Letzte Woche

Last week on Wednesday I was invited to the birthday party of a friend of a friend who is also in my yoga class. Her name is Margo and she's a Latvian cabaret singer. There's a creatively vibrant group of Latvian emigrants here in Neukoelln that includes Margo; my friend Galka, a costume designer; my friend Linards, a VJ; and a woman who designs hats and has a small hat boutique round the corner from my flat. The birthday party was at the hat shop. When I walked in there were several performances and everyone was wearing hats and I asked some guy I had just met (turned out to be the shirtless cellist later) where he had gotten his hat and it turned out there was a make-your-own-hat station!!! So I made a lovely hat which was finished just in time to take part in the hat fashion show which involved climbing up on a ladder and saying your name, the name of your hat, and explaining something about it. I said my hat was called "Nocturne in Grey and Burgundy (I hope to god I didn't accidentally use someone's scarf to make this hat)." It was a smashing success!

O the Latvians...and o Berlin.
The next night, a friend and I returned to Magnet Club (site of the awesome Mountain Goats show) to see Thao with the Get Down Stay Down. It was epic! Magnet is such a small venue, so we got right up front and sang along and danced and when it was over she came down into the audience and we met her and chatted about the Bay Area and she signed autographs for us :)


It was an epic night!
The next morning I hopped in a rideshare to head to Leverkusen and see my original German host family for the first time in 10 years...but that's a story for my next blog post.
Bis bald,
D.

Silvester & Feuerwerk

'Silvester' is how to say New Year's Eve in German. But the more important word to know for this particular holiday is 'Feuerwerk'--fireworks!!!
Apparently everyone and their grandma has piles of fireworks and starting Christmas Eve and continuing through to New Year's Day, they set them off in the streets, off their balconys, in the middle of tram tracks and wherever else they goddamn please at all hours of the day and night.
This means that we were treated not only to our own personal fireworks show with big pretty explosions right off our balcony, but also to periodic (and ever-more-frequent) loud and ominous bangs echoing through the neighborhood for a week straight.
I'd been told that NYE itself is like a warzone--crazy drunk people wandering the streets with armfuls of fireworks and firing them off at passers-by, fireworks landing on one's head from the balconies and roofs above, etc. This proved true when, walking to the bus station to head to our house party of choice, two drunk men pointed fireworks directly at us and some innocent women nearby. When we yelled, they retreated down the street a bit, only to fire distance missiles at us, one nearly hitting one of the other women. It was nuts!
At the party, we watched from a top floor balcony as the entire skyline burst into life at midnight. The noise was cacophonus. Fireworks were everywhere. It was beautiful...even, dare I say, magical. Soon someone thrust 'fireworks' that looked suspiciously like dynamite into our hands and we tossed them into the street with wild abandon. Just like the locals!
Later we trekked through the snow to a big party at the Neukölln Brauerei. Having paid 5eur to get in we were pretty disappointed when the music and dancefloors kinda sucked. But we found a display of free tropical fruit and decided it would all be worth it if we each stole 5eur worth of fruit. That's how I ended up walking home with two pineapples stuffed down the front of my jacket and how some poor sap who made the mistake of pelting Josh with a snowball got a pear thrown at him in return (Josh does not remember that happening, but I have witnesses). Also we still have a cracked honeydew melon, which came home in the hood of Clayton's jacket, nestled into our balcony snow.
I didn't take many photos but here's a sampling.
Clayton pulled our magnum out of the balcony snowdrift (see two posts ago) and popped the cork into the cold night air:

It left a champagne-shaped hole in our snow which has since been covered over:

We enjoyed posing with the magnum for various photos. My outfit was very shiny:

And here's a short video of a firework exploding right in front of our balcony:

I stand by our decision not to go to an overpriced club night...we had a really fun and crazy night for less than 10eur each!
Bis bald,
D.

noch eine Wochenende

Another weekend come and gone. How the time does fly!
Exciting news: I finally joined a gym! I kinda hurt my ankle, and I haven't been able to run for a week or so. Plus it was so dern cold last week, and it's only going to get worse, and I didn't want the weather to be an excuse for not exercising! So I joined a gym that is literally a block from the apartment. It felt really good to get back to weightlifting on Thursday morning.
On Friday was something I had been looking forward to all week: dinner at a Thai place in our neighborhood that does a 3eur buffet once a week! Eric and I and Eric's friend Christian went over there and it was really good. There was a nice minced pork dish that I really liked, but both Eric and Christian thought it was uncomfortably spicy! It didn't taste the least bit spicy to me. Hahaha.
Then we went to a place near Postdamer Platz to see a music performance Eric had heard about: the male half of Swedish duo The Knife. I like them so I thought the solo show would be cool. The venue was a neat gallery with an installation in one room. The performance space was a tiny room lined with black garbage bags. Turns out the music was basically just an incredibly loud wall of noise punctuated by various grating noises. It hurt my ears, so I went into the other room, from which I could hear it just as well but without the discomfort. It was...interesting. Josh and I headed home afterwards without bothering to stay for the second musical act.
On Saturday I did a full-body weights circuit at the gym which was fun. In the afternoon, Josh's brother Joel was putting on a protest at the Schlossplatz to decry the building of a fake Prussian castle on what is now a lovely open lawn. The slogan was "Schloss mit Lustig" or "Cancel the Castle," and they had a bouncy castle inflated on the lawn and Burger King crowns with the Schloss mit Lustig logo on them. They partnered with a group that puts on parties whose schtick is that they hand out free thrift store jackets with their logo stamped on them at events. It was cold and rainy, so I took full advantage of this and donned both a neat black blazer (under my coat) and a rain jacket with a hood (over my coat). With those and my crown I was probably quite a sight bouncing on the castle. The sun soon came out and I biked home much happier and warmer.
Later that evening was the 'soli-party', the solidarity party for the protest. It was at Betahaus, a cafe where Josh and Joel work, and the castle was set up in the courtyard. I manned the door for a while, and we had a whole bag full of nifty letter and number stamps that a friend found in an abandoned building to stamp the hands of people who paid. Not many people actually showed up, so I ended up making all sorts of words and stamping them all over myself and everyone else.
Around 5:30am we finally gave up--there were only five of us left and the DJ had gone. At this point in the evening we bestowed stamps upon ourselves that read: WiNNerS YeS! Despite a shower, that is still very much visible on my arm. Eric, Francisco, and I, the survivors, promised Joel to be back at Betahaus at 2pm to clean up, and then headed to another party on Kottbusser Damm and danced our little feetsies off. When that shut down around 8 or 9, we went to a bar and had a round of beers. There was some sketchy clientele in that place. Finally, we went out for breakfast. All the families and old people at the breakfast place, not to mention the waitresses, were scandalized by our messy, stamped, crowned appearances. We were made to sit outside on rain-dampened patio furniture, but at least we got to eat. When we finally walked through the door at noon, Josh was just on his way out to go clean. We promised to be there at 2, sat down to listen to some comedy, and the next thing I knew I was waking up at 4. We were no longer needed for cleaning.
Eric wanted to go for a run (crazy man) so I biked along with him to check out the Soviet Memorial at Treptower Park. It was massive and impressive and beautiful in the golden almost-sunset light. Behind the memorial, there's a lovely lake. It was a really pleasant trip.
In the evening I had a friend to dinner and cooked pork chops with roasted potatoes and brussel sprouts. My roommates can't believe I told them I didn't think I was a good cook when I moved in, but the truth is that I just never really tried, or had much opportunity to try. All I do is follow recipes, I don't know if that makes me a good cook. But I am really getting to enjoy cooking, and so having recently read about the Sunday Night Dinners in Queens, I got to thinking that maybe I would want to try doing something like that. My friend Celia likes food and cooking as much as I do, so we are starting our own small supper club here in Berlin! The first dinner is this coming Sunday. I'll let you know how it goes :)
Bis bald,
D.