Miles of Berlin Before We Sleep

“Gotta go over the Berlin Wall
I don’t understand it….
I gotta go over the wall
I don’t understand this bit at all….”

-Sex Pistols, Holiday in the Sun

* * *

The world is full of great cities, each of them considered “great” for reasons all their own. I haven’t seen them all and there’s a good chance that I never will, but I’ve seen a few.

I’ve been rained on in London.

I’ve stepped in Parisian doggie doo on my way to the Eiffel Tower.

I’ve drunk sweet, sweet Guinness in Dublin.

I’ve done a shitty Sean Connery imitation in Edinburgh.

I have yet to argue with a NYC cab driver, but it’s on my list of clichés to act out.

Then there’s Berlin.

Sure, I consumed sausages, beer and sauerkraut in Berlin, so there’s one more big city cliché checked off on the list, but there’s so much more to it.

I went crazy in Berlin. I walked around slack-jawed, laughed, learned, cried and shook my fist at Berlin while muttering a string of epithets.

The moment we exited the big, fancy train station that took us into the city, a wave of wonder smacked me upside the head.

Once I had finally stopped spinning around in a circle, gawking at my surroundings, Olivier took me by the arm and reminded me that there was still the rest of the city there for us to see. So, we made our way along and walked for only a few minutes before the Reichstag came into view.

Now, most of the photos of this building that I had previously seen look something like this:

Of course, these days, it’s a little bit brighter and a little less charred.

We walked along the Straße des 17. Juni until we reached the Berlin Victory Column (Siegessäule). It was there that I was attacked by a shrieking, speeding herd of bicyclists, but we really don’t need to talk about that.

As I was flailing about and yelping in the middle of the herd, Olivier was talking with the driver of a bicycle taxi. Once I was able to make a break for it, we jumped in the back and the poor driver began pedaling furiously to take us back in the direction that we had just come from, hauling our fat asses to the Brandenburg Gate.

When we stopped in front of the gate, the driver pointed down at the road, at the place where the Berlin Wall had once stood.

But… that was 20 years ago. These days, the place is a little brighter, more cheerful, with throngs of people – Germans and tourists alike – wandering around, looking at one another, pointing and laughing at people in funny costumes… music blaring, voices, chattering and laughing… a far cry from the dismal Cold War images of the place that I had seen as I was growing up.

We walked around the city for quite a while, looking at this, pointing at that and wondering about all of it. Of course, strolling around gets a little old, so we sat and had a beer outside as we watched the people, who all seemed busy, heading to one place or another. I noticed how they all moved just a bit slower than the people who move along the streets of Paris everyday. The pace was a bit more relaxed and also unlike Paris, the people seemed uninterested in looking at each other, or in being looked at themselves.

It was a nice change.

After we had our beers, we were ready to see Checkpoint Charlie, which today has almost nothing to do with the Cold War symbol that it once was.

No, today it’s a museum and tourist attraction complete with over-priced knick-knacks, people wearing military costumes and camera-wielding tourists – me included.

The museum there is definitely worth checking out, but there is a lot of reading. Mostly, stories of the Cold War and of the fortitude and creativity of several people trapped in East Germany, who had made their escape across the wall. Some made it, some didn’t.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in the museum, completely absorbed. We didn’t return to the present until the museum announced that it was closing. When we found ourselves back outside again, the sky was gray and it was pouring rain. We wandered around in the rain until we found a restaurant, where we dried off and stuffed ourselves with Bier, Wurst and Sauerkraut.

Now it was night and we were ready to jump on a train and head back to our room. The rain and cold was resurrecting the sickness that I’d been fighting for the past week and our feet, in spite of our comfy shoes, were getting wet, achy and hateful.

At the train station, we were more than a little displeased that discover that our train was delayed. So, we waited…

and we waited…

and we began to get very impatient.

Realizing that our train would never come, we took one train after another, slowly making our way closer to our destination, but still pretty much fucked as far as actually getting there goes.

It was after a couple of hours of this that Olivier and I found ourselves standing outside, in the rain, at a train station that was almost deserted. We had just gotten to the point where we had begun to bicker at one another, about to go “Lord of the Flies” on each other’s shit when we saw them: The Phantom Single-Serving Friends.

Yeah, they were stuck, too. A German couple, a few years younger than us. The four of us found a métro, taking us again a bit closer to our destination and then we finally wound up splitting a cab with them, taking us exactly where we needed to go.

In the flurry of everyone trying to get themselves home, no one in the group had thought to ask what anyone else’s name was. When our taxi dropped them off, Olivier jumped out and took a picture of them with his camera phone.

Of course, when we arrived back at our room and tried to upload the photos…

… *poof*… they were gone. Maybe we imagined them, our Single-Serving Phantom Friends. I can’t prove that we didn’t.

Indeed, there are great cities all over the world… and to tell the truth, I’m not a fan of the city, great or small. I prefer some isolation, but not too far from civilization. I like my comfort, but I detest the humans.

Usually.

In Paris, the humans drive me batshit.

In Copenhagen, I finally found them easy to tolerate.

In Berlin, I forgot about my disdain for a little while.

Yeah… sometimes the humans show me something.

At the end of the day, we were exhausted, achy, irritable and happy… we were finally able to rest before continuing to run amok in Germany…

… and I was feeling like shit.