We left Amsterdam around 2AM and drove overnight to Berlin. Everyone was in an ebullient mood, for obvious reasons. I watched Grey’s anatomy and fell asleep. I wasn’t alone in doing this. We ate Olliebollen, a heavy, raisin-filled sugared dough-ball my friend had bought for me as a sample of Amsterdam's finest food stuffs....they are delicious, and just the thing after a few hours in a coffee shop. Which is why there are so many cake stalls open around the Leidesplein in the evening I'd imagine.
Berlin is one of my happy places. I love the city. I can’t really explain why but when we arrived I breathed a sigh of relief. It’s such a cool place full of art and culture(s) and smart people. The city looks great and is steeped in history. Walking around doing nothing here is better than doing most things elsewhere. (I feel the same in Beijing too….go figure). Our hotel was on Wallstrasse and even the cheesy US Wall Street themed hotel with Stock Market figures as the corridor carpet design and a hundred dollar bill as the bedroom carpet design didn’t dampen my mood (Note also the chocolate Euros left as a welcome gift on the bed and the packet of tissues printed as dollar bills in the bottom left corner…). It was so naff I couldn't help but enjoy it and the room’s décor was Germanic in its pragmatism with kettles hidden in closets and doors with warped wood as handles. It's in a quiet corner of the city right next to a U-Bahn station so getting around the city was a doddle. I went outto dinner with friends for a while before finding myself so tired I had to come home to sleep. I did learn that there’s a German verb from the name of my home town: Coventrieren. It means to eradicate a city (Which is what the Luftwaffe did to Coventry during the Blitz in WW11). I felt vaguely pleased to know we’d been immortalized in language, even with such a negative connotation (I guess the UK version would be to Dresdenize…?). Sadly, given a day off in one of my favorite places it was all I could do not to sack out before 10PM. Shameful.
The band’s promo the next day was in Potsdam, about 40 minutes outside of Berlin. The radio station was along the street from the Potsdam film set where Marlene Deitrich used to make movies. The fake streets were still there and reminded me of the sets in California at Universal. There were some (genuine) mansions along the block that looked just like these movie-set facades and the film sets were set apart from the public suburban street only by a fence – they were very open and visible. Although judging by the state of the Streetcar on this set it’s not like the local kids seem to hold the perimeter fence in very high esteem.
Later in the day, after soundcheck, we took a walk along the East Side Gallerie. This is a section of the wall that was left in place and is now used by muralists. Behind this section of the wall is the river (Pictured from the other side—The former West—below). To escape the East one would have to scale two walls, then clear a section of barren no-mans-land under the watch of the guardtowers, and then swim across the river. I can’t imagine the desperation people must have lived with to try that. One of the saddest sights in Berlin for me is near the Reichstag. There are small crucifixes on the walls as memorials to those who died trying to cross over: they were shot, they drowned. Some of them were so young, and some of them died only a few weeks before the wall came down.
I love the architecture in Berlin. There’s such a mix of old and new and the old has such a presence and sometimes a fantastic monolithic feel in the former east. How can you not love a city where the U-Bahn stations look like this? Next door to my friend’s apartment building in Prenzlauer they are redeveloping a former mechanic’s garage that was a previously a bathhouse used exclusively by Stasi Officers. Although that’s a dreadful kind of history, how can you not be fascinated by the fact that this still exists? Maybe it’s just me but that the façade of our hotel was bullet-scarred from WWII did nothing but add to the experience of being there. The city breathes its history.
Tonight everyone’s gone to the same bar we visited in the summer when we played here before. It’s good to know places you like in cities abroad. It makes a place feel like home – which Berlin may well become one day. Certainly it has got to be one of the top places to live in Europe.
Got to Hamburg after a hazy night in Das Bus (it feels like a submarine as it’s a double-decker and all the ceilings are low. Low enough for me to keep cracking my head on) and on my way form the shower rooms at the hotel to the venue I passed a Gallery showing a Casper David Friedrich exhibition (German Romantic school). I’d tried to see his work before in Berlin but the wing of the gallery had been closed. This morning I snuck off while everyone was sleeping but got to the Gallery only to find it closed on Mondays. Same with the Chinese exhibit in the gallery across the square. Bobbins that, innit?
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