Not In Bruges: Berlin, or How I Spent My Summer Vacation

For my internship, I was given two weeks off, which seems a bit silly since the internship is unpaid, and maybe I could just not come in whenever I want. But fine. For the vacation, Heather came to visit me. We still Skype, and she is maybe my best friend.

For the first week, we did little day trips around Belgium and the area. We took a train to the Belgian coast to a town called Oostende. This is where the Belgian aristocrats have their second (third? eighth?) home. It was a beautiful day and we went swimming in the sea twice (also getting kicked out of the sea twice, by some guy on a jetski who had a walkie talkie but didn’t speak much English). The water was warm and very swimmable, at least by Oregonian standards. On our way back we stopped in Brugge, which I did just to show her how horrible it was. Heather agreed that it was horrible, although we did have a very nice pasta dinner there.

Next we went north to the southern part of the Netherlands to a city called Maastricht. It was nice. The Netherlands are quite livable, what with their bikes and flawless English and tall people (so that I could buy clothes there, something I’m not really able to do in the Land o’ Hobbits that I currently live in). We got their via the famous Belgian city of Liege, which is famous for something or other but all we saw was the train station.

Anyway, the real headliner was the trip to Berlin. We had arranged with my German coworker Andy that one of his friends had accomidation for us for 2 out of the three nights we were there. Andy actually happened to be on our flight out (he goes to Berlin maybe 2 weekends a month). But for the first night we needed to get a hostel. Except that Heather informed me that she doesn’t do hostels, because she doesn’t know how awesome and cheap they are. So we got a hotel room for the first night. It was in the East part of Berlin in a neighborhood called Mitte, and the hotel was East Berlin to the core. (As a reminder, East Berlin was communist and West Berlin was capitalist.) The building was made of concrete, as pretty much every building older than 20 years in East Berlin is. The fixtures were like some kind of futuristic 60’s deco, like Star Trek meets Mad Men. It was pretty great. Two thumbs up.

Andy showed us around town. He seemed to really like showing us the city. Berlin is cheap but not dodgy. We saw the Berlin wall, the Holocaust memorial (both are quite cool) and Andy gave us a tour of West Berlin (the “lame” Berlin) for the highlights, although we didn’t get out of his car on that side.

That night we had dinner in a restaurant that had an open-air courtyard for eating. (I had a delicious plate of gormet ostrich for slightly more than a hamburger costs in Brussles.) The building was not designed to be open-air, but was “redecorated” by Allied bombs during WWII. Actually, Berlin still shows many scars of war. There are bullet holes in the Roman columns of government buildings. Neighborhoods are pockmarked with newish buildings built from the rubble standing side by side with older buildings that were somehow spared. Even the museum had entire floors missing from its original construction, and the interior stone walls show scars of bomb shrapnel.

That night we stayed at Andy’s friend’s house. It was also concrete, but he had decorated the place to make it quite livable as kind of a post-Commie chic seen around East Berlin. The next day, Heather had to work on schoolwork for awhile, so I went in search of Hansa studios.

When I visited Dublin a decade ago, I went to all of U2’s recording studios. One I entered by pretending to be part of a maintenance crew going in the front door. The receptionist was very nice as she kicked me out, and allowed me to take pictures of the platinum records on the walls (Google “U2 studios” and somewhere there is a website that shows all of the studios and their location. I gave them my photo and they put it up on their site). Another studio was open, so I went inside past a room full of amplifiers and up a flight of stairs. The engineer asked me how the hell I got in there, and I told him the door was open, and then he escorted me off of the premises (no pictures this time). The other two I was not able to get inside of. However! The recording of U2’s classic Achtung Baby (itself being rereleased this fall on its 20^th aniversary) was not started in Dublin. The first sessions were held in Berlin in a place called Hansa studios, where David Bowie and other famous people had worked before.

I googled the location and headed over via subway. When I got to there I was vaguely disappointed. It was an office-type entry with buzzers for various Hansa and non-Hansa entities. I pressed the button for the main Hansa studios. Nothing happened. It was Saturday, so I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there for a couple of minutes. As I was starting to feel a bit pathetic I began to head out just as a group of people arrived at the door. “Do you, uh, work at Hansa?” I asked them. One of them nodded his head. “Do you, uh, give tours?” He told me that there is a tour given in September, information was on the website blah blah blah. “I don’t, uh, suppose that I can see the studio?” He shook his head. It was, afterall, his place of work. “OK.” But as I was leaving, I looked at the back gate and saw the parking lot. The VERY SAME (I think) parking lot that appears in a photo in the albumn notes. So the Hansa mission was a resounding success and I can finally say that I finished what I started ten years ago. Four thumbs up!

Anyway, the rest of the trip was hanging out in Berlin with Heather and Andy and Andy’s friends and drinking beers by the river. I think the earliest we went to bed was 3am. It was a good trip. The end.

Train station at Liege, designed by George Jetson

In Maastrich

Heather makes a new friend

Sunset in Maastricht, Netherlands

Some guy. Everybody gets a status nowadays.

Hawaii, no wait, Oostende!

There was nowhere to change into swimming suits on the beach, so we used my coat to wrap around ourselves to provide some modesty. Heather was trying to discretely change when I yelled "Surprise!" and she turned around, and it ended up being a pretty good picture.

I rather like Oostende.

D'oh!

And then Heather took another one, which caught me off guard.

Brugge swans

Brugge people

Brugge building

East German Trabants. They run on a 2-cycle engine, like a weed whacker. (You have to put oil inside the gas.) When the wall came down thousands of these were discarded at the border.