13 May 2010
 
Red Kreuzberg


(In West Kreuzberg. Photo Socotra)
 
It was an awful flight from Dulles. You know the drill by now. We were delayed, sardine-can packed in the back of the Lufthansa B-747 for much longer than planned.
 
It was the damned plume out of that unpronounceable volcano in Iceland, of course. The First Officer told us in English, after chatting for a while in German, it was as if the ten-lane autobahn had been compressed down to two.
 
Time aside, the indignity for a former Premier Executive-level award traveler was excruciating. The guy in front of seat 36G dropped his seat back into my lap immediately after launch. I was surrounded by students, who are used to depredation and indignity as a matter of their normal condition. The routing around the ash plume added an hour to the flight, which came in at eight hours and thirty-three minutes. Babies screamed. I retreated under the Bose headphones and gritted my teeth.
 
Still, despite the discomfort it was all right. It was good to be going over the seas again, stretching the world out a bit. Knowing that the connection was not going to be possible to Berlin added some apprehension, along with the truncated night, flying eastward into the dawn. I found that a few melatonin pills on the flight had helped me grab some shut-eye, which normally doesn’t happen.
 
I woke briefly to see the in-flight movie, which was “It’s Complicated.” I had to agree, as a general principle, and was a little unsettled when I realized that my own life resembled that of the Alec Baldwin character, and not the ultimate hero Steve Martin. As you know, I consider Alec to be a pig, a gifted one, albeit, but oh well.
 
Frankfurt was a blur, with a slick connection by Lufthansa in the re-booking onward to Berlin. I was the last seat on the aisle, and was surprised to have the cabin crew of the spotless Airbus roll out a full drink service for he 45 minute flight. I had a beer, damn whatever time of day it was.
 
My bag was the first off the baggage claim at Tegel. I found an ATM and cashed in a couple hundred Euros and was good to go. Amazing.
 
The Cabbie was fluent in English and we chatted up a storm coming into town. We passed Checkpoint Charlie (I will go back) and Hermann Goering's Air Ministry (probably not, it is the Finance Ministry now) so killed a couple requirements early. The Cabbie said that Tom Cruise had done a lot of filming around the Ministry for his film about the bomb plot that could have killed Hitler.
 
It is one of the few remaining buildings that looks anything like it did, back in the day before the Allied bombers leveled the city and the Red Army finished it off.
 
I had booked a place in West Kreuzberg, the counter-cultural heart of Berlin. I am interested in the bright graffiti-covered part of town that used to be another country.
 
The Mauer- The Wall- used to divide the district. Electronic giant Siemens had started there, but the cheap labor of East Kreuzberg had been sundered from the work, and that led to a steep decline in the neighborhood, and the arrival of squatters and hippies. Guest workers- Gasterbieters- had been imported to fill the gap. First Italians and the like, but ultimately Turks filled the nighborhood.
 
Kreuzberg was always a red part of town, and the polizei are always here in force on May Day. The locals like to burn cars and toss Molotov cocktails, though not so much since reunification- the Wende.
 
Hooking up with my local connection went without incident- the place the student exchange program arranged is really is right next door to the Armony Hotel, or maybe I should say vice versa. We are in the West, by a hundred yards, and next to a great red-brick pile of a church.
 
We buzzed first thing up to Alexandreplatz from the Ostbanhof station on the S-Bahn to get an adapter unit so I could plug to the laptop and reconnect with my world.
 
The Saturn Store is the Berlin equivalent to Radio Shack, and it was a piece of cake. To get there we passed the M-trams rolling along and an outdoor exhibition devoted to the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the DDR.
 
We slogged back and agreed to meet for dinner later. I took the lift up to the fifth floor and resolutely killed the 56 e-mail the piled up on the personal side, and a start at the fifty on the business side before it was time to venture out for dinner.
 
The suggestion was Vietnamese, a place called Viet Con, absent the last hard "g" sound, located near the Hackersher Market U-Bahn stop. It was remarkably good.
 
I had a steaming bowl of Pho with tofu- seasoned blazing hot- and some veggie spring rolls with a tall Beck's. Then the Cinema Bar for a half liter of Berliner Pilsner and some first-class people watching. Then the U-Bhan back down to Kreuzberg and a mango daiquiri on a bench, watching the people walk by. Some of them clenched bottles of beer as they strolled, which is apparently quite legal.
 
A Mohawked young man and some associates were carrying vokda in glass containers. This is a great place.
 
Slept a solid seven hours last night, so the jet lag doesn't seem that bad. Awful flight, but c'est la vie. The whole thing is a miracle that it works at all.
 
The 13th is a holiday in Berlin, and I am looking forward to seeing it right here in Red Kreuzberg.
 

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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