“Daytime drinking was special. In a bar, time ceased to exist, and with it the outside world. For as long as you stayed in the pub, you felt immortal and ageless. And when you stumbled back out from twilight into raging daylight, people all around you going about their afternoon’s business, the world had a new shine to it. After all, people had been doing the same damned thing for centuries: plugging the holes in their consciousness with alcohol.”
- Ian Rankin, The Falls
Tags:daytime drinking·Ian Rankin·Rebus
I watch the homeless man walk past the screens. There are two stacked into a stainless steel frame, showing the movements of passengers along the platform via the CCTV-cameras hanging from the ceiling on either side. Children like to play around with their projected images, running back and forth in front of the screens until their phantom copies appear and disappear again and again.
The homeless man stops and stares for a second, then raises his fist and hits the top screen. It is not a violent gesture; it seems matter-of-factly. A few minutes ago he had tried to sell the homeless newspaper on my U-Bahn, friendly and nicely asking for change. I think that maybe he cannot show his contempt for the frozen faces on the train ignoring him and staring into nothingness, but the screen allows him to do so for the recycled projection of humanity inside the metal frame.
The doors of my train close and we leave.
Tags:Berlin·U-Bahn·underground
I don’t know how many bottles of beer
I have consumed while waiting for things
to get better
I dont know how much wine and whisky
and beer
mostly beer
I have consumed after
splits with women-
waiting for the phone to ring
waiting for the sound of footsteps,
and the phone to ring
waiting for the sounds of footsteps,
and the phone never rings
until much later
and the footsteps never arrive
until much later
when my stomach is coming up
out of my mouth
they arrive as fresh as spring flowers:
“what the hell have you done to yourself?
it will be 3 days before you can fuck me!”
the female is durable
she lives seven and one half years longer
than the male, and she drinks very little beer
because she knows its bad for the figure.
while we are going mad
they are out
dancing and laughing
with horney cowboys.
well, there’s beer
sacks and sacks of empty beer bottles
and when you pick one up
the bottle fall through the wet bottom
of the paper sack
rolling
clanking
spilling gray wet ash
and stale beer,
or the sacks fall over at 4 a.m.
in the morning
making the only sound in your life.
beer
rivers and seas of beer
the radio singing love songs
as the phone remains silent
and the walls stand
straight up and down
and beer is all there is.
- Beer, by Charles Bukowski
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The U-Bahn rumbles down the tracks to Nauener Platz station like a tame adult rollercoaster. Maybe it’s the perpetual luminosity in the Berlin underground that makes it so interesting to me. Outside it might be the loveliest late summer morning or the worst November evening, but once I move underground it is the same neon-lit brightness as at three in the morning on a Saturday, the same screaming beer-drunk punks, the same grey mice scurrying around between the smashed green Lech bottles on the tracks. The short ride down to Berliner Strasse feels like travelling in limbo.
Tags:Berlin·U-Bahn. underground
by Gill Davies
I just returned from a weekend in Amsterdam, where it was 18 degrees and the sun was shining and the city was glowing bright in red and brown and yellow.
I was invited to the second Spotters Weekend ever, again organized by lovely Sanne & Bart, the founders of Spotted by Locals. I was a bit apprehensive about the second round, partly because we were more people than the last time (SbL is growing, which is a good thing), partly because I thought it might be hard to replicate the magic that was the first weekend in 2012. Everyone was so enthralled and excited about the first edition that it would be hard to replicate the amazing atmosphere of the mother of all Spotters meetings, I thought.
But this year was equally magical. Again, I found myself part of a an amazing positive group of people. I went to a bookshop with a ghost cat (confirmed by the owner) to get scary books to give away to the other Spotters on Halloween; drank schnapps from at least five different cities in Europe including Pfeffi from Berlin and my preferred poison salmiakki from Helsinki; slept on the creaking ‘Flying Dutchman’, walked around autumn Amsterdam in a hungover daze, drank coffee in a theater from 1793, went to a squatted house with a large snake painted on the outside to play ping pong, fed my Dutch snack vending machine addiction, read a story about Berlin and Midsummer on a boat, listened to the Ukulele and Johnny Cash, danced to cheesy dance radio until three in the morning and fell asleep to an a capella version of ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ reverberating through the cabin over my head.
At one point I found myself standing in a squatted house in Amsterdam, hungover and tired; surrounded by a hundred amazing humans drinking beer and playing ping pong and dancing and laughing, and I could not stop smiling and thinking ‘This is so nice!’
Today it is the same as two years ago: I’m sitting here endlessly tired, adding new friends on Facebook and looking at the photos they took all the while again convinced that I was part of something tangibly good and positive.
Fellow Spotter Tiago mentioned a ‘happiness hangover’, and this is how I feel today. Well done again and thank you, Sanne and Bart. We will be back.
Tags:Amsterdam·Spotted by Locals·Spotters Weekend 2014
Next Thursday (November 6), I will be hosting the launch of the Mauerweg (Berlin Wall Trail) book of my esteemed colleagues Paul Scraton (Under A Grey Sky/Traces of a Border) and Paul Sullivan (Slow Travel Berlin). There will be stories from the Berlin Wall, beer and music and you should come.
Mauerweg: Stories From The Wall brings together two separate walks around the entire 160km length of the former Berlin Wall Trail in the shape of a pair of interlocking essays and 18 full colour photos. The emphasis throughout is on the Wall’s fascinating stories: the tragic deaths and spectacular escapes of the past, exclusive interviews with Berliners who experienced the Wall first-hand, and the various ways in which the Wall continues to shape the contemporary city.
The authors of the book will be at the Circus Hostel on Rosenthaler Platz on the 6th November to talk about their experiences of walking the Mauerweg and some of the stories they encountered along the way. Following the talk there will be live music from Ken Burke. RSVP on Facebook.
More info about the book (and an excerpt) can be found here.
Tags:25 year anniversary·Berlin·Berlin Wall·Mauerweg
Inspired by this.
And then everything is full of inconsequential ’10 things to do when..’ lists and ‘You Won’t Believe the State of this Guy’s Asshole’ posts on Buzzfeed that everyone believes to be important news and in ten years we will have lost the ability to ask strangers to take our picture as everyone is carrying selfie sticks and worries about their followers on Instagram and everyone will keep posting unrelated images with life-advise-texts in their Facebook timeline and gradually loose any media competency they ever possessed while the largest refugee number since World War II is knocking on our doors and no one wonders why it’s 24 degrees in October and instead keeps buying houses for their imagined kids like nothing is going to ever change, nothing is going to change, ever. And you wonder why I hide here behind the words of men long dead like Roth and Celine and get drunk every day?
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The Standing Stone opposite the Garda station on Townsend Street has vanished, and Molly Malone pushed up her cart to the tourist office. Maybe there are more customers here for her cockles and mussels. There are more tourist buses than before – at least as many as during Celtic Tiger times. Dublin now even has one of those obnoxious miniature road trains, shuttling Germans in Goretex from Christchurch to the Four Courts and back. ‘THE BEST TOUR IN TOWN’ is stenciled on its side. I am not sure I agree.
Above the bushes and trees in the Irishtown Nature Reserve, hundreds of crows are riding the winds coming in from Dublin Bay, barrel-rolling and playfully swooping down on each other.
Tags:Celtic Tiger·Dublin·tourists
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Tags:Isaac Asimov