Mitt liv som Tobin

This weekend was the much-anticipated (by me) "co-op weekend" in Berlin. The idea was to get together with all of the people I know in Berlin, all of whom also happen to have lived in the Berkeley co-ops. There are surprisingly many of them: there's Xylar and Evelyn from Wilde, then I met Rebecca and Sarah on my last visit. Rebecca's roommate is also a Davis house alum, and then Sarah met another through a Burning Man group, and .. well, eventually we were up to 10 people, including +1's and +2's. Kate came along too, which worked out well, since most of the other people flaked out.


Kate and I took the train out on Friday and, in Berlin, stayed at the same hostel where I stayed last time, the Cat's Pajamas. In the morning (well, noon) on Saturday we met Xylar for a tour of the Teufelsberg (it means "Devil's Mountain"), which is an abandoned NSA listening post built on top of a giant pile of West Berlin's WW2 rubble. (It was mentioned in the New York Times recently: "Where N.S.A. Kept Watch in Cold War, Artists Now Find Refuge.") This used to be an epic Berlin urban exploration venue, but now some developer owns the land and sells the right to give tours to some other company. These guys keep a relatively short leash on the tourgroups, and their goons are ready to step in if you try to stray from the group... which is very annoying. Notwithstanding this annoying reality, the view from the top is really epic, over the city of Berlin to the east, a massive expanse of seemingly uninhabited forest to the west, and these great geodesic domes covered in fiberglass, that once held giant antennas to spy on the Eastern Bloc.

After accompanying Xylar on a few errands, the next stop on our agenda was a visit to the Persital Singum. The video on that page might convey that the labyrinth is bigger than it really is, but it is still wonderful, pure Berlin weirdness. But it is not a labyrinth in the sense that a labyrinth is a maze. It's a mysterious, organic space to explore, where you sometimes wriggle through small spaces and wonder and the weird things on display and just have faith that this thing was meant to be explored.



The agenda for Sunday was: brunch, flea market, sauna. And for this our other co-opers actually appeared! We enjoyed "real Berlin brunch" at a very trendy cafe in Prenzlauer Berg, where a "no strollers" sign on cafe entrance doors is more common than the "no dogs" sign. And not because they don't like kids but just because there are so many young parents there that stroller overload is a real problem! For brunch and the flea market we had seven people, out of the promised 10. A good C- grade, I guess, but it worked out great.

After a short visit to the flea market at Mauerpark, Sarah joined Xylar, Kate, and me for a trip to the sauna at Europa-Center. The entrance to this place felt a little like the labyrinth - you enter a tall building at ground level near the Zoologischer Garten station in West Berlin, pass through a turnstile, and then take a tiny elevator up four floors. The locker room features delightfully retro-orange tall lockers and those old clocks where the digits are written on little cards that flip over (naturally there is a German word for it: Fallblattanzeige). The main atrium of the complex is centered around an indoor-outdoor pool (with little swim-doorways where you can swim between the indoor and outdoor portions), comfortably warm at around 27°C. There's also an actual hot tub (the hottest I've found in Germany - hot tubs aren't really a thing here) and of course also very cold pools for that post-sauna rush. The Saunas themselves aren't too much to write home about: there are two small "Aufguss saunas" indoors, and another dry sauna outdoors. And two steam rooms. The Aufguss was a hilarious experience due to the crowded sauna (really crowded, everyone elbow-to-elbow), joking and vying for space, and the incredibly intense Saunameistress who scolded, "quiet or I'll make you leave!"). We luxuriated here for 4-5 hours, completely au naturel as is the custom. Skinnydipping in a 27°C pool on the roof of a Berlin skyscraper: I recommend it.

Finally, just before Kate and I had to catch our train back to Hannover, the four of us got dinner at Dolores, a San Francisco Mission-district themed restaurant right around the corner from Alexanderplatz, dishing up the most authentic burritos within thousands of miles, with an intense hipster vibe permeating the atmosphere for good measure. (The guy or girl who takes your order may very well speak only English.)

So, Berlin Co-op Weekend #1: Not entirely according to plan, but a success nonetheless.

Reisekostenabrechnung

Friday
Indian restaurant: Indian Dhaba Mitra @ Hasenheide 11, €26 for two

Saturday
Tram ticket €6,70
Teufelsberg tour €15
Syrian restaurant €10
Labyrinth €10
Drinks at Labyrinth €10?
Lebanese restaurant €3

Sunday
Brunch @ Caféhaus Pakolat, €28 for two
Flea market @ Mauerpark €0
Sauna @ Thermen am Europa-Center €23,50
Dinner @ Dolores €20 for two

Misc
Train ticket €40.50 (mit Sparangebot, Bahncard 25, und Gutshein)
Hostel (Cat's Pajamas) €28 for two nights in 6-bed dorm
Petsitter (Laura Warnecke) €40

On the train to Prague! Trying to do some last minute couch-surfing since the hostels are all booked up. I guess Prague is a popular place, especially on a holiday weekend!

iPhone tethering is amazing when it works, but the connection with my discount SIM card while the train is in motion is almost unusable.

It's a beautiful day outside the train. Very flat green fields, some yellow with flowers, punctuated with the ubiquitous power-generating windmills. Blue sky with lots of puffy white clouds -- looks like an ideal day for glider flying.

It's amazing how flat northern germany is!

We finished up our trip to Belgium with a last-minute couchsurfing in Gent. We parked by a canal on the outskirts of the central city and set off on foot to find internet access. We settled in at a corner laundromat where the global free WiFi internet service provider "linksys" came in strong and sent out a beacon on the "last minute couchsurfing - belgium" group. Within minutes responses began coming in, and ten minutes later a friendly (not to mention gorgeous) Belgian girl rode up on a bicycle and commenced a tour of the city.

The Gent city center is beautiful and medieval, spectacularly well preserved, bustling with students on bicycles, and furnished with an honest-to-goodness castle, complete with turrets and a moat. We spent the evening nestled in a pub enjoying beers--the place was exactly how you'd hope a pub in such a place would be.

This morning we got up early and made the drive back to Köln, where Lisza has a job training thing, and Ryah has some (phone) interviews with fancy dot-com companies. I'm fighting a bit of a cold, so I think a nap is in order...

We're at Macy's European Coffeehouse, Bakery & Vegetarian Restaurant in (also snowy) Flagstaff, Arizona. The coffee is great and so is this coffeehouse. Flagstaff seems like a neat little town, also on the railroad and Route 66, though I am suspicious of any place that seems to subsist mainly on tourism.

There are trains--Burlington Northern & Santa Fe--passing through every couple of minutes. I was amused to see one hotel advertise on its billboard, "No train noises!" Who would want such a thing? Driving along this railroad makes me think of a potential future couchsurfing+trainhopping transcontinental adventure.

At the White Sands NM visitors center I finally bought a copy of Hot Springs and Hot Pools of the Southwest, the purchase of which I've been procrastinating for nearly a decade. Unfortunately it looks like we probably won't hit any on this trip (the prime New Mexico candidates were obscured by snow as we passed through that state). I'd like to finally make the quest to Saline Valley, a remote Death Valley hot spring oasis sometime this Spring.

Here in Flagstaff we stopped in at a good little book store and found many enticing books (including a first edition of John McPhee's first book) but bought only one, by Edward Abbey. I paged through a 1981 edition of a Moon Handbook guidebook to Arizona; reading the description of Flagstaff was kind of sad, since gentrification has obliterated the Flagstaff described in its pages.

We might spend the night here at the apartment of a friend from high school (who is actually not here right now), or a couchsurfing person, or maybe we'll continue on down the road. I'm looking forward to getting to California and spending a few days in one place.

Bree on the tire swing.

Last night, following up on open-ended invitations to visit garnered at the co-op conference in Ann Arbor, we stayed at a queer commune in rural Tennessee (map) called Ida, which sits in a wooded valley and has a couple wood-stove heated buildings, a barn, chickens, some friendly dogs, and hosts an annual music event called the "Idapalooza Fruit Jam" every September. We arrived to find friendly residents who showed us around, a yummy dinner awaiting us, and a cozy loft to sleep in. This seems to be a bit of a hot spot for intentional communities. Within thirty minutes driving ("10 country miles") are Small Mountain and Pumpkin Hollow, and Tennessee is also home to The Farm, a famous and longstanding commune. The author of Wild Fermentation, a reference familiar to any good hippie, lives at Small Mountain.

Heading towards Memphis tonight, then down the Mississippi river towards Baton Rouge tomorrow. Was hoping to pick up a copy of Lonely Planet's "Louisiana and the Deep South," but unfortunately it seems to be out of print. Hostels and couchsurfing opportunities seem a bit sparser down here.

We've amputated the entire Northeast arm from our roadtrip. So, no New Hampshire, Boston, or Providence. )-: Instead: Pittsburgh tomorrow, where we'll stay with Heather, formerly of Ant Hill Co-op, who ran away to Pittsburgh to study libraryness, and where we will also see my friend Brandon, with whom I built a robot in college.

From there we will head down into the Allegheny mountains. This is a complete mystery to me, so your suggestions are welcome. The Blue Ridge Parkway and Shenandoah National Park may be involved. I hear there is a terrific bluegrass jamboree in Floyd, VA on Fridays but we won't get there in time. So: Tell me about (eastern) Pennsylvania, (eastern) Maryland, and Virginia!

View from the road.

I couldn't sleep one night (a consequence of a diet of chocolate and coffee), and, laying awake, I suddenly realized it was July. July! You'd think I'd have realized it from the fireworks outside. But July meant Bree's birthday, and suddenly the Adirondack trip became mandatory. Even if small matters such as how to get home again were not yet figured.

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Tomorrow I am going to Chicago, to do some kind of reconnoitring around Fermilab.

We hitchhiked all the way across the Mojave today, four rides from our campsite in the Alabama Hills outside of Lone Pine to my grandparents' house in Camarillo, completing our hitchhiking tour of US-395, Bridgeport to Los Angeles.

The first car to pass us on our hike out of the hills gave us a lift. The driver, coincidentally enough, was "Rochester born and raised." The couple described themselves as "vagabonds, gypsies, or wanderers, whatever you want to call us," camps in the high desert for the summer, Yuma for the winters, gets by by selling toy binoculars and telescopes, refers to their friends by CB handles ("some because they are hiding, us just because it's fun"), dropped us off at the town library.

Thirty minutes thumbing from the sidewalk in central Lone Pine got us a ride with Lee in his old Ford Ranger XLT to Olancha, more just a highway juncture than any municipality, with a downtown consisting of exactly a Mobil station and a beef jerky stand and an icky hot spring (not visited on this trip) aptly known as "dirty sock." There on the highway with the hot wind whipping through and the traffic zipping along without so much as casting a sympathetic glance, I thought we might be there for a while. Out of the high desert, it was hot and I couldn't help but think of the crazed hitchhiker in Fear and Loathing. You have to keep the faith when hitchhiking, it will work, it's just a matter of time.

I held a sign that simply said, "LA." It wouldn't do to get halfway there, get stuck in the morass of LA that's spilled over the hills. One driver got out to take our picture; she was going North anyway, she explained. After an hour all the rides came all at once. We turned down two rides who weren't going all the way to Los Angeles, who were turning West at Tehachapi, one car a single woman who looked like she was commuting to work, the other a foreign-accented family off to Sequoia.

We waved off that car with thanks-but-no-thanks, and then there was another car waiting there as if from no where. "Burbank," the driver said when I asked where he was going in a little, I don't know, Honda Accord perhaps. This was that promised car you have to keep up the faith for, going exactly the right place and with air conditioning. "Really? Via highway 14?" "Yup." We nestled our backpacks on the back seat next to his hung-up button-down shirts and were happily on our way. We'd gotten out of Olanacha after all. The driver kept us smiling as two hundred odd miles rolled by with tales of adventure. That Yugoslav freighter he happened to be aboard during the Cuban Misile Crisis. The time he hopped freight trains across the country, Bakersfield to New Jersey on $20. The year he lived in Tangiers. The best part of hitchhiking has been the people we've met.

Tomorrow: Amtrak through Los Angeles to Orange County.

Sculpture at Albany Bulb park. June 2, 2006.

I don't think I ever properly introduced this trip that has now reached its conclusion, other than mentioning that I bought airline tickets for it. Four of the Five Distinct Missions have now been completed, but I'll sleep easier if it's properly documented. The most recent mission was to show off California to Bree and have an adventure of it, and I think you'll approve of the execution.

On our last day in Berkeley we dined on Infinite Sushi at Edoko on University and indulged in gellato at the absolutely phenomenal Gelateria Naia. This establishment offers saffron gellato and thereby earns my eternal blessing.

A highlight here was meeting fg and one of his housemates for these above-mentioned culinary expeditions. fg somehow showed up, doubtlessly via a livejournal friend-of-a-friend connection, on my radar as he wrote of his wanders through Mongolia. He'll tell you he's traveled in Russia, but he's not talking about Moscow Russia, he's taking about Spans-Eleven-Timezones Russia. Having made it something like 19,000 of the 20,000 miles around the globe, he's settled, at least for the time being, in Oakland. I'm sure there will be adventures to follow.

The previous day we partied lightly at Casa Zimbabwe's rooftop speakeasy. My friend Billy kept us entertained with tales of urban exploration, physical space hacking (such as climbing the Wells Fargo Building, one of Berkeley's two skyscrapers), and other crazy capers. We visited Kingman co-op and elected to sleep on the roof. And so on.

But anyways, after our gellato, Saffron and otherwise, it was time to get on the road. Our things packed up, our backpacks loaded, suddenly we were mobile again, with ten days of freedom stretched out before us. We took the number fifty-one bus out of town to the Oakland embarcadero and boarded the San Joaquin Amtrak train with Yosemite National Park our intended destination.