14. Berlin: After the Fall of the Turkey

The day after Thanksgiving in Berlin (link to last week's post here), we woke to the banging and pounding of hammers, punctuated by the occasional scream of a power saw. At first, my muzzy head thought we were back in Le Petit Bateau where these sounds were, if not welcome, at least familiar. When we finally bestirred ourselves from our bed about 11 and headed into the rest of the apartment, Brunella told us that the building's owners had been planning to do some major renovations, modernizing the wiring and plumbing throughout the building. But she'd thought they weren't doing it until next week. Apparently they were running ahead of schedule.

Ah well. I was at least used to these things. There's been construction and remodeling in the building that houses Petit Bateau almost since we moved in, and directly below us for more than a month. At the very least this percussive wake up call would ensure that we didn't sleep our time in Berlin away.

However, there was an added element of excitement: while they were modernizing the plumbing, the water on our side of the building would be turned off. Today and for the rest of the week we would be unable to use the faucets, take a shower, or use the toilets from 8 am to 4pm.

Pic unrelated. But funny.

Megan can wake up, check her email, have coffee, have breakfast, maybe even get a little work done before she jumps in the shower. I generally put off taking a shower for the amount of time it takes me to get from the bed to the bathroom. It's part of how I wake up. But there was nothing to be done.

Luckily, more immediate concerns, the kind that existed way back when bathing was thought to be a quick path to death or demonic possession, had been provided for. The floor below us, on the other side of the building and hence with working pipes, had an empty apartment. It had no power, so a shower was out unless I wanted to take one in cold water (and the shower itself was a little sketchy-looking), but I could brush my teeth and take care of nature. This was my first encounter with the fabled German-style toilet. The feature that separates these guys from the ones you would familiar with is a shelf of sorts in the bowl, where...stuff will collect until you flush it away.

I didn't take a picture of our toilet.
The one we got to use wasn't this nice.

I'm sure that one could draw all kinds of conclusions about the psychological character of a people that wanted to be able to stare (and maybe poke a stick) at their poop, but I would not be that one. It was very interesting to verify a conversation that I heard between Fatguy and Blunutt (or was it BoomBoom?) many many years before about this very thing. College nicknames have been used to reference these individuals to protect the innocent. If you can call them that.

But showers be damned, lovelies! After base needs were taken care of, we dressed and headed out into Berlin. Brunella was going to show us the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, and whatever else we wanted to see before she had to go to her class that evening. Our tour would of necessity include a stop at Hamburg University, where a group of students was organizing a protest in solidarity with the students of UC Davis.

The events that spurred this have become a part of the collection of examples of incredible overreaction and brutality on the part of mayors, police officers, university chancellors, and other dishearteningly jerk-ass creeps to the members of the Occupy movement. Some of you may have been on the quad at UC Davis when it happened. Some of you may have been pepper sprayed by the ass-hat jerk who has become an internet meme of infamy. But I'm sure all of you have at least heard and probably seen how a cop at UC Davis casually sprayed pepper spray in the faces of a small group of student protesters who were in turn protesting the brutal treatment of students at UC Berkeley earlier that week during a protest against proposed fee and tuition hikes. There is more to this story, of course. The point of this blog is not to address all of this, and I'm not qualified enough to give it the explanation it needs. Here are a couple of links that talk about it: 

http://www.neontommy.com/news/2011/12/california-public-colleges-lead-nation-highest-tuition-and-fees

And this one: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/15/local/la-me-uc-tuition-20110715

This is me scrambling to find some good links to break this down in time to get this blog posted. For those of you that are more intimately involved (I'm looking at you, friend of mine who I saw get pepper sprayed), if you have some good links that break it down, explain/show the rate increases, the unaccountability of the Regents for what they're doing, all that sort of stuff, please feel free to post it in the comments section.

 But the upshot was that the footage of Officer Pike showing off his big can of pepper spray before dousing a bunch of kids was on Youtube within hours, and that thing's all global and stuff.

You've probably seen this already. If not, though, please watch it. It's important.

And in an incredible bout of synchronicity, we happened to be in Berlin at the same time that these kids at Hamburg University were organizing a protest, halfway around the world from where it happened. How could we not attend?

On our way we walked through a Christmas market. I was still suffering from the aftermath of the previous night's excess, so I wasn't on top of things like taking pictures all over the place. Sorry. But imagine lines of wooden stalls, trimmed in evergreen branches and white Christmas lights. Lots of pine trees set up on the edges, almost blurring the sights of Berlin all around. There was a little Christmas train for the kiddies to ride, and a small ice skating rink. About half the stalls were selling Christmassy things like sweaters and hats, gloves, trinkets. The rest sold food. Food and beer and gluwein, which is basically mulled wine. I finally got to try this thing called currywurst, which is supposed to be a specialty of the Berlin area, though I think I heard another town in Germany claims credit for having come up with it.

It's basically a sausage cut into pieces, covered in their version of ketchup (which is more flavorey, like barbecue sauce) and then curry powder sprinkled over the whole thing. Fries come with. It is some pretty good food that you know is bad for you. 

This actually may as well be a picture of what they gave me.
 Though mine had more mayonnaise.

This Christmas market thing was super cute, and the kind of thing that could make me come to like Christmas again. In the past bunch of years I have become fed up with this nation's most important holiday. The fact that our consumer economy depends on the massive amounts of spending that take place during this time of year makes me feel like all the sentiment, the songs on the radio, the message of goodwill towards men (why not women?), are all just a veneer to hide the message that it's very important for you to buy things, lots of things. Remember that the tents in all those Occupy places were torn down because you can't just go setting up tents in public places, people, for Pete's sake(!), but the tents erected so that people could camp out in front of stores in preparation for Black Friday shopping were not. I hate that aspect of Christmas, and that is the largest one that you can see.

But this little Christmas market was great. There were things to buy, but it was all kitschy stuff. Mostly useless (except for hats and gloves such), but also pretty cheap. And it was there to be itself, to be this tiny little forest village in the middle of Berlin. And now I will end my grinch-ey rant.

All I really need is Carol Kane to beat the crap out of me.

We continued on, seeing more buildings, churches. Much of Berlin is under construction at any given moment. Streets might be half blocked off by orange walls, an old building might have tarps draped over it to make it look half-dressed, a giant jackhammer might sit in the middle of an intersection, cars careening by on one side or another. We went to Hamburg college. A sign hung in front of our destination building; inside, in the Occupied conference room, the students were making waffles. We saw no cops. We ran into this girl named Janice. She said hi, and we told her that we from UC Davis. She did a double take, said “What?” Megan repeated that we were from Davis and she was a teacher at the university. Janice, it turned out, was one of the two people who had organized the protest. Aaand then there were hugs and girls crying. It was very sweet. Turns out that in a couple hours they were going to march to the Brandenburg Gate and protest in front of the American Embassy. Would we come? Would we address the crowd?

By now I was itchy. I wanted a shower. I still felt a bit muzzy. The plan had been to do some sightseeing then go home when Brunella went to class. Then we'd hang out when she got back. It hadn't been the plan that we would be staying out until well past dark, joining a protest march, and then ...what? I had a mental image of standing on a stage behind a microphone.

But again: how could we not? When would these opportunities come to us again? We said yes. Then we headed off to do more of the sight-seeing part of the day before the protesting part. We went on to see the Brandenburg Gate. It looks just like all the pictures.

Et voila!

 There was a performance artist dressed up like a copper statue, sort of like a green army man. He had a life-size (plastic?) statue with him, so it was hard to tell who was real and who not.

Like an oxidized Blue Man Group.

We saw the Reichstag. It had a big glass cupola that you could go up in and walk around, but we didn't do it. We would have had to go through a big security line to gain entry; it is Germany's big governmental building, after all. You know this whole time (meaning: my life) I thought that it was the Reichstag you see in that bit of film where the swastika gets blown up ('Splosion! ), but no. That was at the Nuremburg Zeppelin Grounds.

And then it was back to Hamburg University. When we got there it was pretty lightly populated. In fact, after several minutes, Janice told us that we didn't have enough people to do a protest march. We could wave our signs and chant our chants all we wanted once we got to Brandenburg, but there are specific rules about the number necessary for a marching protest. And we were a few people short. So, after waiting a few minutes to see if more people would arrive, we set out, signs rolled up and not waving. A group of police were hanging out by the gate we left from, and as we set out they climbed into their van and followed us. I've only had a few run-ins with the cops, and it's always been when I was, you know, doing the kinds of things that cops are supposed to keep you from doing. Speeding tickets and...stuff. But while I knew we weren't doing anything wrong- indeed, it looked like we were acting in strict accordance with rules set out by the cops- I couldn't help but be a bit nervous. I mean, they were in a big paddy wagon, puttering along at walking speed, getting in the way of traffic, at one point even driving on the wrong side of the street in order to keep up with us. It was like they were waiting for us to get out of line so they could descend.

When we got to the Brandenburg Gate, they were five more vans full of cops. There were maybe thirty of us protestors, and about a dozen cops to a van. Besides having all that gear, and guns and stuff, they outnumbered us two to one. At least. Granted, this square, the one in front of the gate, is a big tourist destination and home to several countries' embassies. But still. It seemed a bit excessive. But we set up, unrolled our signs, sat down or huddled around, and someone broke out the bullhorn. That and the human microphone thing.

People spoke. It was in German. A couple people translated for Megan and me. One was a tall, thin, bookish dude in glasses whose English was clipped and charming. The other was a guy whose hair was in thin braids, had these bright blue eyes, and was dressed all in camouflage and clean fresh Timberlands. He and Janice kept asking us if we were ready to speak. Megan took the bullhorn first. Facing the US Embassy, she spoke beautifully, summing up her thoughts of what happened at UC Davis, the fee hikes in the UC system that many of the protests throughout the system were in response to, and how wonderful she felt to see this statement of solidarity here in Berlin. If you are Facebook friends with her, she wrote a much better account of this evening than I am doing, down around December second or third. If you're not, well...sorry. You're stuck with me.

I didn't really take any pictures of this evening. I wanted to, but I felt like I would look more like a tourist than a participant. So I don't have pictures of the cops, or the protesters, or the people in the US Embassy ignoring us through their floor-to-ceiling windows. But I did take this one:

Signs, check. Brandenburg Gate, check.
Megan with a bullhorn speaking truth to power, check.

Blueyes asked me if I was ready to talk. He often ended something he said with, “Burn down Babylon!” I wasn't ready; I had been trying to think of what I would say, but I kept thinking I was just cold. I'm so not the kind of person who could Occupy anything for very long. But Blueyes said, “Are you ready man? Just let your words come. Don't worry, man, I got your back. Burn down Babylon!” So I took the bullhorn.

My phrasing was terrible. I think I started with, “I am here to stand in solidarity with the students at UC Davis in the US that the police brutality was done to.” God. My gist, the general sense of what I was saying, was that while the actions the police took were reprehensible, the police do not act without authorization. Someone told them it was okay to pepper spray kids who were sitting on the ground. Someone told them it was okay to ram a billy club into the gut of a tiny little college girl who couldn't protect herself because she had her arms linked with other students to show that they were not violent. Someone okayed the destruction of personal property while removing people excersing their Constitutional right to lobby for redress of grievances. Someone said it was okay to mace an eighty-four year old woman. Those are the people that need to be removed, stripped of power, and have the disgust of a country that decries such actions in other countries leveled at them.

Man. I wish I'd been able to say it like that. But that's sort of what I said, and eventually I passed the bullhorn on.

Tourists and locals wandered by while we spoke, pausing to read our signs, maybe passing a word or accepting a pamphlet. But the cops were the thing that struck me the most. First of all, there were a bunch of them, but none of them wore riot gear. They had their sidearms, but there were no rifles, no paint/rubber bullet guns. No shields. They stood well away from us, across the street on the curb abutting the US Embassy. They looked bored and cold, and took turns sitting in the vans with the heaters on. They were, in short, doing exactly what cops should do in such nonviolent situations: nothing. At one point, after Blueyes had gone off on the bullhorn with a blistering rant about police power, atrocities done worldwide, and a general call for revolution (so Tall Guy with Glasses said), he crossed the street and started speaking directly to the cops, pleading with them (it seemed) to join us. If you were a cop in the US (I'm not fond of police behavior in the US right now), if a guy with dreadlocks who just finished saying you were evil came across the street towards you and started speaking forcefully, my feeling is that he'd get tackled and zip tied. The cops here did nothing. Why not? Oh. Because he was a college kid doing nothing wrong. They listened from the van. One of them accepted a pamphlet from him.

After a couple hours we packed up and went home. It was cold, and dark, and Megan's stomach was all twisted up from excitement. We said goodbye to the students, who marched off escorted once again by a van full of police. Poor, bored police with too much sense and not enough cause to go beating on people.

Megan and I successfully navigated the trams and trains back to Brunella's apartment, where we gratefully took showers. Brunella came home, and there was some dinner and some beer. Then there was bed.

The rest of our visit was pretty tame compared to those first few days. We hung around, saw some things. Megan made turkey soup from Thanksgiving leftovers. Hella good (and I'm not one to use hella).

 Brunella took us to a Mexican restaurant where we had the first tacos in months. Well, I had tacos. Megan had the mole. 

We didn't have the Korean fried chicken. Too angry. 

On our last day she took us on a nice walk to a different part of Berlin, the part where she would have lived had she had her druthers. For the most part I just took pictures of graffiti and funny signs. Behold:

They love this word, the Germans. No, not fashion.

Totally enormous

I...don't know who this is supposed to be. A friend of  Krampus, maybe?

Santa wishes he had those abs.

This guy looked rough. Brunella said he'd been around for a while,
getting more beat-up and punkified all the while.

And this...what's going on here? Is he eating  himself? And liking it?
He's clearly drunk.

Owls are cool. All your friends think so.

This hostel has the best candy.

This place had the best reservoir of schmuckes.

And with that, our visit was over. It was time to leave Brunella and return to Le Petit Bateau. But Berlin has not seen the last of us; that place was awesome. Ich will mehr.  

Besides, we never went to this place.