Berlin Travelang: Botsad, Council, Marijuana

With this article, we open a series of travel essays that unite such different places as Berlin, Sri Lanka, New York and others. The author tries on someone else's life, its piece lives, sometimes illegally, sometimes risking, so that, like a knife, to go through the world and see what remains on the blade. In this text, we will plunge into the street life of Berlin, where the window ajar in the toilet hints at the crime, an acoustic landscape is born from a muffin champing under the sole and screams of punk rockers in leather masks, and in the air he spills a strong and delicate aroma of marijuana.

Cabernet and Chardon

Priority Pass was opened in Vnukov-a tiny vip room at an obsolete airport-and now everyone can get there. There are leather chairs with pillows, you can eat and drink wine from paper bags: on a bag with red it is written “Cabernet”, on a package with white - “Chardonete”.

“There are few places,” says a girl with a micrort dressed in the uniform of Vnukov at the entrance, he seems even smaller due to dark blue lipstick. - Only if you slide.

We sit down to a man of about fifty-five: gray-haired, large, blue running sneakers with white soles, blue jeans, brown woolen shirt on buttons, on a shirt vertical strips, from light brown to black,-an artifact of the seventies. Ten in the morning, in front of a man are two glasses with traces of Cabern. He calls on the phone, he has a large Samsung with a bright screen.

- Roma? Listen, such information. Electric Lobzik give to Veronica Sergeevna. She will be in the know. I am in Vnukov, I'm waiting for the plane. I fly out soon.

Pause.

- Veronika Sergeevna? Good afternoon. Such information. Today Romik will come in, a jigsaw will bring you. You just take and leave it at home, I will come - I'll figure it out. Yes, in Vnukovo, I fly out soon.

Pause.

- Igor Sergeevich? Information is for you. Have you received equipment for testing? Do not understand which one? Well, I brought you the belt. Received? Okay, I am in Vnukovo, I fly out soon.

I go to the tail in the plane, there are no places left, but there is no no far and luggage. Two tall, elegantly dressed. One has a wedding ring and a checkered cape, something between a cardigan and a coat, the other has such a look as if it tasted the environment, as if her whole face are one big receptor. A mini-scandal is arranged on the move-the stewardess leaves, beaten, to look for a place for their suitcases. Sit on the left, by the window. The one with the ring says: “A shirt for fifty thousand should not crumble,” and turns to his friend “Hey, Dude”. “Dude” with a recipient face says a lot, but as if reluctant, in the middle of the flight I take out the phone, open notes and write down a raw piece of her monologue:

- She passed in the trash. I could not resolve. Her train flies downhill. She will be fired soon. She has me who did not pass anything. But she constantly writes to me: show the presentation, show the letter. It is humiliating! I was thrown into the fire, into a fire, near Sobchak, who wanted to kill me. I love my work. I went to the owner of the company. Antonio said to me: Spokukha, I look with you to events. And these people - I am confident in them to the coffin. And this one? “Well, well, sort it out, suggest,” and you leave: fuck you came here? At the same time, you know, they say that the trading ones are fucked up, freson of hell. But no, normal. Here Tamara is very good. It is necessary to solve everything through the floors. When I was raised a sign with green light, I know how the project was fucking!

Sometimes her speech is annoying, sometimes lulls, she speaks all two and a half hours of flight, takes a short break for soluble coffee, but then also speaks. I would regret if I hadn't recorded.

We sit in the wind. When they open the doors, the napkin in my hands turns into the flag of the Aerofobes army, the banner of the brigade of martyrs of uncontrolled psychophysiological reactions to a change in the height, speed and direction of the flight. It is crumbling, torn, then saturated with adrenaline, this white rag in the hands of the winner.

In Berlin it smells of hot dogs and marijuana, in the COS store a party in honor of the arrival of a new men's collection, twenty percent discounts, guests are amused by wine and cocktails, and spread snacks.

Holocaust and chocolate

Four guys behind me in line for Hamburger Bahnhof cash desks. Russians, twenty -five years old. The first says: have you turned off? The second says: you have papers. The third says: let's go to the street? The fourth turns to me with his back, and from an unclosed backpack, the line will pour a fresh and strong grass smell. A great idea before watching contemporary art: brighter, more meanings, later you remember little, a possible traumatic effect is reduced. It is even a pity that in early November there is little good here, mainly something from the category of “40 best works by Banksy”.

Today in Bahnhof exhibition of four finalists of the National Gallery Prize. Young artists, "up to forty years." I mourn the missed opportunities. I stick on the Sol Calero project, Amazonas Shopping Center. The effect of the presence inside the puppet house after the explosion of the neutron bomb: only humanoid dolls that lived here disappeared, but traces of their humanoid stay remained untouched. Manicure salon, exchanger, Salse school, travel agency, a cinema with two rows of chairs, which you constantly fall into the climax of the Latin American drama. Each space is suitable for playing and studying: on the wall inside the exchanger, photos from magazines are glued, mainly scenes by the sea, the TV in the corner repeats the same advertisement, a manicure in this salon earns more than you in a month, you have pants with three stripes, you sit and wait with your easy feeling - and even do not even understand, What was the moment when you got it cool, is it really on the course when counting the ticket prices in El Paradiso?

Amazonas Shopping Center could be called the Triumph or Danaya trading house. A salon of epilation in which only Caucasian women work. Travel agency. Hoofing. Photo studio: a drunk photographer invites you to sit in a chair with a button built into the seat. Click, lighting turns on, a head below, a little left. Metal repair, resembling an underground arms workshop in the mountains of Pakistan. Claims with audio recordings and other nature, whistling with a whistle through the funnel of online stores, megamolls, catering networks and torrent trackers through the VPN. An uniform piece of the past, the damned 90s, lost diversity, implanted memories of total poverty and banditry-a Russian man generally forgives himself manifestations of life.

In the toilet of the museum, I rub the remains of chocolate from the sole with a napkin. I am hated by tourist places: in the morning near the Chekpont Charlie, Maffin dropped in a decorated and at the same time anxious feeling of soft and slippery, as if it were inside a giant vagina. As a result, he walked for half a day, crowned with brown, shit and chocolate are especially noticeable on white Eirmax. Reality has already acquired the features of a nightmare: in the stores it seemed to me that everyone around would mow on my shoes and sniff.

The whole in brown, for the first time ended up on the Holocaust memorial - went between concrete steles in the depths of the area and into the deepening state of discomfort. I can’t say that the power of artistic impact is the same for everyone: here is a family from the father and three children, the father asks them to look out from behind steles in a checkerboard pattern, on the left-on the right, and make funny faces. Photographs.

He tried to imagine a similar building on the Lubyansk, say, square.

Near the Reichstag there were three with the flag of NODs.

In the evening, a group of young people saw a group of young people in the window of the vegan cafe at Warsauer-they arranged a rap "at the exit of the metro. When I went outside, the smell of marijuana finished across the road.

Gardens and folds

I spend a day in the Berlin Botanical Garden. I love them: I recently walked in the garden of Majorel in Marrakesh. There was a queue in Majorel, the day was hot, the seller of straw hats walked along the line-shortly before, I just bought one on Jeme-el-fn, unexpectedly bargaining in French and knocking down the price by half. Of the invisible tubes on the top of the wall around the garden, the line was irrigated with cool water, and I thought that some hallucinogen or Colombian Burundaga drug, which deprives a person of will, could mix in the water. In front of me in line were three French women, well -fed, rounded, chained in a heavy suite: they walked along Marrakesh in Wüton and Dior. In the garden itself, I found a stele in memory of Yves Saint Laran-a piece of a Roman column about a meter high-and sat next to the marble bench, which the Chinese who walked there took for the continuation of the monument. So he sat for half an hour, as if part of the monument, participating in a long photo shoot on mobile phones of the most incredible models.

The botanical garden in Berlin in the fall is signs. If you look at one of the alpine slides for a long time, then the gaze suddenly shifts and visible only signs with the names of plants, they crawl up, as if storming their own signified. The signs the size of a business card - each hill could be filled with the names of the managerial composition of the middle corporation, turning, for example, Salvia Divinorum into Tamara from trading, which I learned about in the plane two days ago, at least made of rough flattery: they say that you are strong, Tamara, albeit transient.

The sun sits over the administrative district of Steglitz-Tselredorf. Along the curbs are heaps of acorns, along the roads - crumbling oaks. Two months ago, in the Moscow Botanical Garden, I met a couple, my husband and wife: stunted, in the slopes, despite the September coolness, they walked around the garden and talked in a language unfamiliar to me; I thought it was Romanian dialect. They gathered a bark from the oaks fallen by a hurricane, and a person drove past a bicycle. There were huge glasses on it, the bicycle made a loud, deterioration sound, and the man looked like a huge dragonfly crawling along the garden path.

Yesterday, in the toilet of the vegan cafe, I took a picture of the Pissuar’s angle, an open window, a heating battery and a mop: the perfect balance of white and black, understatement, a hint of a crime. Today in the toilet of the Botshada I saw a sign written on behalf of Pissuar - and then the first photo found a place in an unconditional narrative sequence. The space equipped with man tells stories, the number of which is approximately equal to the number of folds on the bark of the fallen oak, and also floats, if you look with dilated eyes, and then a low Moldavian with his wife and a bag comes off the trunk, breaks about the knee, throws it into the bag.

In the evening I am listening to the Stories on Instagram: the disappearing folds of the world, a fading stream of evidence of life, too insignificant to keep them even on a cloud server. I grew up in an unspeakable situation of information deficit now: I saw it, I felt it - and it is difficult for me to have the idea that you can not store everything in a row, not to put signs near each bush. Therefore, I make demotivators from my photos and hang them on Facebook - as an example of a marginal story with great cultural subtext. Urinal! I would not refuse a T-shirt with such a print, but instead I buy in Pop-Ap Store near the Hackecher-Markt ultrandlin T-shirt Defend Paris, which depicts Kalash. Perhaps this store existed a day or two and tomorrow it will not become like Stories on Instagram - imagine that Tax Free did not even give me in it!

Dragdilers and emptiness

Sunday tourist banality of Berlin, which I love.

Firstly, there are no people. You go at noon along the Luxembourg rose in some post -core loneliness and understand that all these people who enraged you yesterday are mostly tourists who drove to shopping. Foam, dust.

In general, the idea of ​​stores closed on Sundays. There should be a day of rest. Walk, choose, look, compare prices, look for discounts, go from the flagship storage to the branch and vice versa, touch your things with your hands, an incredible number of things, put it off at the checkout, stand in line in the fitting room (“How much?”-“I have five”)-this is not just akin to some kind of coal prey, it is a diesel fuel of the economy. As outdated as coal production or as diesel fuel. In the future, on the streets of all cities it will be as deserted as in Berlin on Sundays.

Secondly, Mauerpark and other flea markets in Prentzlauer. Historical Market Insight: even if stores are closed on Sunday, people need to be bought. The diesel fuel of the economy should be children, despite all Lutheran ethics. Under the November rain, it is pleasant to hate rich Englishmen, because of which prices first rose in Berlin for housing, and then to everything else, as well as walking in the mud on the wasteland between the market and the stadium and watching the black autumn slurry splashes white sneakers. It smells of tobacco, in the middle of the wasteland plays a punk group of five people, each has a leather mask like a Bane mask in a “dark knight”.

Thirdly, the dragders in the Gurlitzer Park. Behind some-a group of black guys who came on great and read the Anglo-German Repord under a loud bit from a boombox, it is interesting to observe: on the one hand, their idleness is pleasant to the eye, on the other-they sincerely love what they are doing, and this is pleasant to the eye too. The obsession of the medium increases as the twilight thickens. At first you like that they pay attention to you and shout “Watsup Bro”. Then you go into the darker corner, where five or six fucked -up armor do not shout anything, but simply move your lips in your direction. Then you pass by the four energetic bro, which find out the relationship in a language that you have never heard before - by the way, I’m not sure whether it can be learned, because by ear it consists of rhythmized repetitions of one and a half dozen words. All this time in the air is the smell of such a high -quality staph that there are no doubts about the German economic model and the justice of the social structure.

Fourth, gay para. Those who came to Gerlitzer for a transparent purpose completed their plan and sit in a hug on a yoga rug. Those who walk with the child - or two. On the shoulders, by the hand, in the sling - almost never in strollers. Those who take a blond-reporter in Allo Scarf on the corner opposite the bakery interview, while the black operator takes all this on the black camera. Those who go late in the evening from Warsauer Strasse towards Berghein.

Fifthly, a tall man who overtook me near the hotel: he was dressed in a dark, earthen gamma, a rubbed leather briefcase and a jacket, cross-crusted cross-stroke on his back with a black shiny tape. I mentally applauded after him.

Sixth, an ad on the pillar:

"Found Project. The archive of unrealized artistic ideas, which the authors share for free so that others can realize them. ”

There is none of this in Moscow.

Although I think that there is no archive of ideas in Berlin. There is only an ad on the pillar.