Group Outings

After a few gorgeous—hot, humid, but gorgeous—days, for which I could wear dresses without leggings and had to worry about getting tanlines, I heard someone in my class mention that we would be getting thunderstorms this afternoon. I slumped on the steps of the Nikolai Kirche of Potsdam in Despair. Not only was I in Potsdam, again, but it was going to rain? Oh, cruel fate!

(First time in Potsdam:
Berkeley people went to Potsdam for the well-considered idea of “Let’s go on a bike ride around Babelsberg and Potsdam!” This is great, for me, but, umm, half of the people hadn’t been on a bike in ten years. One girl crashed, although she was fine since people weren’t really going faster than a walking pace anyway. There were hills, like going up Durant, which people who haven’t been on a bike in ten years and would take 15 minutes to walk up…oh wait, they did walk up. It is really precious, very pretty, Sans Souci is stunning, I finally had a döner kebap (delicious) but man. Not the best idea for a group trip. Also, they didn’t know where we were going and we kept getting lost. We lost our GSI person at one point and Herr Euba had to go back and find him.)

My day actually started off quite amusing. I was walking to the bus stop and Mr. Probably Has A Drinking Problem was walking back from the market and when he passed me said, “Well, there goes Ms. Snoberoo!” I replied that it was a lot of fun being so, and then continued on, thinking: that is the cutest insult ever. Snoberoo almost seems complimentary. Snobbybritches would have been harsher. Snoberoo just makes me think of snow bears.

The heavens had the kindness to open just as I got off the bus back at the dorm. It was still sunny and the rain was like water falling from a sprinkler—very nice, gentle rain, at least until about ten minutes later, when the sky clouded over and the thunder, lightning, and sheets of rain began. It has stopped again, and Torey might have just opened the curse she last gave on the bike tour—“I hope it doesn’t rain this weekend!” I cannot have rain this weekend, at least not tomorrow afternoon through Saturday afternoon. I am going to Kassel for Documenta and really do not need to deal with that inconvenience.

Fat Tire Bike Tours has outposts in Berlin, Paris, and Barcelona. If they have any openings after I graduate I would seriously consider working there (if nothing else comes up). Torey and I did the Berlin Wall tour, which lasted from eleven in the morning to five in the afternoon. It was so much fun, even though it was pouring with rain for most of the trip. They have giant beach cruisers, much like my ironically named Twiggy, which are perfect for the city—Berlin is very flat, and has an alarming amount of cobblestone roads and sidewalks. Cobblestones are pretty and all, but road bike tires would not make for a comfortable ride. (Side note: High heels and cobblestones. Think about it.) The tour guide kind of somehow reminded me of my bother, and there were only six people in the group, two teachers from Chicago and two Scottish guys, then us. At one point in the tour, just before we stopped for lunch, we had the opportunity to go down (and up) a “hill”—a giant pit in the ground left from where a bahn station used to be. It was like biking on College the block before you hit campus. I was going so fast back up the hill that the chain came off, and I had enough speed to coast up the other side. It felt so good to be back on a bike, and I had a creepy clown horn I kept turned away from me, but I could have honked at people if I had wanted to do so. Speaking of clowns, I went to see the Cindy Sherman show at Martin-Gropius-Bau, which was excellent. So much amazing stuff, and then the clown series, which is just kind of disturbing in a way that torn-up dolls having kinky sex never can be. It was great to see the UFS and the Centerfolds, and then the History Portraits/Old Masters. The exhibit actually began with this two-minute video piece she had done in school, with a stop-motion story of a paper doll picking out clothes and getting dressed only to be picked up by the owner and stripped and put back in the book. The Bus Rider and Murder Mystery series were also delightful. I was going to treat myself to a catalog or book after seeing the show, but the ones I would have wanted were on sale for fifty euro, so I will just look on Amazon later.

When Torey, Susie, and I went to this club Soda in Prenzlauer Berg a week or so ago, we were crossing a street to look at the street sign and heard someone say hey really loudly. I turned to look back over my shoulder because the voice sounded familiar…and it was Michael. What are the chances? A city with millions of people and we run into one of the only people we know. Soda was a lot of fun, mostly because it has three rooms, two of which play not techno—hip-hop and rock, and then house in both half of the time anyway. We were melting in hip-hop so we migrated to rock, where we staked out territory below one of the only air conditioning vents in the place. We left at three, and it took only two hours to get home! At the bus stop at Potsdamer Platz, waiting for the M48, we had one person puke behind the bus stand, and another one pee! It smelled so great. I called Eric to whimper, because it was not four in the morning in California.

I went to the Kunstraum Bethanien/Kreuzberg the next morning, after a delicious breakfast at Bateau Ivre. I had a big bowl of yoghurt with pear, peach, johannisbeere, melon, banana, and mandarin orange for three euro, and then Der Franzose: a croissant, butter, baguette, some red berry jam I not only tried but enjoyed, and a milchkaffee for four. I love breakfast. The exhibit is titled Backjumps: The Live Issue #3. It was a print magazine at some point but now they have “live issues”—art shows, etc. The show was great, I am thinking now about how street art fits in or can work or does it work in a gallery context. There was a video that showed some graffiti, and some of the stuff in the video was by the same guy who did the stuff in that little alley in LA! So that was really cool to see and be able to get a name. In the bahn station on the way home, Torey and I noticed this guy standing, waiting for the same train as us. It was the same guy that had got on the bus with us that morning! And we weren’t at a major stop or anything, it was kind of an out-of-the-way place. We both get really tripped out seeing people like that.

Rachel and I decided to finally hang out, and I ran into her after class on my way to the bookstore to see if they had anything in English. We decided to check out this little bakery in the only shopping area close to campus and it was delicious and my milchkaffee came in a giant bowl. We are calling it our Newfeli. Later that evening we met up and had dinner and were just about to start some chill drinking when her corkscrew broke off in the cork. So we went downstairs because this guy Brendan from my class lives there and we were in one hall for five minutes while Rachel tried to remember which room was his and we yelled Brendan about ten times and then she thought we should try the other hall…and his door was open, first on the left. We ended up hanging out there with him and this guy from Humboldt (the California one) who is what you would picture from a person at Humboldt, but really cocky that he goes there, which might seem odd. I was the only person at the Osdorfer Straße S-Bahn, and the only person on my train car. It was creepy but also would have been fun in certain situations.

For our second class excursion, we went to the zoo! The first animals through the door were alpacas, which was just terribly amusing to me given my recent preoccupation with llamas, alpacas, and all things Peruvian or Erics in Peru. There were also elephants. One elephant was standing with its back to the ‘audience’ and people were gathering and then it: 1. Shat. 2. Peed. 3. The baby stuck its trunk up to the other ones bum. 4. Baby puts a piece of fresh poo on head and looks terribly pleased with itself. Then tapirs, which I got to see in a zoo, and Eric missed out on in the Amazon, a deer type thing that stood so still I thought it was a statue at first, and a panda that acted like a fat old man. There was a pack of beautiful white wolves that just kept trotting in circles and every now and then one would stop and look at the people behind the plexiglass and it was just heartbreaking. They shouldn’t be in such a small space. After the wolves I managed to forget the depressing side of zoos by watching a brown bear scratch its back on a tree and then the sea lions. I love sea lions, they are the happiest animals in the zoo. The penguins all just stood there staring at the fake rock wall, and then one scratched its head with its foot, wings out for balance, which was really cute and surprising.

The Pergamon museum is very impressive. You buy your ticket, get it ripped, walk into the exhibit hall, and BAM. The Pergamon altar. Holy god is that thing huge, and powerful, and just…wow. It is difficult to process that it is there, so close. It seems like they like sneaking things up on you there. You walk through the Ishtar Gate at one point and then turn around to realize its huge and blue and covered in lions, and then the glory of the processional way does not hit you until you are all the way at the other end of the hall. The Pergamon also had statues of or with dogs, which makes me happy. One was likely commissioned by a Roman family as a memorial for the family dog. He is scratching his head with his back leg in the statue, and his mouth is open, and he looks so dog-y. Good job, unknown sculptor.

The Berkeley people had an exciting trip to Weimar last weekend. Torey and I bought vodka/wine for the four hour bus drive, but decided the whole situation was so sad that drinking would really not help. We had six girls in our room at the hostel, and then an extra bed. A knock on the door introduced Cz1ois;>*5#gowski, this Polish guy whose name we could not pronounce even after he showed it to us on an ID. We later heard from another guy that he had asked to be in a room with girls, probably so he could walk around in his tiny, tight little boxer briefs. Poor Torey had the bunk below him and got quite a show when he heaved himself up. She and I made the decision to take the city tour in German, and we understood only one thing well: Goethe had this muse, and they wrote thousands of letters to each other, and he said something about a gingko leaf being a symbol for the merging of man and woman, and that now Weimar is obsessed with gingko trees and all products from, or inspired by, them. We then had hours to do nothing in Weimar, so we ate ice cream and bought books and read. A tour of Goethe’s house in English was given later in the afternoon by an elderly woman who seemed to think that Goethe was perhaps some incarnation of Jesus Christ, amen. A group dinner was served at 8p, Creeper drank three Long Island Iced Teas, and apparently when people went out later that night, he was doing shots at the bar while other people chilled with beer because “I thought that was what you were supposed to do at a bar.” He was practically carried back to the hostel. I was happy to stay in and sleep. We went to Buchenwald in the morning, which was sad and thought-provoking, and well, what can you really say about a concentration camp? We drowned our sorrows in more Weimarian ice cream and homework on the ride back.

Last night our new, fun Berkeley excursion was “Twelfth Night” in German on a boat that has been made into a little theater. We stopped at a strandbar before, where I talked to my mum and Chris went and bought three drinks for himself all at once. There were a lot of bugs and I was apparently the mosquito bait just like my mum, because no one else has bites. The intermission was after eleven, and some people left then, worried about being able to get back to our dorm. Torey and I were considering it, but did want to see the rest of the play. I am glad we did stay, because when Herr Euba sat down, he made crying baby noises and said in a silly little voice, “Oh no, I can’t stay, I don’t know how to get home. Waaaa!” It ended around midnight, and as we walked back we saw Chris at the bar. Euba said, “Chris, first the bar!” and Torey said, “Immer (always).” Oh, Mr. Alchypants.