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.'

Fresh Hell: Finding a Flat in Berlin

Oh yeah, this entire blog has been a thinly-veiled anti gentrification rant:  The Impending Gentrification of Berlin, The Hipster Invasion, Landlords aka Fucklords, and The Current and Very In-Your-Face Gentrification of Berlin.  This blog is a redneck swamp hat with a wide brim shading very angry eyes.  Donuts dangle from strings around the brim.

It’s Fucklord time again.  After yet another one year sublet, we found ourselves looking for another flat.  Not because we paid the rent on time every month for the entire year, not because we never had any neighbor complaints, not because we have money in the bank and a spotless rental history—but because ‘it is a free market and we can rent to whomever we choose’ sayeth the Fucklord.

Oh yes, our hauptmieter gave up her contract behind our backs and the Fucklord saw the chance to kick us out as well, saying ‘you are not our tenants.’  Our hauptmieter told us from her year abroad in France that she was sorry that the Fucklord hadn’t chosen us.  It wasn’t anything personal, you see, they ‘probably just want to raise the rent and get a commission from the next renter.’

Nothing personal?  Jesus fuck.

So off we went into the thick of things again.  Each time we try to get another flat the rents go up 50%, the lines outside the flat viewings get longer and the new metric fuckton of additional paperwork fells another rain forest.

If you are looking for a flat in Berlin, watch out for the poisonous sentence ‘the viewing will be on such-and-such date at such-and-such time.’  This means you will be standing outside the flat (most likely in the rain) waiting for a beady-eyed bald man (most likely in the pub) with a group of 30-40 feckless feckers just like yourself.  If you choose to view a flat that is NOT in Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain, Mitte, or Kreuzberg, you will have to wait outside with slightly fewer feckless feckers.  Maybe only 10-20.

We were waiting outside the shabby, dreary-looking 1940s concrete slab down the road from Mauerpark.  The usual suspects gathered:  hipsters, students, Italians, Spaniards and Spanish-Italian hipster students.  The beady-eyed bald German appeared late as usual.  He led the group of 30 up the stairs and held out his arm.  If he says ‘Heil Fucklord!’ I will strangle him with his own belt and take his keys, I thought to myself.  He did not.  Instead he had us all wait in the stairwell while he showed people in one or two at a time.

This thing must be a tiny fucking shoebox!  Only 2 at a time can view it!  The first couple came out after only 2 minutes and the next pair was let in.  The first couple was grasping an application form in their sweaty hands.  They dropped to the ground in the stairs and started filling out the form.  By the time it was our turn to get into the flat, it was in fact a bit of a shoebox.  But there was no reason to keep us waiting; 7 or 8 could have easily fit inside at once.  But it is the Fucklord’s market in Berlin.  The Fucklord can arrive 30 minutes late and make 30 people sit in the stairs filling out paperwork while mumbling moo-hoo-ha-ha-haaaaaaaaaa under his fetid breath.

When I went to look at the living room I saw why there was a flat tour limit:  a pregnant woman sat on the couch watching television with a very sour look on her face.  I know, honey:  German tv is pretty scheisse.

I asked if we could submit the form online by email, and the beady-eyed Deutschbag smiled and shook his head.  “In the STAIRS!”  If we wanted it badly enough we would have to cop a squat, open up a vein and write it with our own blood.  Pens were not provided.  We decided we were through with this dog and pony show.  We told beady baldy that we would not be sitting in any fucking stairs to apply for any fucking shitbox for any over-inflated price. On the way down the stairs the usual suspects scrawled on their papers in the stairwell.  ‘What do I put here?’ one hipster asked.  ‘That’s your boss’s info’ said the other hipster.  I couldn’t get around them; even though they are skinny fucks in skinny jeans, side by side they are a minor roadblock.  As I tried to step over them, my boot hovered for a bit.  If I stepped too far too fast, my bum ankle would send me crashing down on the poor Italian couple below the hipsters.

My boot hung in the air.  I was tempted to put my size 13 right in the middle of the hipster’s application—or on his empty fucking skull.  One of the hipsters looked up and saw the impending danger.  They shimmied to the side just slightly and let me by.  Then they returned to their feverish scrawls.  They would get this flat. Oh yeah.

Scheissedorf

Or the Beginning of the End?

Gentrification wins.  I give up.  After 1 year in Friedrichshain and 3 years in Prenzlauer Berg, the fuckers doubled the rents and drop kicked my donut ass out into the Niederschönhausen hinterlands where, literally, the streets have no name.  A few blocks down from my row in the cemetery of dead suburbanites are streets number 97 and 101.  I haven’t ventured to find the ones in between because it would remind me that I too have become a number.

I always knew my time here was limited.  More than a year, less than five, I figured. A million ‘creatives’ (mostly bullshit hipsters and trust fund babies) fucked up Berlin; they came, they saw, they drove up rents, they left.  I bought some of their furniture on their way out.  I suppose it was folly to move to a place where all of my education and years of professional experience add up to a medium pot of piss in a sea of wannabes willing to do what I do for beer money.  I still did it, hell yes, and I did it My Way, mutha fucka.

I’m not gone yet, but it feels like it out here in Schiessedorf, the name I coined for the Shit Village in which I now reside after the fallout from leaving the overpriced barn I rented from the Polish farm animals in P’berg.  I ALMOST got a flat right down the street from where I was.  I had all of Zee Papers and shit, and then it all fell apart.  The fucker didn’t meet me at the bank for the deposit transfer (he didn't want my 1500 EUR I guess) nor did he answer phone calls or emails.  Let’s just call him König Deutschbag. Plan B: Scheissedorf. It fell in our laps like a cold beer.  After one month of daily searching, we got Scheissedorf.  I’m only here for three months.  Then…?

It’s peaceful out here in Scheissedorf if you are a corpse type looking for that sort of thing.  There are about 5 restaurants and bars within 10 square kilometers of here and two of them have boards in the windows and for sale signs outside.  I could be already dead.  People cross the street when I shamble down the broken sidewalks.  I look and feel ghastly and ghoulish most of the time.  I saw a couple of androgynous Goth individuals in long black coats gliding down the street.

BUT HEY!!! I’m a digital nomad.  I’ve just decided.  I don’t have to stay in Berlin, learn German, compete with all the low waged locals AND get rampant discrimination from Zee Paper Nazis.  Nosirree, Bob! I can do what I do from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.  I write. I do websites. I take purty pitchers n stuff.  So if I can’t find a flat in a decent area of Berlin during my Scheissedorf limbo, I’ll just take my camera, laptop, my trusty donkey and lance, and take a flying fuck at the next windmill.

Because that’s what you do.

BAU-WOW-WOW!!!!

EATEN ALIVE BY THE GERMAN CONSTRUCTION MACHINE

The Conspiracy is complete. It has achieved total and unequivocal dominion over my existence. I now just accept it with a wry smile and a slap to the forehead. The Conspiracy has followed me everywhere I have ever lived in the past 15 years. Whenever I move into a new apartment, within 1 week the construction starts just outside my window. At 7am to 6pm, every single fuckin’ day. Even on weekends.

It’s true that I have lived in some of the worst former Communist Eastern European urban shitholes ever devised. But still. You would think that I would have numbers on my side at some point. I mean, they are not reconstructing every single flat in the city at the same time, are they? No, Dunkin’, just yours. Yes, they have been rebuilding Eastern Europe since the fall of the Iron Curtain, but why do they need to drive the iron rivets home just outside my window?

Case in point: my current flat. A sublet, as usual, my 2nd this year. Why sublet? A) Because German realtors offer flats that are completely empty, no fridge, no oven, no stove, no kitchen sink. Not even a single light fixture. For 600 euros a month you get a roof, doors, windows and a crapper. Like prison, only without bars and much more expensive. B) Because German bureaucracy is idiotic. The worst I have ever seen. I used to think that nobody could possibly conceive of a more deliberately retarded system than the Czechs. I was wrong. The Germans sit around devising new bureaucracy daily. Just to piss me off. These Deutschbags sit around devising new bureaucracy and circle jerking. So, while we’re waiting for Gunter and Dieter to answer our fucking emails about available flats (and awaiting the ludicrous shit storm of paperwork to follow any offer), we sublet. (deep breath).

‘Geez, Dunkin’, you’re much more grumpy and cynical than usual,’ you might say. Well, I haven’t slept much this summer. I was almost getting used to the pounding jackhammers, the shouts and screams of the workers (or maybe the workers were merely talking and German ALWAYS sounds like barbaric screams) and the heavy drilling on the property next door. It is a vacant lot that will host a new fancy shmancy building which will house the latest batch of yuppies who will soon be shat out of the ass of Corporate America, England, etc. onto the streets of Friedrichshain.

Construction progress has been slow. With the amount of noise they have generated over the last 3 months, you would think they would have the foundation laid and at least the 1st floor erected. Nossir. In 3 months, this small 300 metre lot has got a thin layer of iron mesh on the ground. They dug the whole lot up and filled it in with dirt again about 12 times. I guess the masons, concrete pourers and bricklayers are all busy filling out their paperwork before they can begin. As you can tell, I know just about zilch about construction work (amusing, since I should be an expert by now if I had bothered to look out my windows over the last 15 years). But they brought in some crude noisemaking machines I didn’t know existed. I’ve seen my share of Caterpillars, John Deers, dump trucks, scoopers, bulldozers, steam rollers and cranes. But they brought in something from another planet. It was a tall, twisted mass of steel with a giant central cylinder with a tank for a base. It looked like an oil drilling rig had fucked a panzer tank and the bitch-on-treaded-wheels gave birth to the ungodly progeny right under my window. I still don’t know what the Evil Beast was devised for, other than to accentuate my personal construction conspiracy and to punctuate my occasional hangover. Every day at 7 am on the nose the Beast went to work. BOOM!!! Thump-thump, BOOM!!!! (repeated for 9 hours with a 1 hour lunch break). The cylinder churned and thumped for a month.

Then one day, just like that, the Beast was gone. But another noise began in its wake. It was familiar, the sounds of the workers in the dawn getting ready to wreak havoc on my beauty sleep (and if you’ve seen me, I need ALL I can get). By the end of the day, a scaffold had been erected in front of my building and my windows were covered in plastic. It’s as if the agents of the Construction Conspiracy were gloating at the surveillance tapes of my misery and decided to up the ante. Fifteen years of metal fire and brimstone right next door weren’t enough: there was something in German on a piece of paper stuck on the wall downstairs. I managed to pull a few words out of it. It said not to open our windows for 2 weeks. There would be construction.