Berlin Sept. ’08

Last monday morning, i was sipping my cup of coffee and looking at my feeds from the Berlin CS group and two entries stuck my mind. Since two event are well worth a trip to Berlin, I quickly decided that i would go there for the weekend.

Alexis being busy with a Aikido seminar the whole weekend, i was at the same time a good opportunity to visit Ollie, an englishman living in Berlin, that i had met a month ago at an official couchsurfing meeting. I contacted him to ask if he had a spare couch for me, and he quickly replied that yes 🙂

That done, i had quite some trouble to find a ride share to Berlin, in the end i had to take a ride to some small village one hour away from Münster… at 9 am in the morning. One of the other peeps coming with us was an assistant director for the small private theater of Münster, the Borchert theater and i had a great conversation with her during the trip. Arrived in Berlin, i went to a cafe near Hackescher Markt, to work till i can meet with Olli.

In the mean time, Ollie had organized a small meeting at Hannibals. So after going to his place to drop my stuff, talk a bit and getting the keys, i went to pick up Yosuke at hi Hotel. We went to Simon Dach Strasse to get some food, and then around 9 pm joined the other 20 couchsurfers at hannibals for a great start of the evening. Around 12 the others started to leave to a club they wanted to go to. Yosuke and I stayed a little bit longer, Panorama Bar wasn’t very far away and it was still too early to go there. In order to stay a little bit more awake i used the opportunity to get some espresso ^^

Finaly we went to Panorama Bar, due to my recent adventures with them, and since the guy we wanted to see, Ricardo Villalobos, was quite famous within the “scene”, we arrived around 1:20 am to make sure we make it in reasonably early. To my surprise, there was no line, and ten minutes later we were in the club! Luckily, he also started pretty early (2 am), and we had an absolutely great night listening to a great set, dancing till we collapsed.

The next day, I was amazingly well, probably because i didn’t drunk that much. Anyway I managed to make it to Wittenberg Platz to meet Seán. We went together to the Folsom Street Fair europe… I won’t say anything about it… if you are curious ask me privately, i want to keep this blog safe for work 😛 Obviously no picture of it either. Seán is a great guy and we had some very interesting talk.

I wanted to see the Pyronale from the Teufelsberg with some other cs’er, sadly i was ten minutes late and they had already left. I wasn’t the only one though ^^! Markus, from Bern, was also late, we went there together after getting lost in the forrest. I didn’t find the fireworks that amazing, even though they were clearly better than those in Den Hag. Maybe i’m just not a firework person.

The next day, before leaving, i had the chance of taking part in a great event: Karneval der Verpeilten. Basically the closing outdoor festival for electronic music in Berlin. Near the Hauptbahnhof. With only indictation to the actual location this great map! I was really sad i had to leave to Münster, i would have liked to see the complete event, which looked really great.

Hamburg Aug. ’08

On monday 08.11 we took the road to hamburg. I hadn’t found any couchsurfer willing to host us in Hamburg, as a matter of fact, finding hosts for two people seems relatively complicated, we where in a pinch. Luckily Jakob had proposed to host us and i must say, we had really divine conditions in Hamburg.

Jakob was staying at his mothers place, a two room flat, for the duration of Esley (?) a logic workshop he was attending to. His mother had agreed to move for the duration of our stay to her boyfriends place, so that we could use her room. They lived in a quite lively area of Hamburg not to far from the center. The first evening we ate with jakob at a persian restaurant nearby, Seisa discovered Humus, a long time favorite of mine 🙂

The next day, since we where still quite tired from the first part of our trip, we didn’t leave the house before 12. We then went straight to the harbour, took some ferry to see some part of it. After a small walk along the docks, we took the S-Bahn to Hauptbahnhof, in order to walk through the Mönckebergstrasse, the main shopping area of Hamburg. At the end of it is the Rathaus, a nice old townhall.

On the Rathausmarkt, the place in front of it, was a fair dedicated to products of south germany, we used the opportunity and ate some traditional south german dishes. We moved up north, saw the Alster and the colonnaden, which is a really nice street, a little bit like Arras. Finally we walked through the Planten un Blomen park and stopped at the Reeperbahn.

Sybille, Jakobs mother, was cooking in the evening. She did some great indian dishes, especially the bean dish was great. Niklas, one of Jakobs best friend was also there and we had a, a least for me, quite typical “politics” discussion, emphasizing on the differences of the french and german system, till early in the morning.

The next Seisa had to fly to geneva and soon after, i left for Muenster.

Berlin Aug. ’08

It’s almost too late to talk about it, but better late than never!

I was in Berlin from Wednesday 08.06 to Sunday 08.10. I had a great first evening with Katja, a good friend of mine from San Francisco who was going to Munich the next day. We ate italian on Simon-Dach-straße a very nice neighborhood of Berlin, with lots of cafee’s and restaurant, funny people walking on the streets. It was great to catch up with “San Francisco” even though it hurts as well. After that i went to some park to meet Alexis, Eric and two friends of them. We had a great time even though, since we discussed a little bit to much (i think we came back around 2 am) it messed up my plans for the morning. Originally i had planned to attend to a zazen sesion at the Fuku Gen sadly, i didn’t manage to go to any of the sesions. I spend the afternoon walking between Wedding and Prenslauer Berg, around the Gesundbrunnen. At 6:00 pm i pick up Seisa at the Tegel Airport. We had a nice evening with Matthias, and old school college of mine. This Week-End pretty much confronted me for the first time with my past. But for Alexis (4 years ago…) I hadn’t have any real contact with people I knew from highschool.

The next day turned put to be the tourist day of the week-end. We went out quite early with Seisa and we visited quite a lot of things: Hackescher Markt, Museums Insel, Unter den Linden, Brandenburger Tor, Mahnmal, Topographie des Terrors, Postdamer Platz, Bundestag, Hauptbahnhof, KDW and finally Kurfuerstendam. The evening was sadly less then stellar. We had a really nice beginning, with friends of Alexis, Marla and Philipp (the 2 housemates of Alexis) coming over, had some nice talk with them. Around 2 o’clock we decided to move out to go to some club… After a short (25 min?) line at Panorama Bar, we didn’t get in… This pretty much started the begining of a night full of frustration. We tried to go to maria am Ostbahnhof, which was closed, then took a taxi to Watergate. At Watergate we got refused again, as well as at the club next door (it was a half assed try, nobody really wanted anymore). All of this took sadly quite some time. Seeing that it was already around 5:00 we decided to leave it be and went back to bed.




Not only didn’t we got the fun we hoped for, but the late coming back home made us sleep in. To be honest, we didn’t wake up before 16:00… Which didn’t leave a lot of time to tour around the city. We managed to see a little bit of the Alexander Platz, and then had a really nice walk around Treptower Park, which i like a lot, especially the silly communist monument. In the evening, i cooked, Eric had cooked for us the last few days (it was delicious!), and i wanted to contribute my share. I stayed with the basics and did some mushrooms, chicken and rice with a sauce bechamel. Finaly we went out again, first to pick up Eric at Matthieu’s place. Matthieu was again a really strange event for me. he used to be my neighbor when i was 15-18. I hadn’t seen him since then. We finally made it at Berghain(again). The line up was (partly): Modeselektor, Ellen alllien and Sascha Funke, all from Bpitch Control, who i really wanted to see. Sadly i wasn’t the only one and a humongus line awaited us at the club. We had to wait for 2 hours before coming in (this time they let us in, i don’t want to know how frustrated i would have been if they hadn’t let us in). Basically we missed Modeselektor while in the line. Sasha Funke was playing from 4 to 8 am, so we heard quite a lot from him, even though we spend quite some time in the Berghain hall (he was playing in Panorama Bar). I was waiting for Ellen Allien, who was supposed to play at 8 (till 12). At 8:30 she still hadn’t begin, and my back as well as all the other art of my body couldn’t bear it anymore… I wasn’t the only one, Seisa and Eric agreed happily to go home as i asked them. On sunday we had barely enough time to pack before taking a ride share to Muenster.

We stayed roughly a day in Muenster, on Monday we walked around the city after having lunch with dennis, a friend of mine. It turned out that you can show the city in about 4 hours… In the early evening we left for Hamburg… but this is another story