Club Matte

Break time is over. I’m on a train, my second of the day, sitting in Basel’s (Switzerland) central station in a transfer to Milan after an 8 hour ride from Berlin’s hauptbahnhof. I know I said I was getting back into the rhythm of constant posting. But Berlin was too good, too time consuming. Berlin is an unreal city. Every neighborhood beats like a heart, all day and night, every single day, in its own way, attracting both Berliners and tourists. The party, so to speak, never stops. But I managed to break away from my Berlin hypnosis and make my way south to warmer weather, like a goose.

And this time I really do intend to blow through the last couple of weeks. Recalling the events in detail would be time consuming and difficult and besides, my train has just started and I will be spending the next few hours winding my way through the Swiss Alps and down to the heart of northern Italy. This is supposed to be one of the most beautiful stretches of track in Europe and I may get distracted. But let’s see what I can do. As discussed in my last post (a long, long time ago, I know), power walks was an upcoming topic. Alex and I had signed up for a ride by carpool down to Dusseldorf and we had to meet our driver at Hamburg’s central station. We checked out of our hostel in St. Pauli, across town from the station, and attempted to hop a bus with our semi-used bus passes. But the bus driver, being very uncool, said our passes would only get us about halfway (and then I guess he would kick us off? I was confused on this...) and rather than paying the 1 euro 80 for a new ticket, Alex wanted to walk, mainly due to his frustration, I think, with the bus driver. But this was easier said than done. Alex had a day pack and I had my duffel bag full of gear fit for Siberia, like 50 pounds sitting on my back. And Alex has this habit of power walking everywhere he goes, just kind of head down, forging a path to our destination which turned out to be the train station about 5 kilometers away. But to be fair, if we didn’t hurry, we’d be late. So, about 45 minutes and two very, very sore legs later, we made it to the station just in time to meet the Turkish man and his mini van who would take us to Dusseldorf.

Tracks leading into Dusseldorf's main train station

And now, the autobahn. I’m going to skip around a little bit here. We took the autobahn in this case with the Turkish man to Dusseldorf but we also took it a couple of days later in Alex brother’s (Mark) BMW M3 from Dusseldorf to Berlin, across the whole northern part of Germany. The autobahn is just a word that means highway in German but is special in that many parts of the highway (a highway that connects all major cities in Germany) simply have no speed limits. This is why German cars are so good. They were built for the autobahn. Driving a BMW M3 in the US is cool, no doubt, but admittedly you are limited to the same speed limits (80 mph in Mass, 50 mph in Seattle) as every other Toyota Corolla on the road. But in Germany, the left lane is the no rules lane and everyone knows it. The Turkish man in his minivan from the 90’s kept a cool 140 kph (about 96 mph) during our ride to Dusseldorf which is fast, but not crazy fast. His limits were those of the minivan he was driving. We got to Dusseldorf from Hamburg in a respectable 3 hours or so. When possible however, Mark was averaging about 210 kph (140 mph) in his M3 limited only by his car’s tires (winter tires). The autobahn looks like a normal highway except for the German vehicles screaming by you in the left lane. I would have loved the opportunity to drive like a German down the autobahn but there is some real skill that takes time to acquire with this style of driving. I noticed that the reaction time has to be so much more precise and so much quicker in order to avoid collisions, collisions that are inevitable fatal at such high speeds even in the safest of cars. Cars slow down in the left lane just like any other highway, traffic exists on the autobahn too, and if you are not quick enough to react to a slowing car, it could be bad. Not that I was offered the chance anyway. Mark was a pro, though. Unfortunately we didn’t get to drive like this the whole way to Berlin because it was the start of the Easter holidays and everyone was on the road trying to get home so the trip took us a lot longer than usual. But those stretches of road that were free made you feel like you were flying, even from the passenger seat.

Dusseldorf was surprisingly nice. It’s a rich city, one of the few in the world that is debt free (as we could see by the “days debt free” counter outside the city hall - 5+ years and going strong). The city is seen as a bit snobby by the rest of Germany and with the amount of luxury vehicles roaming the streets, its easy to see why. The city has a beautiful old town district along the River Rhine with traditional 16th and 17th century German architecture, filled with beer gardens, sausage shops, and other hip cafes and restaurants. The nightlife was pleasantly hopping for a wednesday night and the weather was sunny and mild during our brief stay. Mark is 26 years old, works as a salesman for a Japanese telescopic lens company, and travels all around Germany on business, for which he is reimbursed for fuel. He shares a penthouse apartment on the top floor of a nice apartment building in a pleasant residential neighborhood with an eccentric 50 year old German man who runs his own start-up company. His roommate collects obscure art during his free time and is educated at Johns Hopkins’s SAIS in Washington, DC. He was fun to talk with. Dusseldorf is also the city where the family that I have a small connection to German heritage with is from so it was pretty cool for me to be there. But we didn’t stay long, one night and two days, and then we drove to Berlin.

Dusseldorf has been debt free for 5+ years

Alex and I ate a lunch of flammkuchen, a pizza-like meal famous in Dusseldorf

As you are already aware, Berlin is an awesome place. I’ve never been to a similar city. And I was lucky because I have many friends there that I had met the previous fall in Chengdu (which seems like such a long time ago now). And other non-German friends were meeting up in Berlin as well in an attempt at a reunion. So I used my stay in Berlin (longer than I originally intended) as a break from the normal humdrum of city hopping and traveling that I had been doing for the last couple of months. It’s going to be a bit difficult to describe why Berlin is so cool but I think it all has a direct connection with its post-war past and its East-West divide precluding the fall of the USSR and the Berlin Wall. The unique dynamic that developed after the fall of the wall turned the city into a haven of hip culture spread across not one central downtown area, like most cities, but across many distinctly different neighborhoods, forced to evolve on their own due to their historic separation. (Quick note, I’m passing a small city called Spiez, located on the edge of an unimaginably beautiful lake in the heart of the Swiss Alps. Wow. I almost prematurely disembarked the train). I stayed with Lissy, a girl I met in Chengdu, who lives in Prenzlauerberg, a neighborhood in the former East Berlin. She is a true Berliner, born in East Berlin in the GDR just before the wall fell and united the city. Prenzlauerberg is an old residential neighborhood, not far from the action, and is dotted with pleasant walking streets and a park, Mauer Park (or wall park), that still has lesser known pieces of the wall, now graffitied and displayed along a local soccer stadium. The wall here is mostly unknown to tourists and is now just part of the park. Since I stayed in East Berlin, and actually most of my friends here are East Berliners as well, I got to know East Berlin pretty well. Without going into too much history, East Berlin was controlled by the Soviet Union following the second world war and became the capital of the former GDR, the German country that composed all of East Germany. But conditions were so poor in East Berlin that the repression that followed when people tried to flee to the west created a hardened culture eager for its freedom. When the wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union and consequently the GDR collapsed shortly afterward, East Berlin exploded in a movement of re-identifying itself. The parts of the wall that were symbolically left standing were artistically graffitied as were most of the old factory buildings that now make up many of the hip urban neighborhoods. Art became, as far as I could see, an outlet for the emotions that followed in this re-identification process. Art through graffiti and wall paintings (that are omnipresent in East Berlin) but also art through music, like the city’s intense underground electro scene, and media and food and whatever else.

We attended a Hertha BSC match in Berlin, Berlin's best team

We sat by the supporter section

A typical street corner in Prenzlauerberg

An old section of the wall in Mauer Park

So one of the things we sampled many times during my stay in the city is one of the things I was most looking forward to on my entire trip: Berlin’s nightlife and underground electro clubs. These clubs are all unique and are located in these large factory buildings that look deserted and rundown during the day. But these neighborhoods that appear as wastelands in daylight come alive at night when hipsters start filling in the gaps in cover of darkness. The clubs that I went to had some of the best electro music that I’ve ever heard and were filled with people dancing to the heavy beat that rolled continuously, non-stop through the night and into the following days. Every one of the city’s hundreds of clubs had lines out the door where eager young people awaited judgement by the all powerful bouncers, unsure whether they’d make it in or be turned away. And most of these clubs had lines out the door on the weekdays as well. Some of the best DJ’s are from Berlin and can be found in these clubs from time to time. And my friends in the city are well connected and know the best places to go so I was treated to an experience tourists only dream about. It was awesome.

An old art yard, Berlin has many of these types of exhibits

The triumph tower

The building where Angela Merkel goes to work everyday

Skyline of East Berlin as seen from the top of the Berlin Dome

The inside of the Berliner Dom, a large cathedral in East Berlin

But as you know I spent a lot of time in Berlin. I did a lot of sightseeing as well. I explored all the major neighborhoods in both East and West Berlin, saw the Brandenberg Gate, the triumph tower, the houses of Parliament, the building where mighty Angela Merkel works, took a boat tour along the Spree. But my favorite tourist attraction was the wall. I visited the East Side Gallery, a stretch of wall that was preserved for its unique art. The gallery goes for about a kilometer along the river by East Berlin’s Ostbanhof train station and displays murals from artists all over the world that came to express their unity with the city. Two famous murals I went out of my way to find was one of a car, a Trabant, famously built in the GDR and is now one of the defunct country’s few remaining products from the time, being driven straight through the wall, and the other is of a kiss between Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1979 and the East German president Erich Honnecker, a replica of a famous photo that depicts the two kissing each other on the cheek in a sign of greeting. We also visited Checkpoint Charlie, the famous section of the wall that served as one of the few entry and exit points between the American sector in West Berlin and the Soviet sector in the East. And we went to the wall memorial where we watched a brief video that explains the history of the wall and the conflicts it created. And the memorial also preserved a section of the wall as it was back in its heyday where you could see the barbed wire fences and guard towers and the two high cement walls separated by an area known as the death strip where dozens of East Germans lost their lives trying to escape to the West. It was a powerful experience.

The start of the East Side Gallery in Ostbanhof

One of the more famous murals from the East Side Gallery

Some teenagers hanging out along the wall

Here you can see the preserved wall, guard towers, and death strip

Famous sign by Checkpoint Charlie

During my stay we had on several occasions small reunions amongst my Chengdu friends. It was really great seeing everyone again. We met over brunch, for dinner, at bars, and at house parties. It was a nice break from the nearly three months of traveling I had done on my own and I feel refreshed enough that I can continue on my solo journey for the final leg along southern Europe. I’ll be honest. I’m sick of the freezing, dark weather. Even Berlin was colder and darker than usual. So I reserved a ticket straight south to Italy. In the preservation of time and money, I’d like to see as much of southern Europe as possible before I return home. I need to see the sun for a little while. Kind of like the reward for months of winter traveling.

I’m at border customs now, I guess we’ve entered Italy. My plan is two stay a few days in Milan, meet up with some old family friends that I know in the city, and then continue to short-hop my way around northern Italy for a couple of weeks. I’ve got a lot of ideas.

So then, welcome back to the present! Hopefully I keep my old routine of regular posts. I was addicted to them before and am happy to be returning to them. I hope you’re still with me!

Club Matte!

Oh and by the way, this post is called Club Matte (pronounced mah-teh) because I became obsessed with this drink. It’s an energy drink from Berlin that comes in a large glass bottle, mostly sugarless (so nothing like red bull), and tastes like oatmeal (to me anyway). It’s good in the morning and afternoon and at the club and pretty much all the time. I had at least one of these per day and I’m going to miss them now that I’m gone. Try it when you visit Berlin - you’ll feel like a Berliner.

Until next time, Berlin!