Subterranean Beefworks

Peh Peh Pehlah

"Well this is going to take a long time, so you may want to get some snacks."

Twenty-three days in Munich, eighty-four days in Germany, eighty-eight days since I left home, and now I sit inside an apartment on the quiet street of Paganini Strasse, at a kitchen table listening to "Desolation Row" by Bob Dylan. To be honest, it is almost impossible to keep any kind of perspective.

It's also impossible to know where to start entries anymore, considering how much time passes between writings. But boy, you can always count on a Bob Dylan song not ending when you're trying to think.

I don't really feel like I am qualified to talk about the place I live now; I have simply not seen enough of it. And it's not so much laziness or unwillingness to "embrace a new culture," rather a penetrating feeling of discouragement brought on by seeing cups of coffee going for 11 Euros...and then seeing a lot of people happily sipping coffee. It's an expensive place, this city. Of course not everything is priced according to predicted inflation for 2050. Some friends and I found a bar tucked away on a back street that sells liters of beer for EU4.50. The drawback with that is the beer is so easy to drink, and comes in such large quantities, and it's such fun to hoist a beverage weighing more than a kilo to your lips, that you get too drunk too fast. And you end up getting sick in the downstairs bathroom of your host family's house.

Cologne - August/September 2005

But before I can say anything about where and how I currenly live, maybe I should say something about where I used to live: Schneegloeckchenweg 23, stadtteil Hoehenhaus, Cologne.

It's a really cute place. It's the kind of cute that brings parades of children down the street with decorated bikes and a little drummer, because that's just the day the children celebrate bicycle decoration. And it's the kind of cute that moves everybody else in the neighborhood to put out colored paper flowers and napkins in honor of this holiday.

My room always seemed to have a smell that was not Daniel in origin, but it was a nice, accomidating room.

Colognish Ubiquity: Friends and beer bottles.

My first cooking mess, home-made alfredo with cheesed bread, white wine in tea cups.

Life was beautifully simple in Cologne. Days consisted of going to language school until 1PM, and then...hanging out. Hanging out usually had something to do with eating turkish food, indian food, or grocery shopping for what we would be cooking for eachother at home, before settling down for a series of card games that I would either consistently lose or consistently dominate (before finishing off the night with consistent losses).

Laundry was not something I had much control over, but that doesn't explain why I look like such shit in this picture.

Surely it was the combination of simplicity, full bank accounts, and friends that made Cologne the experience that it was, but even today I feel a surprising allegiance to this city. It's groddy zones don't phase me, the foolish fashion sense of its youth doesn't offend me, and its (somewhat isolated) pockets of beauty really strike me as something special. I miss Cologne, and I can't imagine what my experience would have been like had I not spent 2 months living there.

From the Dom, looking in the direction of where I lived (east).

Fighting the Atomafia with dinosaurs.

A stylish place not to keep your food.

Before the only haircut I got since being here, and frickin' free, care of my friend's housemate.

It's better if I don't explain what or why I am fixing that.

The Mexican Doener, without question the best you will find in Cologne. Wiener Platz. My stomach just growled.

Two months that kicked unquestionable ass.

Now I live in Munich.

I bought a bike from someone recently. It has helped a lot in getting into the feel of this place, which has actually been pretty difficult from the get-go.

Side-view.

It has no discernable brand-name besides "Rocky" but for 65- Euros including lights and a shock absorber in the frame, I just couldn't pass it up.

From another angle.

Training for something.

I've been riding the hell out of it too. When I bought it, I had no choice but to ride it home, which meant guessing my way across the entire city of Munich. When you see a city from a bike, you see an entirely new beauty than what you see from the windows of a train or tram, a real visceral living beauty that you only experience in those moments just before and after almost running somebody over because you're riding illegally in a pedestrian-only zone. Since I got my bike I've been taking it on trips to the city of Dachau. One day I rode about 40 miles on my bike before dragging my sorry, sweaty ass through the door at home.

Home.

So just what is home? At the moment I am only prepared with pictures of my room.

Just having put my bags down.

Another angle.

Inhabited.

It's pretty frickin' sweet actually. The bed is warm and comfortable, the outlets are in all the right places, my couch encourages sprawling out (and doubles as a futon taboot). They don't give me much in terms of money, but the program took care of me in terms of living accomidations.

Kids.

I ran into a couple of kids the other day on a ride around the Nymphenburg castle. They were calling out to everybody who walked past them, "What's your name? What's your name?" Everybody seemed to be ignoring them, but I stopped to talk to them a bit.

"Daniel is my name, what's yours?"

We talked for a little bit about not too much. They asked where I was going and I told them I didn't quite know. The little one protested, "How can you go anywhere if you don't know where your going?" The question took me off guard initially. I told him that I was planning on figuring it out as I went along. He told me that if I kept going straight I would find their school, the place from which they were walking home. "Are you a German or a foreigner?" A foreigner, I said. "And what kind?" "I come from the United States." I replied. "Oh, did you emigrate?" "No, I am just here for a year." "Is it because you wanted to escape the floods?" "No, no. I'm here to live and work."

Two really nice kids, they were. I asked to take their picture and they were more than happy to oblige. Then we parted ways.

The future.

Gegenwart.

From there, I don't know what else to say. I drank something like 4 cups of tea during the making of this entry, and I am really antsy from all the caffine. My favorite radio station is playing some foreign adaptation of Springsteen-style rock, nobody is home, and I am looking at my empty bowl of homemade potato and carrot soup, thinking that I might fill it up with some more. There's nobody home, and there probably won't be anybody until like 2am. I have the stereo going at just the proper volume; the music is present but only as an afterthought, and yet you can still feel the bass passing gently over the inner surfaces of your ears. The light over the kitchen table is dimmed, there's some warm incandescence coming from the floor light in the far corner, and every visible window is just a sheet of thick black night-time, decorated with vague reflections of the kitchen and living room.

For those that pay attention to the site where I put my art-ass photos, I hope these 'action shots' gave you a better idea of what Germany is like for me. Maybe they say something more than a parked purple bike.

Until next time, all the best everybody.

PS: 90.25FM Muenchen is rocking the fuck out. The Doors - Awake, followed by a consistently destructive chain of simmered caramel-molasses smoke-shisha-and-get-a-shoulder-rub-style trip-hop that is filling the living room like warm fresh breath.

This station is so good it's slowing down my breathing.

Posted by Alchemae at October 23, 2005 01:31 PM