walking, more abandonment, more pain.  It was in these sporadic failures in the schedule that I was forced to see through the kaleidoscope that was placed in front of my weary eyes.  When suddenly left to my own devices, I could see what a horrible money pit I was stuck in:  10 EUR beers, 5 EUR water, 12 EUR snacks.  It was as if the entire Swiss Tourism Board was fattening bloggers up for the slaughter of future tourists. After waiting at the previously agreed meet point for an hour all alone, it seemed abundantly clear that they wanted to teach me something; maybe patience; maybe perseverance in the face of gross incompetence. In any case, it was working:  my plane was leaving in one hour and I was nowhere near the airport.  Phone calls to our Mediterranean guides fell on deaf voice mails and text messages went unanswered.

In spite of all their attempts to waylay and befuddle my progress, the Swiss lost.  I made it to the airport with minutes to spare, swore jovially at my British Blogger chums as I ran past them in their check in lines, and I wondered to myself if Nixon was laughing at me in the middle of this chocolate-coated clusterfuck.  Sure, Tricky Dick.  You were looking up from Hell on me while I was walking on the same cobblestone streets which cover the buried fortunes of the entire Right Wing from Hitler to…well, YOU.  And I was too distracted by the Big Golden Chocolate Clock Festival to notice.