Cars, ducks, bikes and cats

This is Paul. I don't know much about him but I can tell you that the guy has a knack for finding a car that should be patented, compressed and manufactured into tiny hand-held devices that are given out to all automobile owners who live in built up areas. Paul had two clues: the name 'charlie' and a vague reference to ALDI. In Berlin for his holidays, with a morning free, the dude makes his way to Checkpoint Charlie, walks around for about half an hour and finds the car as easy as a set of keys in a back pocket. For his troubles, Paul's getting to go see Kraftwerk play in September in Wicklow. That was a competition run by the good people at Bodytonic. Now I'd like to start my own. You see I went out with my bicycle on Wednesday last. I ended up at the absinthe bar in Kreuzberg and like desert follows dinner, I got drunk. The following events have returned to me in anachronological order but at some stage I went swimming in the lake near Wedding, drank 8cent beers in Alexander Square, took a dance class, broke and then fixed my ankle, passed out twice on a park bench, had a quick row with my girlfriend – I lost badly – and then somehow ended up in my own bed. The bicycle didn't make it back with me but a family of ducks did. They're being cared for by my neighbour who has wild cats. I didn't know this but the two are supposed to get on really well. In some cases they even breed, giving rise to these hybrid creatures who love and hate water at the same time. Either my bicycle got bored or got picked up by some other bike, I don't know, but Berlin's a big city and when you can't remember even a quarter of your steps it's hard to retrace them. Anyway, it's a racer. It's got pink handlebars. I'm pretty sure it's the only bike in Berlin with pink handles. I would have photos but I never thought it blog-worthy until it wasn't there anymore. Anyway, Paul, maybe you're still knocking around the city, or maybe someone of Paul's ilk wants to step up to the plate, but I miss my bike and I'm prepared to pay to give it back. If anyone's got any leads, sightings or vague inclinations please let me know. I will gladly compensate you with your weight in kebabs.

Viva Polania

The poor machine had been crying out for a run. She’d yelp and moan every time I took her down to the shops or the video rental. She longed for the open road and the slow as a bicycle bullshit in the city centre was driving her nuts. There was nothing to be done about it but go on another road trip. The beginning of Poland is about an hour and a half from Berlin geographically, and about150 years psychologically. The Polish border town of Sulpice, from what we could see, was basically established to provide Germans with the four things they can’t get on their own side of the border: cheap smokes, cheap flowers, cheap haircuts and cheap hookers. Presumably German couples weekend there. The lady will get her hair done and buy a bouquet, while the man will get his balls licked in the woods. Afterwards they reconvene and smoke lots of cheap cigarettes, before driving home glad that in the EU there’s always some other fucker lower down the ladder than you.

Now the problem with living in Berlin and not having regular employment per say, is that you can never remember what date it is. The insurance on my car ran out a week ago, but sure I thought it was still the middle of July and didn’t we take off and not realise that we were driving an uninsured vehicle until we hit the border. The security was tiny, and why wouldn’t it be? The Polish government have no beef with the Germans just homosexuals and women. But the problem with arriving in Poland is that you’re immediately met with a very confusing roundabout. Get it wrong and you’re back in Germany. Get it wrong three times, pass through the border three times and eventually the border control will put down the porn and come out of their booth and start giving you shit. We swallowed the old insurance disc and pretended the NCT disc was the insurance instead. Border control asked us where we were going. We said Sulpice. He said, “Go and don’t come back.” So we did.

Did you know the Polish don’t take the Euro yet? Neither did we. So after we had a lovely plate of schnitzel and coleslaw in this roadside joint that looked like a chicken coop, we had to drink enough to bring our bill up to €20. (Otherwise we’d have got change back in pigs feet, or gold teeth or whatever currency they use in Poland.) That’s a lot of booze in Poland. Lucily, Sergei and Sasha, Linus and Pavel were on hand to help us. They were bus and truck drivers from the Ukraine. They tried to get me to pimp Bridie out. I was missing out on a fortune they told me. We were low on gas money and car insurance isn’t cheap but in the end Bridie decided against it. She had a headache. Still it’s good to know that if the whole making-it-in-Berlin thing blows up in our faces, that just an hour and a half away is the answer to all our cash flow problems.

Dead Germans

Armin and Bernd weren't good friends but they had a lot in common. They both liked to get their kicks in unconventional ways. Not content with walks in the park, social drinks or even wild nights of uninhibited sexual passion, Armin liked to have his body parts eaten and Bernd, conversely liked to eat body parts – literally not euphemistically.

They met, as many like-minded people do, on the Internet, and soon a date was set up. Skipping the usual dinner and movie staple, Armin and Bernd went straight back to Armin's where he had a room set up to suit the mood. It looked like a butcher's shop. Long story short, Armin sliced off Bernd's dick. They ate it together (it's assumed it was roasted with rosemary, but no one knows for certain) and then Armin stabbed Bernd in the neck, chopped up his remaining body parts and froze them for countless meals to come. Armin was arrested and is serving time as we speak.

Five years later and a hot 20-year-old who went looking for love on the internet winds up dead outside of Berlin and the mumbling voices start saying there's something rotten in Deutschland.

Anja was a bright young model. Michael was a 37-year-old photographer. They met online, found a common interest in vampires, and like summer follows spring, the next thing the couple were meeting up to strangle the fuck out of each other in a dirty hotel room.

Now I'm not trying to say that society has lost the run of itself or the Internet is a bad thing, or even that Germany is a bad place, but in certain cases wouldn't it be nice if couples courted for a little while, with their parents in tow, at a reasonably safe distance?

The 98almera blog strongly recommends all newcomers to this fair country to only entertain team dating for the moment.

A typical day in Berlin

Picture this: you've been out in a club till noon. You walk out onto the street. Your eyes still haven't adjusted to the light and your ears are still only picking up tsum, tsum, tsum from speakers that are a long way behind you.When all of a sudden an egg flies out of nowhere and then a head of cabbage, and after it a big bag of flour soaked in brown curry powder and vinegar.
This is the annual Berlin vegetable war fought between two neighbourhoods that used to be on either side of the wall. The West side have been kicking ass for three years in a row but this year they got pummeled by the East. The violence is limited to the soft kind and anyone who takes the war too seriously gets thrown in the river.

After that, filthy and stinking, the crowd all head along to the East Side Gallery and hang out on the river beach watching hand ball or Ricardo Villalobos who just happened to turn up to play party hits. There are grandmothers and some of the biggest gurners in the crowd and fresh pizza going around for €4.


This is just another typical day in Berlin. The girl with the pink umbrella is just seconds away from getting a water bomb full of yellow curry all over her nice black dress.

Speed, €3 noodles and my blocked sink

Speed is big news in Berlin. It's everywhere. Now speed is not a bad drug. It won't convince you that you have flying abilities or make you chew holes in your cheeks, or give you a superman complex. In that regard it's a good drug. And it would be a totally good drug if it weren't for the fact that it turns you into an unstoppable, two-headed, red-eyed consumption freak. You'll chain your way through two packets of smokes in a few hours easy, and you drink like it's last orders on the eve of the rapture. It's like a performance enhancing drug, and the performance is drinking. You don't drink smart either. You'll take slugs from anything, be it wine, shots, beer or even a half-finished bottle of poppers that happened to be closer to reach than the beer. And it doesn't stop. If the speed is specially good it might never stop. And money is no object either as speed makes you resourceful. If you can't afford any more alcohol, you'll find it. You'll do shots of cough medicine or mix cleaning products with coke. If you run out of smokes, you'll roll teabags in bible pages. It's awful. But speed, at heart, is a good drug. If it were a person, you know it would give generously to charities and never use the word 'cunt' in polite company. So when you wake up two days later and your sink looks like this and you can't remember whether it was you who puked or one of the eight other madmen you took back to drink bleach and smoke earl grey with, then you shouldn't really blame the speed, just blame the freak that it unleashed in you. Speed is your friend and deep down it means you no harm.

Order amongst pyromaniacs

Berliners have a dysfunctional attitude to the rules. You can find yourself on some dirt road in the back end of nowhere with no traffic as far as you can see, and a little queue of pedestrians will develop all waiting for the redman to go green. Smoking is illegal in bars and restaurants, yet unless you're somewhere posh, no one's going to tell you to stub your smoke out. And this is where this little piece is leading to. Berliners like to burn cars. Never mind that one in five jobs in Germany are linked to the automobile industry. Actually, come to think of it, seeing no one works in this city, maybe that's why they're doing it? But they like to burn cars, not in a Parisian manner, but in an orderly manner. They pick BMWs and Audis. And they have a map. I guess that's to stop someone burning the same car twice. Order amongst pyromaniacs: that's Berlin in three words. Incidentally my car's parked right in the centre of the tight cluster of spermy-looking tags.

Hitchhiking etiquette and Franz Ferdinand

Last weekend, we took the car down to Melt Festival. En route we had to pick up a tent and welly boots. The tent I'd had coming over was missing a pole. At night we'd have to take turns sleeping standing up to support the roof. We found a tent but no boots (This will become important later).

I've written a couple of articles on the festival on www.bodytonicmusic.com, but if you don't have time to check them out it'll suffice to say, no drugs and lots of rain are not the ingredients required for a weekend of fun. The one good thing was finding a way through the partition and into the backstage area. Apologies to Franz Ferdinand for drinking all the beer from your rider, and apologies to Bonde Do Role: we're not in a band called 'gay faces'. I don't even think there is a band called the gay faces. But if I start reading about a new Brazilian 'buzz band' going under that name, I'll come looking for royalties. Apologies to Roisin Murphy too. I spilled Red Bull on her shoes.

At the end of the night, there were giant puddles separating the campers from their tents. This is when the welly boots would have come in handy. Three hours of sleep later, we went home covered in muck. We picked up two hitchhikers who broke all hitching etiquette by first talking too much, then spilling beer and then falling asleep and snoring. The weekend was so bad that, that night my girlfriend decided to split up with me.
On the plus side, one of the hitchhikers gave me ten bucks for petrol, so that's me sorted for halloumi kebabs for another week.