Bookpacking is now existing in a (only slightly) more advanced form at this new address: bookpacking.wordpress.com
Do please check out the latest content from locations like London, Barcelona and California.
If you’d like to get in touch, or even hire me (I’m a UK-based travel and fitness writer) please don’t hesitate to contact me: info (at) bookpacking.com
Do please also check out my other blog about Running the Berlin Wall
Thanks!
Bookpacking
One of the delights of the Berlin is just wandering the streets. Today it’s Friedrichshain, which is quashed between Karl Marx Allee and the Spree river and one of many sub-centres of this diffuse city. Berlin feels like an ever-shifting urban canvas, and leaving the new style bars behind in the avenues, we find esoteric treasure in the side streets and alleyways.
Like a plane crash survivor, Berlin is city embraces the now and all the possibilities of existence that brings, yet can never escape the memory of its trauma. Pasted on a garage wall, a riot of CMYK announces another rendezvous of the colourful-but-cool in a venue which will enjoy its moment in the sun, before returning to the tumbledown obscurity from whence it came. This is the city of the Geheimtip, the nod and the wink about a bar, cellar or even someone’s front room which is temporarily the focus of the fickle and fashionable.
But underneath the posters, where yet another team of spray painters have left their mark, a mural depicts a Zeppelin. Immediately recognisable, its shape speaks of a dark past but is somehow softened by a loss of edge that the passage of time gives to memories that cut less deeply the further back they are. From the pre-Hitler era, before Friedrichshain was renamed Horst Wessel Stadt in honour of the Nazi anthem writer, it belongs to a conflict that is less offensive than its successor.
Across the street is a yard full of Volkswagen T25 camper vans. Appropriately VW’s spiritual home Wolfsburg is a short drive to the west. Two African men load a lorry with parts, before approaching us to see what we’re staring at. The vans are not for sale but only for export they tell us. Import/export: the people involved in this business never seem to welcome scrutiny. Presumably, given Berlin’s low costs and the popularity of these vans abroad, they’re being sold overseas. “Das ist Kultauto” we manage to say – a cult car. Unimpressed but satisified we pose no threat, they amble away. Berlin is one of those places where you can sense things happening underground, in hidden places. For good and bad.
Turning another corner onto Modersohnstrasse, one of the many open spaces you find in Berlin (bomb damage or communist lack of care?) is gated with a sign which appears to announce something defiantly to the world. Inside, it is packed with a collection of those distinctive two-axle trailers that you only see in this part of the world. Like the T25, they have a certain boxiness; but unlike the camper vans in the yard, there are heat shimmers denoting working stoves – they are occupied. A gypsy encampment? A travelling circus? An artistic paradise? We’re seized with a need to know.Then a paramilitary figure, clad all in black, emerges on one of those sit-up-and-beg bikes that are fantastic for stately patrols of the flat Berlin cyclepaths, but would be useless in London. He stops to adjust his phone; such an opportunity is not to be wasted.
His clothes are actually Carhartt rather than military fatigues, the only war he is fighting is the annual one against the bitter Berlin cold. This, he tells us, is a community of squatters. Rather than travellers, they are stay-putters who spied an opportunity in this empty patch of land and took it. Our pragmatic new friend tells us how it is: “This land was empty so we decided to squat. The government said ‘Ok, no problem, we don’t need this right now so you can have it. But when we are ready to build our sports development, you will have to move on.’ But, this is Berlin, so they have no money, so they cannot build it and we are still here.” Ah this city, such a cheap date for the decadent but destitute. “If you look carefully,” a friend once said, “you’ll notice people nursing the same beer for a long time.”
But being Berlin, this cosmopolitan community of squatters are very much in touch with the modern world. “She works in IT,” he says as woman in a hooded top and baggy jeans slouches past, “So we have very fast internet. Another guy is a businessman and he owns several companies.” Anarchists, alternatives, entrepreneurs and IT specialists – all living cheek by jowl in this soon-to-be-gentrified quarter. But how long can this coexistence last, as capitalism spreads its polarising wealth and business also spies an opportunity. Are the anti-yuppy car burners of Friedrichshain fighting a losing battle?
Never again during the safety demonstration will Bookpacking sigh internally: “And just when was the last time a plane ditched on water and people actually needed a lifejacket; indeed still had a head left on their shoulders to pull it over ? Eh?”
A timely reminder that life is precious and can be taken away from us at any time. And, that we should always watch the safety demonstration…
Yours chastened,
Bookpacking
BTW info@bookpacking.com is working now. Apologies for the technical difficulties.
History casts a long shadow in Gdansk, and so we do. Bookpacking loves this kind of light and spent hours photographing the old and the new in this city. This is the old German street of Biskupia, and if you look hard enough you’ll see the odd bit of German lettering. Heading up the steep cobbles it was hard to believe it was only 10 minutes walk from the city centre.
When Gdansk was known as Danzig this area would have presumably reverberated to the sound of German not Polish, a la “Tin Drum”. Today the Polish postie stops to chew the fat with a couple of local ladies and all is tranquil in the sharp winter sunshine. The only skull and crossbones designs we see now are the ‘danger of death’ signs on the electricity junction boxes.
Bookpacking is finally taking its first tentative steps into cyberspace. Our mission is to blindly go where a few people have already been before - but maybe doing it in a slightly different style and offering a few lit-linked tidbits of travel info.
Bookpacking is about arriving in an interesting city, hitting the bookshops, bars and cafes and finding yourself having a great time only hours later. It’s about finding an old copy of a 20th century classic for a couple of Euros; stumbling into a 50s-jazz concert in the backstreets of Paris; finding yourself in a poetry reading in a DDR-era Berlin bar; or watching a prosody-led improvised jam in north London.
It’s about joining the dots between all these places and feeling the pull of that river of creativity that connects the Paris of the 20s with the Barcelona of the 90s, or the Edinburgh of the 1700s with the San Francisco of the 60s. But most of all, it’s about now. Because now is the time. Now is always the time.
So come on in, the water’s lovely!