first i take my pants off.....then i take berlin.

From BERLIN, GERMANY
May 10th, 2008

Dudes, oh dudes. (Am I allowed to say "dudes" when in Europe? Will the cool police come and get me and throw me in the loser tank for the night?) Dudes, my darling ones, mein dammen und herren, here I am safe and sound across the pond, madly typing away on a silly Euro keyboard from Berlin before catching my overnight train to Big Fat Gay Paree. Just wanted to say a few words from Germany.....
APFEL!
VERGNÜGEN!
ACHTUNG!
PFANNKUCHEN!
That's all. Goodbye.
(Most blessedly short update the Tourist has ever written! All this German efficiency must be rubbing off on me.) On second thought.........

Okay, first of all, Berlin is pretty awesome. I hadn't pictured it quite so green, and even though I'd read somewhere that the city is something like 40% green space, I had to be here to really comprehend what that means. (Hey, no one ever said I was the brightest bulb on die tannenbaum.) It means trees EVERYWHERE, stupid. Parks everywhere. And then - get this, concrete-dwelling Torontonians - trees.....that aren't even in parks. Now that's just weird. I mean, get off it already, fancy Europeans. Seriously.

The weather here is insanely good right now, so it's a prime time to enjoy all this nature and crap. I arrived what should have been completely exhausted but the sunshine managed to wake me up, miraculously. I'm about eighty days behind on sleep right now. And I only got here on Thursday.

After a fairly sleepless Tuesday night in Toronto, I took the bus to the airport from Kipling Station, which I'd never done before. There we all are, a gang of strangers on the bus platform waiting for the Airport Express, and I'm thinking, Hey, Isn't this neat!

Surely this was no ordinary TTC bus. It would be full of world travellers, both excited and sophisticated. We'd talk about our travels, share stories and advice, wish one another luck. I thought we'd, I don't know, hold hands and stare into one anothers' eyes and join in singing It's a Small World After All. I'd get lots of autographs in my yearbook, and comemmorate the experience with a new tattoo. I thought it would be beautiful.

Instead, everyone just shoved their fat asses and their suitcases on and glared at one another, like on any other bus ride. I was the only idiot who couldn't stop grinning, undaunted even by the puffy, scary man across the aisle whose face looked like it had the habit of being punched at least twice a day and who continually glared at me as though he wanted me dead.

I became (still cheerily) convinced that he was a regular user of this route for the sole purpose of robbing tourists at the airport, and promptly reported him to security as a terrorist when we arrived. Last I saw, they were punching him in the face.

I boarded the plane with my usual assortment of undeclared liquids, gels, illicit drugs and a miniature chainsaw, and some declared shampoos and things in their little see-through case, each of which airport security insisted on swabbing with some mysterious goop. Because the bottles have no labels, security woman says. What does the goop do, say I, merely curious. We have to put it on if there are no labels, she says. Yeah but, I say again, what does it DO? Then she tells me if I don't want goop next time I should buy mini travel shampoos and things instead of using my refillable blank ones. As if I couldn't have filled a Head and Shoulders bottle with something else. I explain that I don't like wasting the plastic. She looks at me like I'm a retard. I punch her in the face and run away. Problem solved!

Another thing that joined me on the plane was my arsenal of sleep thingies. I had my soft fuzzy eye mask (like a teddy bear is sitting on your face), my earplugs, my pillow, my syringe of heroin........all the things a seasoned traveller brings to conk out en route. Unfortunately, I'm also a quite accomplished insomniac, damn me, and didn't get one wink. When I did drift just to the edge of sleep, the army of screaming babies attacked. This one kid five rows behind me spent most of the trip screeching as if his mother had ripped his arms off. I was ready to suggest she do it, as having arms was obviously doing nothing for him.

And there's the broad next to me, no earplugs, no eye mask, nothing......out absolutely cold. Lucky German bitch.

I've decided that all planes should have a soundproof room on them for babies and for frat boys who want to spend flights comparing, A) How drunk they got where they were, and B) How drunk they plan on getting where they're going. And another soundproof room for me and me alone. Oh why didn't God make me deaf? Instead, he made me funky.

So I arrive in green Berlin at nine (Berlin time) the next morning, take a cab in and drop my stuff off at the hostel (which I can't check into until THREE), and spend the day wandering along the River Spree, sitting in a beach chair at a waterside bar, and napping briefly in a park full of Berliners tanning in their underwear. By the end of day one I'd developed a tan and some truly silly tan lines..... It was great. It's been upwards of 25 Celsius here every day, and the outdoor life in Berlin is glorious. Every bar has a patio, the Spree is covered in them, the parks are gorgeous (Volkspark Friedrichshain would be the biggest and best park in any other city; here it's number two or three. When I come back here after Paris I'll hit Tiergarten, the big one, which is enormous.)

So yes, The Tourist is staying in a HOSTEL. I know, I know, I'm too old for this shit. I just really wanted the experience of bedbugs and diseases caught from toilet seats. Joking. This place, East Seven Berlin, is cute and clean and looks like an IKEA catologue come to life. I did have my own private room the first night, and then switched to a dorm with five other people (mostly Germans who won't speak to me) as the singles were booked.

I was unsure how I felt about sharing a room. Everything I'd read told me this place was not a big party hostel, but still, I anticipated staid old me being woken by loud nighttime partiers stumbling home. Instead...well....reverse that. Yep. I'm the asshole.

Day two I decided to take a walking tour of the city that leaves from the hostel, expecting something kind of serious yet informative. I didn't know it would end up leading me to partyland. (Indirectly, of course).

The tour was led by Sylvia, a hot chick from Montreal who's been running tours all over the place the last ten years - she arrived in Berlin three years ago and was giving tours of it a week later. Our tiny group set out and picked up people at another hostel and in a park until it was a group of about twenty, some Yanks, some Brits, a very gorgeous Frenchman, a couple from Senegal and a gaggle of blondes from Calgary, who managed to typify everybody's idea of the obnoxious American tourist. Ah, Alberta, doing us proud as usual. They were a few of the many people I encountered who were "doing Europe" in a few weeks, which of course means two days in each place, hence hostels and pubcrawls with fellow tourists, and very little else.

Anyway, Sylvia was not only cute but very insightful and an excellent tour guide, and had a definite twisted Canadian sense of humour, which made for a few odd jokes that were lost on everyone but me and may have seriously confused the Calgarians. At one point she actually referred to Goering as "everybody's favourite Nazi"; all she said about the Huguenot museum was that she had never actually seen anyone go into it.

We saw a great many of the sights-to-see, including the Holocaust Memorial, which is quite amazing, the Brandenburg gate, Checkpoint Charlie, a piece of the Wall, and a parking lot outside an apartment complex. This particular lot is situated on top of the former site of Hitler's bunkers where he and Ava Braun and the gang spent their final days. No sign , nothing. Just a parking lot. I think the idea was that to acknowledge it would be to glorify him in some way.

Berliners have put so much thought into these things; I read that there are over 200 memorials all over the city, some big, some small, some hardly noticeable unless you know where to look. In the square where the Nazi book burning took place, there is a tiny window in the ground: you look into it and see an underground library full of empty bookshelves. Across the way, Humboldt University, whose students helped Goebbels gather the books to be destroyed, holds a used book sale out front 365 days a year by way of an apology. It's taken the almost twenty years since reunification to decide what to do about the former East German parliament; after much heated debate, they are only now tearing it down, brick by brick. The Neue Wache Memorial is quite moving and very controversial. It's stark chamber containing only a statue of a grieving mother holding the body of her son. It's also the resting place of - here's the controversial part - both an unknown German soldier and a Holocaust victim, and is dedicated to all the victims of war.

It's no wonder Berliners aren't the smiliest lot. They're being reminded every single place they go and every day that they were complicit in something unspeakably terrible. I think it's wonderful how thoroughly their stance has been to not let themselves off the hook.

A very strange note: a company recently given a contract for a preservatory substance for the Holocaust memorial turned out to be the same company that manufactured Zyclon B, the death chamber gas. When this was discovered there was a huge uproar, and the company defended themselves by saying that first of all it wasn't the current proprietors' doing, and besides, what they had done was no worse than any factory that made anything during the war and contributed to the German economy at the time, thus fuelling the war effort and the holocaust. Basically equating making Zyclon B with manufacturing toothpaste. They eventually agreed to donate their product and the work for free.

You may be wondering how all this led to dancing until six a.m., but it turns out that a walking tour is the perfect place to meet crazy British people who want to take you out on the town, among others. At the end of the tour a gang of us, including Sylvia, ended up drinking on the Spree (Caiparinhas, which I've since discovered should be called Crapperinyas for what they do to you - I met a bartender last night who thought he was doing me a big favour by giving me a really large, really strong one at the end of the night and I've been cursing his name all day).

Anyway, I joined Sylvia and the Brits, and Jean-Philippe, aforemontioned Frenchman, who really is the kind of goodlooking that can make women take their clothes off by just looking at them too long, for dinner and drinks and then dancing all night at this beautiful, hopping club on the river called Watergate. I managed to party like it was 1989 (tee hee, Berlin joke, wall coming down, get it?), dancing with the city's best party animals to an amazing DJ.....and escape with my clothes still on, breaking Jean-Philippe's mystical gaze with my SuperCold Canadian power. Yeah! Wait......am I bragging about not sleeping with gorgeous French people? Dammit! I've fucked up this trip already!

Next night was the Jamie Lidell concert (Lidell is an awesome funky singer I learned of through the ex-squeeze - he's British but now lives in Berlin), at a beautiful old venue called Admiralspalast, with Johnny Greeneyes from Chicago, another dude I met on the tour. Jamie Lidell was fantastic and absolutely wildly insane on stage, and we had a great time, despite the minor shock of Greeneyes and I sharing our ages and discovering that what was maybe supposed to be a date was transpiring between a twenty-one year-old and a thirty-two year-old. I was shocked at his youth, considering his maturity; he was blown away that he'd just met the youngest looking, coolest and most unfathomably beautiful thirty-something IN THE WORLD. What luck.

And I snuck into my hostel at six in the morning again, knocked everything over and woke everyone up. The Germans tried to gore me with their bayonets.

I've been getting by with really crap language skills: my Deutsche when I arrived consisted of "Good morning/afternoon/evening. I'm sorry, I don't speak German. I would like a glass of wine." I've since added different variations on the wine thing, and about five different ways of saying "I want". That's right, travelling the world speaking like a five year old again. GIVE ME THIS! GIVE ME THAT! I WANT BOOZE! (Okay, so I had an unorthodox childhood, what can I say?)

I had trouble at first remembering which version of "the" corresponded with which version of "a/some", ie which was masculine and which was feminine. Until I figured out the trick that "eine", which is feminine, rhymes with "vagina". So yeah. "eine vagina" - that's the extent of The Skeptical Tourist's Practical Tips on Learning German. I also think that Eine Vagina is the perfect name for the heroine of Disney's upcoming sex ed animated feature. I will provide the voices of both her and her (also German) trusty post-op tranny sidekick, "Nicht Dick".

There are ticket machines on all the streets that say "Hier Parkschein Losen" on them. Which I know is just telling you to buy your parking ticket, but I like to think it means "Park here, loser."

And the word for "tour" is "fahrt", which obviously makes me giggle. There are all kinds of fahrts here, too. Big ones; small, intimate ones; long ones; short ones; loud and rowdy ones. Again with the five year-old business! I know, I know. But can I just tell you that I saw a sign in a park the other day that said "Bitte Nicht Futtern"? Do Not Feed the Animals? Or Please Don't Fart? You choose.

I'm off now. Every now and then I have to jump up from the keyboard, grab one of my many passports and break into a panicked run through the streets of Berlin, in honour of my hero, Jason Bourne. (Love you, Matty D. Wish you were here.)

And now, a confession. I've written a great chunk of this email not from Berlin, but from Paris. This is the first time I've had the time and the energy (no thanks to last night's caipirinhas, the big Parisian ones) to finish saying all I want to say about Berlin. And don't get me started on Paris. All I'll say for now is that I'm trying desperately hard to stay Skeptical. The only thing that sucks here is my choice to be inside, in an internet cafe, on a stunning and warm Paris springtime day. But goddammit, I had to stay somewhere that's close to a toilet.

A bientot, my faraway darlings,

Everybody's Favourite Sweet and Sour,


The Tourist

P.S. Post your comments, send your emails. It's always nice to know you're all not dead.