Cyclists vs pedestrians

Bought a bike at the flea market and took it for a trial run to the Volkspark. Got overtaken by all other cyclists on the road, and one jogger. I haven’t ridden bikes much over the years, there seem to be some parts of my body that don’t like it. I daresay the pain will go with daily use, but I wonder can it be good for such sensitive parts to be worn sore?

The cyclists here run down pedestrians who accidentally walk or stand in the bike lanes (often a barely marked part of the pavement, so easily done), while the pedestrians retaliate by shouting abuse at any bike rider who veers into their territory. I shall have to keep a foot in both camps, so to speak.

I just finished a book by Graham Greene. At one point he (as the narrator) says that he can’t feel desire for a woman if she’s beautiful, especially if she’s intelligent too; in order to feel desire he needs to feel in some sense superior. Huh.

In 1979, no-one died.

Made my first visit to the local swimming pool today. Paid for my hour’s session and then wandered around searching in vain for the changing rooms before unexpectedly re-emerging into the foyer. The helpful man who’d taken my money knew a few words of English and personally escorted me to the changing rooms (go to the showers then go out again, along a long corridor, up a flight of stairs and along another long corridor, and Bob’s your uncle). Here I found myself alone apart from a menacing looking brassy blonde woman, possibly ex-Stasi, who was checking lockers with no small level of aggression implied in the manner she was slamming each one shut after looking in it. Having changed and found my way back to the showers, I luckily happened across the same helpful man who then directed me to the pool.

I had a good long swim, negotiated the shower and changing room, and returned to the foyer thinking I’d done well, only to discover that the turnstile through which I’d entered did not helpfully give way for those trying to exit. On the contrary it stubbornly refused to move no matter how hard one pushed. Only then did I realise that the ticket used for entry needed to be re-submitted in order to leave. My ticket, being sopping wet and at the bottom of a bin in the shower area, didn’t help matters. The helpful man was nowhere to be seen, so I fruitlessly called ‘hello’ a couple of times towards the deserted ticket office. The turnstile was fairly high but there being no room to squeeze around I decided the only option was to climb. Was halfway over and semi stuck when a head appeared in the ticket office; naturally it was the Stasi woman, and naturally I thought I was for it. She stared at me and I waved, as it somehow seemed appropriate. At which point she surprised me by smiling broadly as I managed to clamber down the other side. She turned out to be quite sweet after all, and sent me on my way with kindly words of indeterminate meaning (indeterminate to me anyway, must improve my German).

Anmeldung

Thank goodness I got here for the Indian summer so that I got to experience the beach bars before the winter sets in. It appears only now that I’ve made the move here, got myself somewhere to live and a job (of sorts), that I may have underestimated the winter. I thought it was like England, but just a wee bit colder. I wasn’t informed about the whole minus 20˚ aspect of it until I’d gone through the endless days of Kafkaesque bureaucracy that make you feel that now you can probably never, ever leave. I came for depravity and dissipation and got 5 hours queuing to register my presence at the Rathaus.

Germany in a mess

So, I’ve come to live in Berlin for a while. I managed to time my arrival with the middle of a huge economic depression and the first German comedy election; one that no-one won but everyone said they’d won. Main entertainment value came from Schröder, who behaved in a way that you see politicians succumb to disappointingly seldom, i.e. losing the plot entirely due to exhaustion, alcohol, drugs or a combination of the above.

It’s strange here; nobody has a job, neither the Osties nor the Wessies. The only notable difference between them from my point of view is that the Osties don’t tend to speak English, which when your German is still limited to ordering a beer and saying ‘not big enough’ tends to be important. That, and the fact that it’s only the old Wessies who can’t stop banging on about how much better it was in the old days.

It’s not exactly like other European capitals. It’s one of the poorest cities in the country (with people having to move to Frankfurt or Hamburg to get a job), there are relatively few old buildings because it was flattened almost as successfully as Nagasaki by the end of the war, and it’s full of all this unused space.

However, there is a Berlin vibe. The anything goes vibe. They hold tenaciously to their tradition of freedom and tolerance and avant garde weirdness, passed down from the decadent 20s into the wild drug-sodden 70s and onward. This often seems to manifest itself in a need to be able to be naked at any time or place no matter the temperature, but is still undoubtedly a good thing.

Most people here bemoan Berlin’s current economic fate; others see it as a unique chance to exist in a place as yet relatively untainted by global capital’s smelly breath.