To Berlin and back

So, I got back this Monday after being in Germany for about a week. I started writing this when I got back, but school got in the way so I couldn’t post it until now.

I left Stockholm on Tuesday last week. The day before that, I had gone on a 9 hour unplanned detour to Linköping to get my passport, which I had somehow forgotten to bring when I went home for the holidays. I had to get up at 3am, so when I finally arrived in Berlin and went out with my friend Sofia during the evening, I had slept in the same clothes and make-up 4 times. The first time was between 10pm – 3 am, because I couldn’t be bothered to change into pyjamas, the second time was on the bus to the airport, the third on the air plane, and the forth while napping in the hostel room. Sofia and I ended up on the same plane; she slept with her head against the seat in front of her like a slouched beanbag, I slept sitting up with my mouth hanging open in what must have been a very intellectual pose. The flight was just over an hour, and I occasionally woke and heard a guy laugh at our charming poses and I think he might have taken photos of it, although I sure hope not.

I got off at Ostkreutz and walked all the way to the hostel in Möckenbrücke. It took roughly 1 and a half hour, which was fine because I didn’t bring any luggage, just the clothes I had on and a backpack with essentials. Just walking in Berlin is pretty exciting to me. The city definitely has a sort of personality, with it’s mixture of run-down houses, the rivers and the quickly expanded subway- and train networks, and of course the street art that covers everything. I was told that shop owners often spray-painted their shops themselves to avoid vandals scrawling all over them. Anyhow, I checked in to the hostel and took it pretty easy, went to the mall KaDeWa and bought a really nice new bra, then met up with Sofia for dinner and beers later. I think I went to bed around 1 am, which was one of the earliest nights during this trip.

The next day I met up with Camilla at the train station. I think I got up around 7am, but her luggage was lost so she was delayed. I ended up buying a completely new outfit at Vero Moda while I waited. When she arrived we went off to Freidrichstrasse and walked down to Checkpoint Charlie. I had forgotten to print out my train ticket so we once again had a detour to a hotel who were kind enough to let us print it; I think they might have thought we were guests at the hotel. We walked around in the LaFayette galleria and looked at designer clothes we could never afford. One store had a discount on Armani clothes, and among them was a dress that used to cost 2.500 euro that was now lowered to 250 euro. Insane, but still too much for us to buy it.

Our train to Leipzig was delayed so we hung around the Berlin hbf for a while. It was freezing. I bought 5 twix for 2 euro in a shop, which was great. I usually hide away chocolate when I go to visit people in case their food habits doesn’t correspond with mine. I’m irrationally afraid of being hungry for long periods of time. When we got on the train we annoyed everyone by being hyper, and we watched an episode of Sex and the City on Camilla’s laptop which meant they had to endure my laughter. I don’t know anyone who laughs as much out loud at TV and movies as I do. We put tiny hats on our hands and drew faces on them. Her boyfriend picked us up when we arrived and drove us to their apartment. When we made pizza, he got the task of chopping onions and insisted that it was quicker and more effective to put them in a blender… they turned out very liquid, but the pizzas were still alright.We had a chill-out night and watched Easy A and some Simpsons and fired some fireworks.

The next day, we didn’t get up until after 1 pm. I woke up a bit earlier (maybe around 10) and tried watching child shows in German on the TV while eating a bar of my emergency chocolate… which was well-needed since we didn’t eat until 3pm. We got most of the shopping for New Years done and went to a bowling bar nearby. We ended up staying up until 5am and I got to play a pretty cool tv-game called Heavy Rain. I also found out that candy wrap sticks to me.

We got up at 10 am the next day, and this was the start of my very sleep-deprived weekend. We had to get some more shopping done before the New Years party. For some reason every single shop seemed to sell fireworks, even a clothing chain that we visited. The guests arrived around 8pm. Me and another dude was apparently the only singles at the party (it was a rather small, personal pre-party before we went out) which caused a pretty awkward matchmaking. The guy knew about it; I didn’t until my friend told me halfway through the night. I thought it was pretty weird. She told me he had asked her to send him pictures of me before we met and that he specifically wanted a Swedish girlfriend… I’m not really sure what they expected to happen since we didn’t get a chance to talk much and I was going back to Berlin the next day. He was also like 15 years older than me and I don’t think we had any common interests. We stopped partying around 6 am, and since my train left during the morning I decided to not go to sleep.

I slept a bit during the 1½ hour train ride, then I went to the DDR museum. Maybe it was because I was still slightly drunk, or maybe because I’m not really a museum kind of person, but I didn’t see what was so great about it to be honest. Since it was the day after New Years, a lot of the shops were closed. I went to the hostel and tried to get some sleep, but ended up not getting much anyway and heading off to KaDeWa, which I had visited the first day. When I got back I decided that I really wanted to go to an alternative bar crawl, and since this was the last night I could to that I decided to get over my sleepiness and go out.  I didn’t think I would stay the whole night, but I ended up going to 7 bars and not falling asleep until 6 am. It was a fun, weird night. I ordered a drink called Absolute Love, but the waitress misheard me and handed me an absynth instead. I’ve never drunken absinthe before. We were to a bar owned by one of the Rammstein members (The last cathedral), which had awesome decorations and music but not so much dance floor. Another memorable bar was the ping-pong bar, which just consisted of an factory like room with only a ping-pong table in the middle and a bar next to it where you could buy drinks and rent rackets. A continuous game of circle ping-pong was played with 30-some people while some jazzy chill-out music played in the background. One of the girls I met there suddenly threw herself at the tour guide and made out with him. I couldn’t decide whether I thought he had the best job ever or the worst. I sneaked off when I started to feel a bit too drunk/nauseous and somehow ended up on the wrong station when the subway had stopped going, and ended up catching a cab for my last money. I almost didn’t remember the name of where I was going, which would’ve been bad, but then something triggered my memory and I could recite the whole address.

Sadly I don’t have any photos from the evening (couldn’t be bothered to bring my huge camera with me). :p

Check-out time was at 11am, so that’s when I got up. I was completely hung-over and could almost not make it to the spot where Sofia and I was going to meet up. I pulled myself together and we went to a pretty good vegetarian lunch place and then to a flea market. We decided to meet up for drinks later when I had gotten some sleep, so I went back to the hostel and lay pathetically in bed between 5-8pm. I met up with Sofia and some of her friends, but decided to go for soda instead of drinks, because three nights of drinking and partying is just what my body can take. I’m glad I managed to get out of bed though. We talked about politics and gossiped about a former roomie and talked shit about the other one and about the bike thefts and accidents we had together back in Linköping. Fuuun times. I told myself I’d go home around midnight, but I ended up staying until 1:30am. I was already sleep deprived, so what’s one more night of little sleep going to hurt? I had to get up around 5:30 the next day to catch my plane home.

I bought 2 litres of tequila and rum at the airport for roughly 30 euros. If I had bought it in Sweden it would have been maybe double that price. I was travelling with Ryan Air and hadn’t checked in any luggage, and I was already carrying a tube of art posters, so I was a bit nervous that the crew would tell me that I couldn’t bring that much on board. I overheard a guy telling his friend that the pilot had told him to stuff the things he bought in the tax-free inside his luggage. I only had a back-pack and it was already stuffed to the breaking point with things, so that wasn’t really an option for me. Somehow I managed to hang my jacket on top of the tube, which then hung in a way so it covered the bags with tax-free stuff. They didn’t stop me, and I don’t know it they would’ve cared, but I’m very happy I didn’t have to pay an extra 35 euros for all that stuff. It probably looked a bit suspicious though.

So, that was it! There’s a lot of details that I haven’t written about, but this is almost 2000 words long, so I think I will stop there. I stayed at http://www.grandhostel-berlin.de/ , which lies just a bit outside the city but is just a few minutes away from a subway stop. It was very clean, cheap and friendly with beer for just 1 euro during happy hour, so I definitely recommend it.

The pub crawl was hosted by http://www.alternativeberlin.com/ (it’s the 666 anti-pub crawl). Also recommended!

Plz 2 not B performing fallatio on me on the dance floor

… yeah on the dance floor (that was hummed in the tune of “Too sexy” in my head).
Karma, sweet karma.

I wrote some week ago about how I find my old friends from high school increasingly embarrassing when we go out. I also wrote a few entries back that I’d make a post with the theme “dancing habits”. How does these two things correlate? Bear with me a while…

Well. Just after I turned 18 and started going out to clubs, I mostly went out with my “gang” from school. Because of our young age and tight economy, we couldn’t get in to the really pretentious places. Then, as we graduated and got a tid bit older and more accustomed to the Stockholmian nightlife, my friends started to want to go to the fancier places with more expensive drinks, snarkier crowd photographers, creepier guys with more grease in their hair, and more famous DJ:s that still played music I disliked just as much as in the previous places.

I’ve never been much of a dancer. I occasionally enjoy jumping around and being silly I’m in good company. I’ve never claimed to be good at it (actually have been told several time that I’m not), and to be honest I’ve never really seen any beauty in club dancing anyhow. I just enjoy jumping around and having fun, and that’s about it. For some of my friends though, dancing could lead to free drinks and a place in the VIP room.

Here’s the thing: I’m kind of a nerd, and in a nerdy fashion I’m relatively awkward when it comes to body contact. I don’t really mind it, I just don’t often initate it casually unless I feel that I have to, or if I’m really drunk. With some people, whom I known well and like, I can casually pat them, poke them and hit them randomly and this is pretty much my most genuine form of physical affection.

Back to the dance floor:
You know how, when most people go out, they dance by shuffling their feet in different directions, moving their shoulders up and down, shifting the weight of their hips? … yeah, these friends I’m talking about don’t do that anymore. At some point, one of them decided that the hip, new cool thing was to dance like the girls in the most sexistic R&B music videos. Every time I’d go out with them, every 5th minute at least, this girl would either sneak up behind me and do an interpretive dance depicting bum sex, or simulate going down on me by either grinding her  bum against my pelvis area or slithering down my body until her head was roughly at the same spot as my female parts.

When she first started doing this, my reaction was pretty much like this: “HEY YOU HETEROSEXUAL SCHOOLMATE WHOM  I RARELY EVEN HUG. I’M SORRY TO DISAPPOINT BUT I DON’T REALLY HAVE A PENIS DOWN THERE, YOU KNOW, SO YOUR ATTEMPT TO SEX ME UP RIGHT HERE ON THE FLOOR IS GOING TO BE FRUITLESS. ALSO, I’M FEELING A BIT UNCOMFORTABLE WITH THIS.”
Apparentlyshe found this to be hilarious. So hilarious, in fact, that she made a point of doing it more often just to annoy me. I decided that since shoo-ing her off didn’t work, and there aren’t a lot of places to hide on a dance floor, I’d just freeze up every time she came near. Every time she wanted to play “J’s got an invisible penis”, I’d lower my eyebrows, pout, and simply not move. This tactic was reasonably successful.

Fast-forward a year. My friend with an affinity for sensual interpretive dancing has moved on to even fancier clubs, and there’s no scarcity of people with real penises and an appreciation for her, uhm, art, that  wants to dance with her.  I don’t mind her dance as long as she doesn’t do it on me and jokes aside, I get that we’re just from very different social circles and cultures, and in some scenes with some people, there’s people who actually appreciate the beauty of it and not just for sensual reasons. I can’t lie and say that I think it looks good, or that I wouldn’t feel extremely dirty if was forced to do it myself; but bear in mind that this is also true for a) being on reality TV, b) singing any of the winner songs from Eurovision on kareoke, c) wearing crocs.

Now, I’ve never been forced by someone to wear crocs, and never has a person taken a croc shoe and rubbed it against my body sexily to the beat of “Sexy Bitch”. If someone did do that though, I can imagine being a bit uncomfortable and annoyed, much like I felt during my days as a human dancing pole. Now, the payoff to this rather long story might not be the best case of poetic justice out there, but it’s good enough for me. Here it goes.

Said friend has during the last 1 ½ years done some modeling and gets hired from time to time for different events. One night, she and some other girls were hired to do something at a club where some band was playing. I hadn’t heard of the band before, but it consisted of some pretty unclean-looking rockers in their late forties, maybe early fifties. The only reason I know this was because at the same night, a segment about this band was being filmed for some comedy show that runs late evenings. My friend and the other girls who were hired for the event were asked by the film team if they, during the last song in the segment, could run up on stage and just dance a bit along the band. They agreed, but since they didn’t get any time to think about it, everything was improvised. From what I’ve understood, the film team told them that if they used the footage, it would only be a short piece at the end of the show… granted, it was short, but it still made me feel that a small piece of karma had just been handed out. Why? Well, just as the show wrapped up, they showed the girls running up on stage, with the voice-over “Well, it’s clear that someone’s choreographer took the day off”, and then a slow zoom-in on my friend, the only girl on stage doing the really dirty dancing, right next the long-haired, greasy, biker-looking, sweaty, overweight and quite frankly disgusting guitarist. They kept the scene going while the credits rolled.

It aired a couple of weeks ago, and the girl in question wasn’t too pleased about it. I honestly didn’t think her dancing in the segment looked any different from the things she subjected me to, but I guess it looks less glamourous when you see yourself doing it next to some greasy, old dude, on TV.;)

* said friend will definitely figure out that I’m talking about her if she reads this. Oh well, it’s true and she knows it =.=’ 🙂