Oh yeah, please excuse the spelling and grammer, this keyboard is a jerkass and I'm quite tired all the time lately.
Where was I...
so, when we woke up that evening, it was around midnight. I checked my email to see that we had recieved word back from a post on the g8 listserv asking about hitching out of berlin. This cool site called hitchwiki had a perfect spot... legal, plenty of room to see you, plenty of room to stop. So we walked to that place (it was only like 2km away). Looked fucking perfect so we walked back to the hotel, grabbing cardboard along the way to make a Berlin sign. We hung out and packed and stulff, and when we were done, it was approaching 6 (7 being the time the site reccomended hitting the road). We walked back to the spot and flew our sign. And we waited... And it rained... and we waited... and our sign discintigrated, and we waited... and nothing. Eventually, around 11 a car stopped and we started putting our packs in. "you going to Berlin?" I asked. "Nein," came the replay, "Dusseldorf." Dusseldorf was not on our way. 20 minutes later another car stopped. I was more cautious this time... "Berlin?" "Nein. West." Fuck. We waited another 2 or 3 hours before we called it quits. Sad. Quite sad. We went to the Haupvonhoff train center to ask about train tickets to Berlin. The woman seemed to dislike us and told us it was 104 euro. Fuck that shit. That's just under my budget for this whole trip.
So we went back to the Internet cafe to get our email-check on. Someone had replied that they hadn't been to Frankfurt, but they searched the net and found a squat and a cafe that seemed semi-radical. The squat had a website, so I went to it. The Subhumans were playing there tonight, and we were hopeful that we could stay there if we told them what was up. Our hope was to hitch the next day. They had no email address or phone number and were 7km away. Do-able if we worked our asses off at figuring out public trainsit (it's so difficult in another language... painfully difficult). Before we did that I found out where the cafe was, and it was realtively close, around 3km. So we decided we'd walk there and if it was radical and people spoke english we'd ask how to get to the squat. As we walked, it became wildly apparant that we were entering a new side of town. Until then, all of berlin had been touristy and lame as shit. In this district, every block had a smash g8 poster wheat-pasted up, most blocks had 2 or 3. As we got closer, we saw more and more (A)'s tagged up.
When we got there, we were in awe. The whole place was tagged with radical graffiti except the windows, which were filled with fliers about radical events. Across the street Anarchy, Smash the G8 and Carlo Lives were tagged up in Greek. The shop was closed, so we decided we'd wait outside (we knew it would be open later as the emailer said they were going to have a womyn-only thing that night, so we figured we'd dip in and say hi and see if there was anywhere to stay and say hi. Instead of that, two people showed up and tried to get in. They asked us if we were there for the show. When we asked what show they said Subhumans of course. It turned out the subhumans were playing there and not at the squat. They showed us around to the side entrance. Inside were around 6 anarcho-punks setting up for the show. Once inside it dawned on us... this was more than twice as big as the biggest radical space we had seen. They had a large-venue-sized area in the back, where they were moving things around in preparation for the show. One of the womyn who showed up asked where we were from. We told her Portland, OR and she said "You have too much money." It was a pretty simple off-the-cuff remark, but it cut pretty deep. I was thinking of arguments against that, but I was sort of shocked, and her english wasn't so great, so I'm not sure if I could effectively articulate it anyway. We were all sort of downtrodden after that. Our hopes of being greeted by friendly radicals just like us were dashed. Though she was only one person.
We introduced ourselves to the others and asked if there was any way we could help. They needed help in the general 'move heavy shit around' type of way, and we gladly obliged, though Vanc and Saed weren't doin so hot for lack of sleep (saed especially). So we lugged shit around for an hour or so, then Dick from Subhumans showed up and we unloaded the P.A. One of the main people that managed the space (thomas, we later learned was his name) said that for helping unload the PA and help out, we were covered for admission. Good thing since we were/are low on money and I don't know how much admission would've been. He also offered me any drink I wanted from the cafe on the house. I ordered a beer since I'm still amused by the novelty of drinking in public and because I was feeling icky and socially awkward after that person's comment, and dealing with strangers who hardly spoke my language, and whose language I hardly spoke. It cut the edge a bit, but I was still pretty nervous.
We sat around and talked to people a little bit, including the 'too much money' person who was named Sonya, and who I had a relatively pleasant conversation with about differing cultures. I felt a bit better after that. Sonya's friend offered us vegan cookies and asked if we were vegan. We said yes and she said she was glad. Vanc tried to ask about dumpstering and she seemed really nervous and ran away. Language/culture barriers are really weird.
So we sat for a while as punx started trickling in. They looked just like american punx except blue-jeans instead of black ones or Carhartts. Some had black jeans, but none had Carhartts. Vanc asked Thomas if there was anywhere to nap and he showed them a space in a loft above the area in front of the stage, and they went up there, while I wrote the last blog. Dick sat down next to me and was checking his myspace, and I was minorly star-struck. I asked him if he was headed to Berlin and he said he just came from there. Shit. So he got up eventually and then I heard music (though at that point there were only maybe 30 punx there) and I thought they were starting so I cut my blog short and went to watch. It was just soundcheck but I decided that even though I wasn't particularly sleepy I'd lay down where vanc and saed were anyway. I slept like 20 minutes but the sound check was so fucking loud I couldn't sleep anymore. I went downstairs and watched some punx play foosball until the sound check finished, and went to sleep for an hour.
When I went downstairs there were between 2-300 punx at the venue. They were eating, drinking and being loud silly anarcho-punx. And to think, that morning we didn't think there was even one anarchist in Frankfurt. I woke vanc and saed up and we stood around for a while before the show started. There was a grindcore band first, that sang mostly in German but a little in English, but it was hard to tell for some songs since it was Grindcore. Their lyrics were pretty silly and cliche "Don't you understand, you are brainwashed" and "Fuck this/the world!" But whatever. They did a cover of Police Bastard and a grindcore cover of What A Wonderful World. After that Subhumans took the stage and played a fucking amazing set. They played all of my favorite Subhumans songs and only one Subhumans song I don't like (mickey mouse is dead). It was song after song he just kept going and going. Dick is nuts. He kept coughing and hacking shit up but he just kept singing and dancing as hard as he could. I love him. It was that way two years when I saw them. I imagine he can't keep doing that for much longer so I want to see them every chance I get.
After the show we were scared. We were too awkward to ask anyone if we could stay with them. The one person I had met and talked to a bit came up to me and asked where I was staying, which I took to be an offer in my head. I said I didn't know, maybe a park and she said we should talk to people and see if we can stay with them. She said she'd ask around too. We decided to hang around until people were leaving then go to the nearest park and wait till sunrise to hitch. We hung around for a while before Thomas met up with us and asked where we were staying, and we told him our plan. He said it was too cold for that, so we could stay at this space, even though generally nobody was allowed to sleep there. He told us to hide a little if we were laying down before people were leaving because then they'd want to sleep there too. We hung out a bit and talked to the Iraq Veterans Against the War, who were also here for the G8 and who spoke at the show before the Subhumans went on. They were pretty cool, but had no advice on getting to Berlin. The friend they were staying with was from Olympia, so we talked about the pacific NW for a while. Eventually the subject of the effigy came up, which sucked, because we were right in front of the IVAW guy. It was a pretty tense conversation but they were fairly reasonable about it. The vet less so, but I felt like he was just now starting to decompress and move away from what he had been taught in the marines. I gave him a "we don't support the troops zine, which he took and said he'd read. One of their friends who was from here judging from his accent gave us the advice of asking about reigonal trains rather than express trains. We said we'd keep that in mind but we had a good feeling about the next day.
Oh yeah, the reason all the businesses had been closed that day and not many cars had gone by was that it was fathers day here, which is a no work day.
So we went back to our sleeping space, and laid down. We sat around talking for a while until there was only the very distant sound of one or two people. We were unrolling our sleeping bags when a man walked in and said something in German. I said "we don't speak german" and he said in English "we are closing RIGHT NOW" and we replied "Oh, Thomas had said we could stay here" to which he replied "I don't care, you can't sleep here. You have to go." We figured he misunderstood so we started explaining on other words more slowly. It became clear that he understood what we were saying, but he he didn't care. Shitty. He was loud and angry too, which is expecially scary in German. He walked away as we started re-packing our stuff. Scared and confused and sad. I heard him talking to Thomas and then them exchanging a few sentences and then Thomas walked into the room we were in and apologised saying there was a miscommunication and we could stay there. The other man walked in also and apologised. They left and we pulled out our sleeping bags and went to sleep.
That was, just to clarify last night... I'm trying to get caught up to present time before I send out any emails, because a good portion of what I'll be sending out is updates, so if I don't email you for a few days that's why. There's like no free wifi in this town, the internet is monopolized by internet "cafes" that actually don't even have coffee, just computers, but hopefully that will be different in Berlin.
