Berlin Part 1 (the first 2 days) July 31st- 30th, 2006

(Margaritte)

We arrived in a fuzzy state: awaking at 2:30 am to catch our 7:30am easy Jet flight into Berlin. I was taken out of my fuzzy state by the sounds of birds chirping loud like insects. The sun was hotter and there was an ad on the metro against homophobia, showing two football players kissing. We took in our new surroundings with the ease of Brazilian music on my disc-man. Elliat was confident in Berlin; we were going to her other home, her other life with all the little secrets to reveal. She pointed at graffiti/street art that she loved, told me the direction we were going to Liebigstrasse. I started to get a taste of the German language. Berlin is spread out in large block buildings creeping with stairways and ally-ways, long Avenues with red brick bike paths.

Elliat's house X-B, a fraunen.lesben.trans (womyn, lesbian, trans) housing project, is where we were headed. Housing projects are gigantic communal apartment buildings where people can live communally for cheap. Since squatting became illegal in Berlin many former squats have been bought and not developed; the occupants pay little rent and live similarly to how they did before. The housing collective is in the process of trying to buy the building so it can be even more collectively run. To find out more info visit http://squat.net/liebig34/. When we got there we were greeted by a phone call from our friends in Leeds, Helena and Bob of the band Gene Jenet. They were considering doing our Travel Queeries theme song! Familiar British voices in a land of new. It’s funny how Britain started to feel like home.

The housing project was set up like a typical apartment building except everything was open. You walked up a flight of stairs to a hallway leading to a kitchen and toilet for that floor as well as 2 living rooms. The people living on that floor shared the communal space. Another hallway led to the bedrooms—generally large rooms with big windows overlooking picturesque European cityscape—with a big coal-burning furnace in the corner. I had already fallen for Berlin. It’s a somewhat quiet city with the rich smell of trees. Its concrete for sure but there is so much public DIY art on the concrete, it’s as if the flowers were painted in.

We headed to Schwartz Canal, a frauen.lesben.trans (womyn, lesbian and trans) wagon platz—the squatted land by the river where people live in caravans. This wagon platz is under threat of eviction. We did an interview with a womyn living at the squat when we came back to Berlin the second time. On that fresh summer day they were having a small secret café. German vegan food is rich and filling. We ate hearty bread with 6 different kinds of spreads ranging from light gray to bright yellow and tasting of curry, garlic, eggplant and beans, chocolate cake and chocolate musslie for dessert and apple juice and tea to drink. We sat down outside with a group of new friends as I was introduced to people I had been hearing about for 6 months. The new friends—happy polite faces all—came into my head with the stories I had listened to many Thursday mornings in Seattle, while waking up to conversations with Elliat.


That night we went to The Mitmoch Drag Show (by Kings of Berlin) at AHA Café in the Gay Museum. Yes, there is a Gay Museum in Berlin. We were greeted by another large building with a grand stone archway. Elliat was performing in the show so I was in charge of shooting. We brought visiting Seattle friends Savvy and Roscoe to see the performance and help with the microphone (thanks you two!). We walked up 2 flights of stairs (everything in Berlin was up a few flights of stairs) to a crowded hole-in-the-wall room of sweaty queers. The room was full of moisture and German. Elliat was whisked to the back room as soon as we walked in. I squeezed myself in-between people, completely forgetting the word for “excuse me” in German, and set up the filming equipment on top of 2 people’s heads. The show began.

There was a trans womyn doing male drag with a fake mustache on a split stage. She stripped in front of a mirror, put on a strap-on and proceeded to gyrate onto the mirror with her dildo. On the other side of the stage a womyn doing male drag with a huge sock cock covered in xmass lights punched a balloon ball sac hanging from the ceiling. There was also a bio gay man doing boy drag to a song from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, “Touch me touch me, I want to be dirty.” Then there was Elliat’s shower curtain performance “Exactamente ganow”. It was overall one of the most genderqueer cabarets I have ever seen: only what I would expect from Berlin.

The next day we had to do errands like picking up the tickets to Poland. Elliat made it fun by having us stop at an outdoor B&W photo booth to take pictures, eating dripping fresh nectarines, and later, Gelato when we were really tired. We had the Gelato by a Poseidon sculpture fountain at Alexander platz in Mitte, the city center of Berlin.

On our walk home we went past the Berlin wall. This really affected me; I did not know such strong feelings would come up. I remembered watching it fall with my parents on TV in the 80’s. It meant something to my Czech heritage family and I: watching people liberate themselves; thinking at the time that one of our greatest feats against oppression was being accomplished. I remember learning later that it just paved the way for more capitalism. I still think we need to break down boarders between each other, but I don’t think the story was painted in the most truthful way in the USA, as usual.

I thank the Berlin wall for bringing all this up in me. The wall is now covered in murals: some about the struggle, some just beautiful art pieces and some tag graffiti. There are hole pocks marking the crumbling cement. My favorite Mural is one of the more famous ones of two men kissing. I got into the middle of the street to take a picture of it. I peeked my head out one of the holes, examining the canal beyond. This made me think about oppression and land and property. I started to think of all the times in history when a wall has been erected to keep people away from each other. I thought of Dr. Seuss’s “butter battle book,” a fixture in my young life, about keeping people away from one another and making them believe others are having a better or worse life then them. I thought about Palestine and Israel and how walls are still being built today to separate people.

After puzzling over boarders all afternoon we returned to X-B for a delicious dinner with all our new Berlin friends and old Seattle friends, Katinka, Roscoe and Savvy. We all went to play our second game of Queer footy at a park near the house. The game was fun and more of a close match than last time, with all the good players. I got more confident in my playing and even tried out being goalie, while Elliat kicked butt as usual. It was so nice having a break from talking to people, connecting instead on a purely physical level. Afterward we all got club matte—the drink of Berlin, a non-sweetened carbonated matte tea drink that keeps you buzzing all night—and hung out in front of X-B.

Our first interview in Berlin was scheduled that night with Lotta, a Swedish activist friend who had lived at X-B for the past 2 years. We interviewed her in the room that she was moving out of in a week, that we would inherit when we returned. The interview went smoothly, discussing the history of X-B and how the collective was trying to buy the housing project. We went to sleep that night knowing we would be in Poland the next evening.