travelling short stops by the door

this weekend, among other things, i had to arrange the breaking of my mobile contract from home (which disabled the use of my new local SIM card until now). took me two hours since they could barely break into the system and at the Nth attempt only, so even the price was lowered. on my way there i was using the Bahn for a few stops and suddenly two people entered at the door I was standing at, and both shouted suddenly and simultaneously. the one´s pronouncement was MUSICA! while the other said FAHRKARTEN! - and in line with their announcements, the former started hitting his guitar and singing while the latter went around to check on our diligence to pay.

the rare switching of people in the zone of the Moon

almost a regular by now (this word sounds very German somehow, even in English...), have even made it to the office each day this week (ok, this is only the 3rd day yet and today i arrived in the early afternoon hours only, aber immerhin), i started to notice how uncommon my daily path to this place and back really is. i am basically travelling from kreuzberg´s core to one of the centers of what used to west berlin, so where i am switching lines each day there are only a handful of people doing the same.

this point also happens to be in the strip area, the one among several that feels like having arrived on the Moon.

fragments of a diary

2008 01 13

The first interesting experience I had when I was already in the urban area, after the three punks who stepped, or rather jumped in front of me to ask for some coins at Warschauer Str. (somehow not being able to see that I had three bags in two hands and was barely able to move my feet, let alone search for something with my hands) was seeing how a girl who was sitting at the right side of the U-Bahn bench was looking attentively at a page of words both in Turkish and German. She had “architecture,” “building,” “floor” and some more words of this kind, but almost at the bottom of the page there was also the word “patriot.”

2008 01 14

I slept unexpectedly long, which probably also has to do with the fact that rooms here in Berlin (and in all the northern countries I have been to) are not heated the way they are back home (in the flat I have been staying most often in the past four months anything more than a T-shirt could easily make you feel uncomfortably warm). Feeling somewhat dizzy from too much sleep, I immediately got out of the flat to see the center of the neighborhood (i.e. SO36) for the first time since I am really HERE – as I have to remind myself recurrently that now I am really HERE, as opposed to just visiting, something I have done four times in the past two years.

My street can be best characterized by saying that it has an ugly shop of alcoholic drinks and a loud road next to it at this end while there is a petrol station at the other end, but at least there is also a school and a sportcenter which people seem to frequent even now.

My new coat feels too elegant for this part of town.

Otherwise, I feel somewhat lonely today, but will meet people at the uni tomorrow, so this should not last long, I hope. Until then, I still have two articles to read, but since I have no internet access here, nor a TV, I seem to possess all the time in the world…I mean, I can hear everything I do.

II

I have looked at the names of the people living in this building and there are many Turkish-, Slavic- (Yugoslavic, if you allow me this anachronism since they are all post-yugos, though most probably against their will…) and German-sounding ones. If you only replaced the Turkish-sounding ones with Hungarian ones it would be like a typical block in Budapest.

III

I have brought altogether ten books with me plus twenty-two written CDs (with well over a hundred LPs), and I got myself two more books already, the German edition of the Lonely Planet guide to Berlin and Karl Schlögel’s Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit, both partly to practice my German and also to get into the Szene, broadly defined.

2008 01 15

Traveling on the Stadtbahnen above ground is one of the most pleasant experiences one can have, a construction I have only seen here in Berlin (perhaps there are some other miraculous designs like this), where you can observe everything while curving in the air around the level of the 1^st or 2^nd floor. I had to switch once when going to the Uni, and then on the way back took it (just for the fun of it originally, though this allowed me to go back to my new fav restaurant) from Zoologischer Garden to Hackescher Markt. Every station presents a new image of the city.

In the afternoon I walked across the bridge on Prinzenstrasse, past the Sommerbad von Kreuzberg for the first time and went all the way to Bergmannstrasse, the other central street of the district (it is that of SO61). Even though my eyes were really itching when I woke up this morning – must be because of the cold winds that blew into it over the past few days. I won’t mention any of the physical tiredness I have been having because of my walks, though I would not exchange the pleasant dizziness (and the goodnight sleep) one gets from being out in the cold and moving for hours…

2008 01 17

Was up till late last night, actually typing here for hours on end to rewrite my proposal at once, had some good ideas to start from but as a whole it did not yet take an “organic form” – which is not yet necessary either, not much can happen till next week in this respect either. On top of this tiredness and unpleasant dizziness with which I woke up (one should never sit in front of the screen for hours and hit the keyboard in stress!), the serious days have also just began: today we already had some discussion that turned out interesting and informative, but not too enlightening, all in all. Then we went on a longer collective and guided walking tour into the city, which was nice but we only covered some streets, partly to illustrate the regained historicism of the late decades of the GDR. The private exchange I had afterwards was worth more – and much shorter as well, so I would not have gotten somewhat frozen because of only this.

As a very kind form of goodbye, I was told that “Now you are part of it!”

2008 01 19

My first weekend is here with weak though constant rainfall, after a rather tiring, though at times very enjoyable first week – tiring mostly because it costs me much extra energy to listen to stuff in German…Yesterday we had our first party, got home rather late (or early, depending on the point of view), after some absinth and a slight bit of coffee, which makes you feel like walking slightly above ground. Questions of personal ethics, identity and love on my mind most of today, only Spiró’s Messiások seems to be able to keep me focused and away from sitting here listening to various songs since I can finally play my CDs on this compi. It did not mean to “eat” them for the past week but I just managed to fix it (manually, like in the good old days of Vidi TVs!) tonight.

2008 01 20

Past 11 p.m. again, about to finish a Hungarian book on surveys concerning historical knowledge, and it is kind of amusing (but at times, actually mostly rather annoying) that the person who conducted them does not seem to know some really basic facts of “our national” history herself (beyond the huge conceptual problems that arise from going on about it the following way: you give people three options and then complain that many choose each…) – I might even decide to explore it in more detail, if I decided I wish some stir around my name back at home (I have published reasonable stuff at truly marginal organs before, keep in mind).

Ok, she is anyway disrespected by many, so there should be no need for such attacks, plus one only tries to appear smart by dodging idiotic stuff when one is still an immature intellect and in my case, as you see ;)

the city of...

i received the three keys by post today, and a simultaneous email arrived as well which, in somewhat broken english (yes, i will write in german as well), stated that "it is the city of the folks"

an attempt at linguistic (or national/cultural?) deciphering?