A love affair with Berlin (shame about the weather) put down deeper roots last week as an unexpected meeting there dragged me out of end of summer lethargy and onto a train via Cottbus bound for the drizzle splattered German capital. It was cool - I get the impression Berlin is always cool - and busy with a big-city edge as I stepped off at Lichtenburg Station into a proletarian grey concrete landscape of railway sidings, heavy industry and tower blocks, Turkish coffee shops littering the high street, off which the capital's notorious skinheads lurk. But skinheads are skinheads everywhere, so don't worry about them. September 11 just gone, from the S-Bahn I watched this plane dive-bombing into the centre of town, and it gave me a jolt, until I realised it was static, hanging from a wire, going nowhere other than its perch above the German Technical Museum. Give peace a chance, baby. Having hooked up with a couple of dodgy Moroccan space-cadets for a chunk of their country's finest ... maybe only ... export, I disappeared into East Berlin for lunch at one of the best restaurants (see photo below) from Cold War days when the eastern half of the city plus the rest of East Germany were under direct control from the Soviet Union's Kremlin citadel in Moscow. It was closed, so I got a 3 Euro hot dog on the street. Back on the western side I went to see the apes. During World war II the zoo had been bombed and so all the animals escaped and could be seen wandering through the city's rubble, a story that inspired U2 to write the song Zoo Station, and me to go vegetarian ... for a few days. There's a subtle, very Chinese joke in the name of this place (see left) and it also features in a USA Today list for 10 best restaurants in the city, which isn't a joke. It's on Kurfurstendamm Street - Kudamm for short - the heart of the former British sector in West Berlin. This division, throughout the cold war, saw the French in control of the north, and the Yanks in the southern sector, with its enormous Templehof Airfield, today serving as an emergency refugee camp. The affluence of the neighborhood is in stark contrast to the great swathes of Workers of the World Unite Stalinist architecture to the East. The shops here aren't shops, they are boutiques and sell swanky threads; Mercedes Benz has a showroom with million dollar sports cars on the pavement, next to Gucci handbags, along Kudamm, where retired spies and Arab businessmen sip coffee on cafe terraces, watching the world go by from behind newspapers. And that world going by is a multi-national, all creeds and colours festival of the common global man and woman, complete with a shed-load of sassy, leggy, urban chicks marching about. The San Franz Isco non-stop pub on Aachener Strasse is one of the city's least known, yet superlative watering holes, and, as far as I could tell, not a gay bar as the name may suggest. Barmaid friendly and as no grub is served, smoking permitted INSIDE! Yahoo! Give that lawmaker a medal. The Turkish manager appeared briefly and then disappeared smartly through a trap door set in the floor behind the Berliner beer pumps. In my bounding eagerness to get down to the boozer I forgot the camera-phone and so with the appliance of science I got this street view of the pub (see left) from Google and took a photo of it from my desk at home. Shame the drunken American from South Carolina isn't staggering out the door bellowing "Who wants to go to the Irish bar?" Karl Marx Allee is 89 metres wide and two kilometres long and the former bastion of communist bureaucracy is best seen by bike, available for hire from any number of places en route. Stop off at the Holocaust Memorial next to the Tiergarten and contemplate man's ability to systematically wipe out millions of people ... then head two hours south onto Dresden, a compact, flat and pleasant city through which the Elbe River gently meanders. Follow the water downstream - it reaches the North Sea just past Hamburg - but don't go that far, stop at Pfunds Mlokerei dairy for a glass of udder fresh milk before hitting the road once more. When in Germany always prepare for the unexpected, such as this top left - Kunststoff - message from McDonald's, the shrine of capitalism, given to us on departure, before being surrounded by gnome refugees back in the days of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. The penultimate leg was a slow boat to Wherevarova and when I stepped off onto dryish land, shoes squelching after rain, the sun beamed down flooding the Elbe valley with warmth and autumnal bliss ... then a bus home. Quite astonishing! No more than a week after I found Christ in the Rumburk Railway Station Pub, I find him today in the Green Tree Pub, just down Station Street, operated by the same Christ, namely our old friend and buddy and saviour Miroslav, valiantly working on his goatee while searching high and low for a copy of the Bible, in Czech. Every copy in Mary Magdalene's church had been nicked. Translation:- Restaurant (highly debatable as it's a hardcore boozers' pub and the only food on view was potato chips) Green Tree Proprietor Christ Miroslav This whole religious escapade appears to be a subtle ploy by the Vatican to infiltrate the morally bankrupt Czech soul via booze - an easy avenue to go down. In fact a local priest took this road to redemption so seriously that he got wasted on a daily basis, even Sundays, and was removed from his post in Budejovice (a town world famous for its Budvar beer, its name stolen by US brewer Budweiser) and packed off out here to the back of beyond, preaching each week to a flock of eleven or twelve if Kuba the Geologist gets out of bed in the morning. There's some sort of religious awakening going on so I suggest everyone puts their head inside a nearby church or temple, or whatever (mosques only let in Moslems, so don't bother there), if only for five minutes, just to check out the vibe. If it's cool, sit down, admire the masonry and have a sing song. If it's not so good then get yourself down to Miroslav's pub and contemplate God. You never know, he may be sitting close by, on his sixth beer by eleven in the morning, vole, contemplating a shot of vodka. Kumbye-ahh m'lud, kumbye-ahh, etc ... Continuing onwards and hopefully upwards with the religious theme from last time round here is an astonishing revelation that was made to me on the platform of Rumburk railway station outside the grime encrusted platform restaurant/really a pub, decor circa 1983, patronised by off-duty train drivers, ticket inspectors, signalmen, pointsmen, train-spotters and loafers, like me. All welcome; even gypsies. Translation:
Restaurant Station Rumburk Proprietor Christ Miroslav (names reversed for official reasons) Miroslav, or Miro or Mirek to his friends, is likely a long-lost-to-drink member of the Christ family who wandered into Bohemia and stayed, and 2000 years after his forefather was wandering the Levant, has ended up running a pub in the back of beyond. But he appears content with his lot and was heard yelling out of the door at Tonda staggering down the platform, "... and get us another bottle of rum from the Vietnamese grocery, you ox. I'm thirsty!" Jesus Christ Himself went though similar agitated bliss, but carried on bashing the bible regardless. So it seems does his extended family: banging on about booze as if it is the font of all knowledge and source of all sustenance, which in fact it is because Honza refers to beer (readily available anytime, anyplace, anywhere) as 'Czech bread' taken in large quantities during a traditional daily ritual much as Jesus H Christ did with bread and wine in some backstreet Jerusalem boozer all that time ago, around about the year dot. Not much has changed since. Nazdravi Jesus H Christ and Miroslav H Christ! Brothers in arms! When the missus is at work, Posh can play! Thank god for hospital night-shifts. Hurrah! A poet and I don't know it. Mind you, I did get her this (see left) Indian blanket that has been transformed into a rather fetching curtain. Prodigy finished their set at about midnight and after a spot of shopping hippy style - see Indian blanket, left, that has been transformed into a rather fetching curtain - I and several hundred others (read: elderly) bailed out of the after-party and wandered back to town where I whiled away the hours in a non-stop bar (The Czech Republic is the only European nation to have 24-hour boozing; while Poland closes at 5am and re-opens at 7am) drinking coffee, reading the newspaper and watching MTV until about 3.30am when I walked through deserted streets to the railway station, full of snoozing and snoring people lying around as if exhausted from some battle. Just outside the station, next to the Upa river, I stumbled into a lump of granite (see below) carefully wrapped in a silver sheet, and on a bench I sat contemplating its purpose for a good five minutes. In the end, with locomotives hooting a pre-dawn fanfare, I decided that it must be some sort of religious object of worship much as the Mohammedans have in Makkah with their kaaba, which they reckon dates back to the time of Adam and Eve ... for Christ's sake. Either that, or Honza the local forklift driver couldn't be bothered to take it any further and just dumped it there like some people do babies, leaving them on the doorsteps of affluent looking houses. According to Wikipedia: `The Black Stone plays an important role in the central ritual of the hajj, when pilgrims must walk seven times around the Kaaba in a counterclockwise direction. They attempt to kiss the Black Stone seven times.' Hang on ... come to think of it I reckon that explains Honza dumping the stone where he did, because he then went to the pub in his forklift, came back 4 hours, 12 beers and 6 rums later without the forklift, and spent a few more hours walking round and round the stone, forwards and backwards and sideways and in a zigzag, sometimes horizontal on the grass, catching 40 winks, waking up and mistaking the stone for his long-suffering wife, Lenka, and so in an act of apology he started kissing and fondling and slobbering over the obelisk, mysteriously wrapped up in silver like a glamorous lady or a turkey at Christmas. Inwardly warmed by the glow of religion, happy that Honza had found it, in Lenka, I fell immediately asleep on the 04.38 train and woke at the end of the line in Hradec Kralove to this disconcerting image (see left) wondering if I'd been transported back to some sort of Stasi-SS police state with Big Brother omnipotent, just as Orwell wrote.. With an eye out for Stormtrooperesque cops and grabbing coffee and croissant I sat outside as light crept into the world., making out somnambulant commuters silhouetted on the forecourt on their way to offices in Praha, and before I knew it I was asleep on an express train to Nymburk and by some miracle awoke just as we pulled into the station and jumped off and walked around for a bit in a bit of a daze and then two drunken fans of Sparta Praha football club staggered off another train, grinning sloppily, singing tunelessly, yet still standing and frolicking with victory from the night before. The railway station pub didn't seem to have changed much since the days of Gorbachev and as I sat I looked up at the wall and saw this man's face staring off into the distance, kind of over my shoulder, at the brewery where he had grown up and from which he gained inspiration for his book Cutting It Short, going by the name of Bohumil Hrabal, my hero. |
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FOTO BEDSIDE TABLERussell Shorto FOOD FOR THOUGHT
‘I don’t understand why when we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something created by nature we call it progress.’ Ed Begley Jr. * "The more I see of Humans the more I like my dog." Mark Twain * Only when the Last Tree Is Cut Down, The Last Fish Eaten, And the Last Stream Poisoned, Will Man Realize That Money Cannot be Eaten Cree Indian proverb Nb. Doesn't work in Google Chrome, no idea why not...
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