Germany - Town & Country

Three straight weeks of partying finally caught up with me in Berlin and I got sick. Sucks not being able to drink in one of the nightlife capitals of Europe but when you're on the road six months the priority is to just get better. My first night I unwisely attempted to go out and had to turn back at the door of a bar I'd traveled a half-hour to get to.

I forced myself outside the next day. The first thing I noticed was the architecture. Unusual for Europe Berlin has few old buildings. It looks like a place devoid of history (when of course it is the opposite), fashioned out of nothing by the city's brilliant unapprenticed youth. That's the second thing I noticed. The young have made it their own. They swarm the streets in their strange dark clothing, tattoo the buildings with wondrous designs, smash the half-liter beer bottles they all carry around at night onto the sidewalks (in Friedrichshain, a popular hood for this crowd, they're covered in broken glass.) Young people are everywhere, and when you see an old person they're like an uncommon oddity you had almost forgotten about.

Berlin is seldom traditional-Europe beautiful. Sure there are more civilized districts than Friedrichshain, and the parks, monuments and institutional castles proceeding west from the Brandenberg Gate are reliably lovely. But the soul of Berlin is alternative, and poor. For street art it's without rival in Europe, and a young German native of Berlin harangued me about the moral imperative to reclaim public space from advertisers. Across the facade of one Soviet-era tenement was hung a huge sign reading "Fuck Media", part of a grassroots campaign against a planned corporate development of land along the river. But there are cracks in the proletarian armor. Below this impressive, wall-sized relief I recognized the "Go Forth" slogan of Levi's current ad campaign:




I was informed it had been done by a respected Portuguese street artist. So at least one guy's "sold out." Call them cooptions or collaborations, they're inevitable - and not all bad. I think the Levi's campaign is beautifully done and this artwork a cool and inspired extension of it. It's only when money becomes too interested in a place that it loses its authenticity and so too its appeal.

On top of being sick I only had two nights in Berlin which is really a crime. I was traveling too fast - for a major city you need at least four nights. I was looking forward to London and Spain where I'd be able to slow down. But I couldn't slow down yet. I had a rendezvous.

The seed of this whole voyage was a ten day trip I took to Spain last year with two of my closest friends. I had the time of my life and saw what I'd been missing not having traveled before. On that trip in the city of Valencia I met two German girls, Mariam and Lena. Over the next year they would badger me on facebook about when I was coming to visit them and I would say 'the next time I'm in Germany.' But I doubted I'd see them again. Then this trip took shape, and so did plans to come. I would meet Mariam at the train station in Hannover and we'd catch another train to Oldenberg, where the girls grew up and Lena still lives.

I knew nothing of our plans - where I would sleep that night, what we'd do, if this was going to be worth it. Turned out we were going to Mariam's family home. It was midafternoon when we arrived at the house she grew up in outside Oldenberg. Her family were all seated at a picnic table in the back yard. They had just finished lunch and were drinking little glasses of beer or wine or juice and talking. I was given a beer and we sat down with them. They were kind enough to speak English as I don't know a word of German.

Mariam's brother and his girlfriend live nearby in a farmhouse with horses and it was decided that a jaunt was in order. We took beers and attached one of the horses to a four-person coach and then we were off with the horse's hooves clopping over the German country backroads and Lena's dog loping alongside the coach and beaming. Here's me at the reins:



I stayed there one night and was shown every courtesy. I ate a delicious meal for free at a Turkish restaurant Mariam's father has owned for thirty years. When I asked if I could do my laundry the old lady who lived with them and who seemed to occupy the dual-role of grandmother and maid simply said "give it to me" and that night I found my clothes neatly folded in a basket in my room. When I came downstairs in the morning there was a full breakfast on the table and I was sent off a little while later with an embarrassment of goods, sandwiches and fruit and candy and a glass jar of strawberry jam made from the mother's garden that I said I loved.

Mariam and her brother drove me to the train and we stopped so I could buy a bottle of California wine for their parents.

If following up a recuperative stay in a family home with a blow-out debauch had become a strategy I was sticking to it. I hugged Mariam goodbye on the station platform and thanked her once more for everything and boarded a train bound for Amsterdam.