Save the community gardens of Berlin!
Posted: October 25, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Berlin, community garden, dieoasepankow, gartenfreunde, Kleingarten, overdevelopment, pankow, photos, Ulli Maaßlos Leave a comment »
So Nadja just signed a lease on a place in Pankow.
A beautiful place with a balcony that looks out over one of the community gardens that Berlin is famous for. Nadja heaven, really.
Come to find out the community garden is 90 years old, founded in 1921.
90 freaking years!
Beautiful gardens, they are, with tangled slews of veggies, amazing flowers, old gnarled orchard trees and a crazy amount of birds that have obviously come to call this garden home now for hundreds of bird-generations, except there’s one problem. Read the rest of this entry »
Colorful night homage on my old hood and more scribbles from summer
Posted: October 24, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Berlin, culture shock, English teaching, Germany, photos Leave a comment »
Franko looked a bit rough today.
I had arrived at his office five minutes early and was walking around the block, utilizing the extra time, as I always do, for further Berlin exploration.
My first time here I discovered the Berlin Wall ran down the street, and I was excited to look around some more.
Alas, upon reaching the first corner my phone rang. Read the rest of this entry »
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Berlin Graffiti: Bald Buzzards, Boomers and humanity as a kindergarten
Posted: October 22, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: American dream, baby boomers, Berlin, economic crisis, egypt, Graffiti, photos, politics, sarcasm, satire 6 Comments »
The symbol of America’s Bald Eagle has been replaced by a Greedy Grey Buzzard, an aged vulture feeding on the already stripped carcass of the country’s dead dream.
There is no meat left for the children this winter. And that, now, world-wide. Politics aside…business is running the show anyway.
But what do I know? Who am I? If I have a cold day in hell’s chance of figuring this all out, I ain’t aware of it. It’s all very complicated.
I just notice that a few have all the apples…and the rest of us, none. Read the rest of this entry »
keys to the place
Posted: October 19, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: apartment hunting, Berlin, neukölln, neukoelln, photos, travel writing 1 Comment »
Got me the keys to the new pad.
Now I just need a lightbulb or five. And fixtures in which to screw ‘em. Not a light in the whole place…just bare wires…typical for Germany.
I was lucky the place came with a stove and a kitchens sink. In Germany, the old ’everything-but’ saying goes: you get nothing, not even the kitchen sink.
The irony of that luck is that I already have a stove and a kitchen sink. Now I am the proud owner of two sinks and two electric stoves…but all I really want is a gas stove. Read the rest of this entry »
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Scenes from a summer gone bye
Posted: October 18, 2011 Filed under: Fiction | Tags: Berlin, culture shock, disease fiction, English teaching, Germany, photos, sarcasm, satire, travel writing Leave a comment »
My afternoon student, Magdalena, was apparently some princess of Prussia. Sorry, The Princess of Prussia.
The next in line to the German throne, after her brother, were something to happen to him. If.
“Can I, with thee, talk?” my boss asked. My eyebrows raised, instantly wondering how I had fucked up. “It goes around thine single-student.”
“Sure…one moment,” I answered.
Not that I had ever fucked up, or ever gotten a complaint, at least not yet, but due to reasons concerning my nature, I always feared the worst when anyone said ‘let’s talk.’ Read the rest of this entry »
Graffiti, heartbreak and American preachers
Posted: October 16, 2011 Filed under: Eggs | Tags: Alexanderplatz, Berlin, deutsch amerikanishe beziehung, disease fiction, German American relations, Germany, Graffiti, photos, travel writing Leave a comment »
Up the cool echoing stairs from the U-bahn, pausing to lay a cigarette between my lips, to light, to inhale, to light again, and to take a long, off-work-for-the-day drag off that cigarette—basically, a nicotine sigh—I turned the corner out into the bright of daylight, walking toward Alexander Square, across which I was headed to catch my tram home.
The American voice immediately got my attention.
“Hey, thanks a lot for your patience you guys,” the voice said with naïve sincerity. Beaver Cleaver sincerity.
Patience? Berliners?
The irony of me blogging about the apartment I ended up getting…
Posted: October 13, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »
- Home sweet hole…at least with a view.
Some funny shit…life is. Turns out I got the very place I blogged about below. The place where 40 others pushed and shoved along with me to view the place…somehow, I have no friggin’ idea…I was the one they called back. That is nuts.
Yes, I am the proud renter of a place in NeuKölln…near the border to Kreuzberg…a very hip neighborhood that the trend-douchbags call Kreuz-kölln.
I just call it my ugly hole apartment…and that is probably why I got it, because half the people were scared off…and the other half were bums who would settle for such a hole but don’t have good credit…and I like it that way cause it’s cheep.
And because I’m right in the middle of endless bars and restaurants, a heavily Turkish/immigrant neighborhood, the Turkish street market along the Landwehr canal four blocks away, one of the best felafal joints ever (Sudanese Tamiya) right across the street, one of the best Asian Supermarkets only 3 U-Bahn (subway) stops away, my favorite park is only 5 blocks away, and the street is paved with cobblestones, indeed even my sidewalk.
It’s the fifth floor, no elevator, and I can’t wait to carry my fridge up those stairs.
Fuck yea.
Any given weekend (at least if the sun shines)
Posted: October 13, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Berlin, corporate free, free entertainment, Mauer park, photos, quality of life, travel writing 1 Comment »
Berliners all have their favorite park.
And any given weekend, if the weather is at all tolerable, that is where you will find them.
Well…if the weather is super nice, maybe the Strandbad, as I’ve reported before…but that, of course, is rare. This is Germany were talking. And if the weather isn’t nice, you will find them boozing it up in the club, pub, bar or Kneipe.
Sure…then there is the folks with their Ruderverein (rowing clubs,) car or motorcycle clubs, their medieval and Native American reenactment clubs, their shopping malls and their fitness centers, but such douchbags exist in every city, we’re not talking about them here. Screw them. Read the rest of this entry »
Apartment Hunting as Extreme Sport part III
Posted: October 12, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: apartment hunting, Berlin, gentrifizierung, Germany, renting, sarcasm, satire, Wohnungsbesichtigung, wohnungssuche 1 Comment »
A few weeks more than exactly a year later…
Now it’s just absurd.
At first I was annoyed…now I just laugh.
“Don’t push and shove, people. You can calmly wait until the others are finished looking and come back out…there isn’t much to see anyway!” the agent today said, shouting to the line of us waiting down two flights of stairs.
And he was right…the place was a tiny, ugly hole.
But I appreciated his honesty. Rare in a real-estate agent.
A new perspective…a new blog name
Posted: October 6, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »
SO. Yes…I’m back in ‘Heavy B’ and I’ve made a few changes in my life. Thought I’d change the blog around a bit too.
Even done got me a domain.
Nuts, right? Blame it on the finely set table of my life having its cloth pulled. Blame it on a tiny mountainous country in Southeast Asia. Blame it on a lot of things.
As silly and cliché as it sounds, my trip to Laos PDR was a life changing experience…and NO, I did not go to fuck little boys, ladyboys, prostitutes or elephants, nor did I get high and go tubing in Vang Vieng. I didn’t even go to Laos to add it to my yuppy places I’ve been; purchasing their handicrafts and enjoying their quaint ethnic traditions, while inwardly laughing at how primitive and poor they are so I could feel better about my pathetic soulless society.
No…I went to Laos to simply talk to the Lao people…and I never in my wildest dreams imagined what I ended up finding (neither did I imagine I would be hitchhiking, eating lunch with construction workers, or sleeping in strangers homes who graciously (without asking for money) took me in. Read the rest of this entry »
