Beers in the Tiergarten/Tears in the Beer Garden

Last day in the last city on this trip: Berlin. So different than the storybook quaintness of Prague or the classical elegance of Vienna, Berlin is a mixture of post WWII buildings, a few older structures pockmarked with shrapnel as a reminder of the war, and remnants and reminders of the Berlin Wall. The whole two week trip had been planned as a quirky holiday to see more Caravaggio paintings (and that’s been wonderful), but it’s also been a great— dare I say post pandemic? adventurous holiday. And a chance to drink a lot of great German beer.

A bit of backstory: there used to be five Caravaggio paintings in Berlin but three were destroyed here when the flak tower they were stored in had a fire during WWII. Ever since I learned this I doubted that it was true— at least one of them is very small portrait, similar in size to the Mona Lisa— so my theory is that someone picked it up and tucked it under their arm back then and their naive grandson has it hanging in their condo somewhere here. In fact, a tiny bit of me thought if I just walked around snooping through condo windows here over these three days I’d probably find it, and become a celebrated darling of the art history world— but alas, no. 

But I feel like we’ve walked around the city enough to say we tried. I mean we have walked. So last night we decided to treat ourselves by strolling to a great big beer garden in the park and we got really, really, soused. By accident. I’m not even sure how it happened— it had been a super hot day and we hadn’t eaten much and at the end of the day we’d walked on heavy legs quite far to find this place— so the beer was cold and went down fast. It was touch and go for a bit there.

“I’ve got the spins, can I just lie down here for a bit?”

“Steve, no. We’ll get kicked out.”

“So?”

“We’ll get kicked out in German which seems worse. Plus are you just gonna lie down outside a beer garden then? Look it’s all stinging nettles.”

“How am I gonna walk to the bathroom?”

And so on. We had an elaborate plan to save a bit of beer in one glass so we could pretend to spill it on his shorts in case he had to just pee in place... you know, so it looked like spilled beer on his shorts instead of pee. Then we had the brilliant idea to maybe we should get some food to soak up some of the alcohol— but who was going to do this?  Walk over to the food court area and order and pay for food when menus are all in German?  And carry it back on a tray? Navigating the bathroom was too difficult, so this felt NASA level complicated. Finding a missing Caravaggio seemed easier in that moment.

In the end the task fell to me and even then I screwed it up. The German word for pizza is ‘pizza’ but somehow I managed to order us a handful of arugula instead. “Just this?” The pizza guy indicated, in German, as he held up leaves. “Nein!” I said, possibly a little too hysterically. Luckily pointing helps. So in the end we got pizza and paid (and peed!) AND somehow stumbled drunkenly home through the beautiful Tiergarten, probably a little bit too loudly, back to our hotel.

Taking it easy today :) 

Disney, But Make it Sexy

At the risk of making a snap judgement on a city I’ve only been in for a few hours, I can’t helping but compare Prague to Disneyland. The cobbled, curved streets! The colourful buildings painted yellow and peach with wooden shutters on small windows! A little cobblestoned bridge covered in statues that cars can’t drive on! I keep expecting Belle from Beauty and the Beast to throw open her shutters and start bitching about the baker’s bread in her poor provincial town as I round every corner. It’s beautiful.

Of course there are no rides here like in Disneyland, but Prague really makes up for it by having tons of quaint little cannabis shops. Picture a Disney theme park dotted with stores where you can buy Mickey Mouse ears, but replace the mouse ears with weed and then multiply that number of shops by ten. Add to that the fact that the Czech Republic is also world famous for it’s lager so lots of beer is sold everywhere, all of which creates a fun mix of young, wasted people, whooping loudly while wandering the streets with nothing but churches, a famous old clock, and a cobbled bridge for fun. 

But wait— I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the Prague Sex Machines Museum— it seems fun. It claims to house 350 items but the ones I noticed were a chastity belt made out of metal containing what look like vampire teeth, a vibrator that appears to attach to a Kitchen Aid mixer (it comes with a guarantee!) and a dildo that looks like it was stitched out of an old baseball mitt. 

You know what, never mind, it’s really not that much like Disneyland.

Uncouth in Vienna

Travel sucks! Why? Here’s a list

See if you can get the gist.

My bag is zipped but without doubt

Forgot to leave my liquids out

Security lineup’s long as heck

And I get picked for random check

Now at the gate and there’s a guy 

Who cuts the line- no reason why,

My flight’s delayed; they’re out of food

The customs folks are kinda rude

But when I get to a new city

Damn, it’s looking uber pretty!

The view’s divine, the locals cool

The buildings— architectural jewels

The metaphorical grass is green 

The sights— the best you’ve ever seen 

Vienna is a visual froth 

These folks are cut from different cloth 

Saw paintings, sculpture, coins and more

Music, churches, marble floors.

It’s gorgeous and I feel my luck 

And yet— alas, I am a schmuck

Cause—  it all feels like a lot 

Some designers lost the plot 

While violins can sound so placid 

Decor reads more like Trump on acid 

You like gold! We get it dude 

But when you use this much it’s crude 

Or maybe I’m just not cut out 

For what Vienna’s all about 

Like —I am sadly, such a keener

To giggle when there’s talk of weiners;

Get tipsy walking cobbled stones,

Waver into cycling zones

Not saying I am unintelligent 

But maybe somewhat... less than elegant

Vienna you are style and grace 

But I’m ready for a different pace 

And so tomorrow— off to Prague 

Where I will write a different blog :)

 

Dublin Days

Today, on the app I use to learn German, I had to practice the phrase “Are you jogging right now?” which if you think about it, is a pretty cruel thing to say to someone. (If I were ever to jog again I’d hope it’d be sorta obvious.) Steve overheard me and said “Why practice German at this point? Are you that worried about the language barrier?” because we leave for Vienna tomorrow. But it’s our last night in Dublin and if I’m honest I’ve not understood a whole lot of what’s been said since we got to Ireland and it’s meant to be the language I speak. Today, for example, it was raining so fiercely that we ducked into a donut shop to wait it out and after we started chatting with a local I realized I might’ve told her I'm coming to her house. 

She said her house is beside the Guinness factory, which i understood to be both fifteen minutes away and also thirty minutes away. Foolishly I made an attempt to chat more and asked why there were only buses and taxis in Dublin and no regular cars driving around and she answered by telling me that in the unknowably distanced town where she lives, they use horses and buggies. After we heard that Steve and I just started nodding a lot. She said you couldn’t swim on the beach there as a kid because the water was all Guinness flavoured, and Steve tried to engage with “Oh, so it smells like Guinness near the factory?” but she just said no. 

I could tell she was pretty disappointed with these idiot Canadians. She held up her phone to show us an instagram video of the Guinness factory and I honestly thought it might’ve been a Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory type situation but with a beer river instead of chocolate but it was just a video of a beach. Any beach. There was no factory at all in the video. 

At this point we were clearly just having two parallel and completely unrelated conversations in the same language. Maybe she asked me if I was jogging right now. Maybe she even asked it in German, and in hindsight, I might’ve been willing to take up jogging in that moment if it would’ve clarified what the hell we were talking about. It was still raining and there was nowhere else dry to stand so this was our life now. 

When it finally cleared up a little and we said goodbye, I checked to make sure I still had my wallet but it was only partly because I thought she might’ve been distracting us with her high falutin horse-and-buggy-talk while her accomplice stole our stuff. But no one tried to steal anything of course, she was just a friendly person and as usual, I am an idiot. 

As we strolled back through thick puddles to our hotel, Steve saw on google maps that Dublin has a leprechaun museum. “What would that museum have in it?” he said, and it hit me.

Maybe that woman was a leprechaun. Like, the worlds tallest leprechaun? And she was trying to get us to go visit the museum and there are horses and buggies and Guinness swimming pools and frosted lucky charms and even a beach in there?

And I wouldn’t be surprised because Dublin is magical. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard people spontaneously break into song or laughed and clinked drinks in the last two days. It’s very easy to smile here. Next time I’ll stay longer for sure. And maybe practice learning Irish in my app before I come.

Hank the Fifth Turtle

There are two unfinished Michelangelo paintings in the National Gallery in London. He has unfinished sculptures on display in Florence too, right near his famous one of David (he calls them ‘the prisoners’ because they’re still ‘imprisoned’ in rock, I think.) And I remember Hannah telling me years ago that what she remembers from the audio tour of the Sistine Chapel was that Pope Julius II had to repeatedly nag Michelangelo to finish painting it. What’s up buddy? Buckle down and gift er done, Michelangelo.

What if he didn’t actually finish anything though? Lots of artists had apprentices or workshops where younger people toiled to learn their craft, so what if when doing the Sistene ceiling, Michelangelo was distracted by a new paint colour and just really wanted to focus on clouds for awhile in a corner, and had some novice rando come up with the main Adam and God finger touching bit that’s in the middle? What if he was like “Look, paint what you want, I don’t care, as long as at least one of em is naked. You know. Make it nice.” (Because Michelangelo is Italian, he talks like he’s in The Godfather in my imagination. Maybe he even said ‘budda bing bada boom’ — what do I know). And what if that uncredited guy had to just sit back and say nothing while people made Michelangelo fridge magnets of his creation until the end of time and he got zero credit for it?

Or maybe Michelangelo had helpers sculpting the boring bits of David? Like you’re a new sculptor and it’s your first big chance with the chisel and on your first day Michelangelo just said “Ok, you’re on pubes and toenails this month. Don’t screw up.” 

What if these helper artists didn’t have poetic sounding Italian names either but were just called Hank or something....? I mean no one names a teenage mutant ninja turtle Hank. I guess some people are just destined for greatness. 

Out in London

I’d forgotten. It’s been years since I’d jet off somewhere on a plane and I’d just simply forgotten what it’s like to fly, trapped beside some old guy whose leg touches yours but with whom you never made eye contact for 9 hours, whose elbow is not only taking up the entire armrest but also ever so slightly and annoyingly sticks out into your side of it. Years since I’d felt that odd feeling when that person seated behind you fiddles with the seat pocket attached to the back of your chair literally dozens of times during the flight, and each time it can’t help but feel like a surprise soft graze across the top of your buttcrack. I’d also forgotten that flicker of disappointment you get when you finally turn around at the end of the flight to see who’d been seated there doing that only to discover that it was just some random stranger and not, in fact, Daniel Craig, like you’d hoped.

Anyway we’re here now, in London. We were headed elsewhere but when we discovered the National Gallery was nearby I made the executive decision that we were going in there immediately to see the Caravaggio paintings (the museum is free), and I took a photo of this beautiful basket of fruit in his painting Supper at Emmaus. See how it juts off the edge? It’s inviting the viewer in with that precariousness. We want to push it back on the table for safety. (Or to put it another way, we want Daniel Craig, to just ever so gently, graze the edge of the basket with his hand the way he might tuck things into an airplane seat pocket.) An art historian I studied said that where other painters keep the viewer at a distance with their formal compositions, Caravaggio removes that virtual velvet rope when he lets things hang off the edge like that. 

Then we walked in the opposite direction of, well, nearly everyone, because they were off to see a parade with the Queen for her Jubilee celebration while we were headed to Shakespeare’s rebuilt outdoor globe theatre to see Much Ado About Nothing. I know what you’re thinking but I don’t care because I am a bard nerd and IT WAS THE COOLEST. It wasn’t a normal stage at all but had a runway style section that protrudes out at an angle where like in Shakespeare’s day, the ‘groundlings’ audience members stand in the dirt; paying just 5 pounds to see the show (and many get to be a part of it, since the actors often talked to them during the play, brought them on stage, or once even rode a motorcycle through them to enter the scene). In keeping with the theme of this blog I feel I should tell you Daniel Craig was NOT in the play but has acted in theatre productions of Othello and Macbeth in the past and he was probably busy protecting the Queen in the guise of James Bond today