Day 27: Berlin

Monday, September 9

I am. Not as young as i used to be.
    That's tough to admit, actually. Like. I felt old when i was a teenager. I felt old in my 20s. But i remember waking up on my 30th birthday and feeling like a different person. When i was 34 and uprooted my entire life to go live in Los Angeles and pursue a dream, i said i was 17 years old. Most of the people i worked with that first summer were in their early 20s. They accepted me as one of their own.
    In the last four years, i've aged by sixty.
    I've been pushing it too hard. Even with the slow starts, only out exploring and doing things six or eight hours a day, it's still catching up with me.
    I did it for twenty-six days. On the twenty-seventh, i needed to rest.
    I didn't do fuck-all today.
    After going to bed at two last night, what with the film festival and writing out the last bit of my log after, i got up this morning around 8:30-9:00ish. I went downstairs and had breakfast, intending to scroll through my lists and figure out what i wanted to do today, but all i scrolled was the same old news feeds, for far longer than i should have.
    I was not getting energized today. It wasn't happening for me. It was raining, it felt cold outside. I've gone out and done things in the rain at other stops along the way, but i've also regretted that a few times. I decided i would hang around the hostel today and not feel bad about it. Not like when i hung around the hostel in Stockholm, which i felt tremendously guilty about, not like that. No, this hostel is actually decent and i don't mind being here.
    I figured i'd finish breakfast, go upstairs, grab the laptop, do a little planning for Paris, like getting my hostel booked, and maybe start looking ahead a little from there. I checked the weather, the rain was supposed to be done around 4, maybe 6 at the latest. I thought i could pick out a few points of interest in Berlin for later today, perhaps things close to the theater, and head out around 4 when the rain stopped.
    What happened was, i went back upstairs, and promptly fell back asleep.
    When i woke up around 1 or 2 or whenever it was, i still just laid there, fucking around on the internet on my phone.
    4:00 came and went, but by 4:30, i finally got restless enough to get up and go outside. I would just start walking toward the train station and figure it out on the way.
    A few drops of rain hit my exposed arms. Cold rain. More of it. The drizzle was still present.
    I turned around and went back to the hostel. Sat in the common room, fucking around on my phone, for a while. And then, finally. Finally. I went back upstairs, grabbed my laptop, and booked my hostel for Paris.
    I've been expecting to spend more time in Paris than other cities. I've been saying a week. But i only booked four nights, which will get me through the film festival. I think i need to hold off and decide how i'm feeling when i actually get to Paris. I'm expecting it to be a more emotional stop. There's a number of things i'm planning to do that will involve memories of Amanda. So i don't know if i'm going to want to stay there for a whole week.
    Truth be told, i'm still thinking i might just fly home after Paris.
    This whole trip has been a major bucket list item for me, but i maybe have seen enough for one go. It's also been a trial run to see if "selling everything and buying a small RV and just living on the road for the rest of my life" is a viable plan. I think the answer to that is no. And it's also been a test to see if i can do a multi-city film festival run when it's my own movie doing the rounds. To that, though, i think the answer is yes.
    Finally. Finally finally. I left the hostel and actually went to the train station. I rode out to Zoologischer Garten Station, right by the Zoo Palast theater, to get a little sightseeing in. It was 6:30. I had three hours until the movie.
    I had made an offhand comment in a video log yesterday when i arrived at the film festival that the Zoologischer Garten Station is abbreviated as "Zoo Station" on some of the screens in the metro station, and "I think U2 had a song about this place."
    Turns out i was right, this is in fact the Zoo Station U2 was talking about. But it goes deeper than that, and i could have referenced several other artists with more credibility than U2. Like the Scorpions, for instance.
    Or, for a less jokey answer, Nina Hagen.
    Zoo Station became a hub for teenage drug culture and prostitution in the 1970s. The issue came into the public eye with the publication of the book Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (We, The Children from Zoo Station), based on the true story of Christiane F., a 14-year-old prostitute and drug addict. The book was later made into a movie, which David Bowie contributed music to.
    Bowie was famously living in Berlin at this time, and spent a lot of time in this area in particular. A ten minute walk from Zoo Station, i came to Schwarzes Café, which was opened in 1978 by a radical socialist collective in the wake of the Tunix Congress. If i go much deeper into this, i'm gonna end up writing a history paper. The point is, this quickly became David Bowie's favorite spot to meet Iggy Pop for drinks.
    It's a fascinating place, it definitely has that 70s counterculture vibe, i can see why Bowie liked it. Google definitely lied to me on how much i was gonna spend here, this may be the most expensive meal i've had on the trip yet, but it was worth it. The food was very good. I'm in Berlin, so i got the wiener schnitzel, and some schnapps.

    I've also gotta mention the bathroom. Charming, peculiar, and uncomfortable in equal measures. The four urinals are wide, shallow, round bowls set into the ground, with a backsplash that goes all the way to the ceiling. There are no dividers between them, and there is a mirror on one end, so if there's a full house, you can stare at dicks to infinity. Also the one stall seemed like a space pod. I don't know how else to describe it. Sink was weird too.
    8:00, so i still need to kill another hour and a half.
    I visited the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which was commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm II in honor of his grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I, and began construction in 1891. It was bombed to shit in 1943, with only one of its five spires, the entrance, and the altar surviving. After the war, discussions on how to rebuild the church were heated, and lasted until the end of the 1950s. The idea of razing what remained and starting from scratch came up, but this was deeply unpopular with the locals, so the ruins were left alone. A new church, a weird brutalist concrete octagon with small stained-glass windows in each 1' square section, was constructed next to it on the grounds. The bombed-out husk is now referred to by Berliners as "the hollow tooth."
    The ruined church closes its gates at 6, so i was unable to go in. Perhaps i'll find the time in the next two days, since i'll be in the area again. We'll see.
    In a nearby shopping mall, there's the Clock of Flowing Time, a three-story-tall column of tubes which fill with water to indicate what time it is. A series of a dozen large flasks rise up on the left side to indicate the hour, while much smaller, flatter, disk-shaped containers go up the right, for the minutes. Every hour on the hour, the minutes side drains, which is a bit of a tourist draw, and twice a day, at 1:00, the full hour side drains, for twice the fun.
    I did see the minutes side drain at 9pm, it was kind of anticlimactic.
    The clock is an engineering marvel, though. Built in 1982, the only moving part is the pendulum, which operates the pump to bring water up the main column. Other than that, everything works by syphons and suction. The clock is accurate to within two minutes.
    Another strange clock sits outside the mall. In English, it's just referred to as "The Berlin Clock," which is not a particularly good or helpful thing to call it. It's a stack of square lights, which, if you know the algorithm it's programmed with, you can decode the time from. Some lights stand for five hours, some stand for one hour, and then there are smaller ones for minutes and seconds. Its actual name is Mengenlehreuhr, which sure doesn't look like it has "Berlin" anywhere in the name. So i ran it through Google Translate. At first i was set to "Detect Language," and Google decided this was an Indonesian word meaning "Understanding the Workload." I manually changed it to German, to reveal the true name of the device: "Set Theory Clock." Yes, this makes much more sense. The algorithm is based on set theory, i'd read that in the article. Although, i think that, of all the options on the table, "Understanding the Workload" is the best name.
    Well, it was past 9, and i'd exhausted all of the Atlas Obscura offerings in this area. So i went over to the theater, and waited for the movie to start.