Berlin was so super rad there’s no way I can summarize it easily. But I’ll try.
I went for the International Conference on Technology, Knowledge and Society. It was small but full of cool people, particularly Christine Hine, Victoria Armstrong, Deirdre Hynes, Jocelynne Scutt, scholars investigating technology and gender and online sociology. I presented my research on wireless networks in rural Peru and couchsurfed my way through the rest of the week with some equally rad women.
Got to see the city the second half of the week. My unbelievably rad journalist/anthropologist host in Prenzlauer Berg showed me tons of stuff, as far as we could walk — we even attempted to sneak into Wim Wender’s pad when the door was open but never made it past the bruiser in the lobby, although we came close. We also had a fun competition trying to outdo one another in listing our encounters with famous people. I will think of her whenever I drink ceylon tea or eat German all-natural margarine (which I initially thought was cheese, and smeared heavily on my bread in the morning). Anyway, so I really just spent the majority of my time in Berlin being utterly grateful for humanity. For my hosts, my fellow conference attendees, a director at the Fraunhofer Institute who was gracious enough to meet me for dinner the first night I flew in. Germans on the street. Owls. Children.
In terms of the city itself, snow was everywhere, at first. It made Berlin look beautiful, and the dry still air was a welcome change from Boston’s frigid humidity and unrelenting wind. I particularly liked the buildings with their huge windows and full panes of glass. Also the enormous and deep bathtubs and high ceilings of Berlin apartments. Also the large amount of foreigners. Also the prevalence of cute shops and cafes, all of which were open really late, and the plethora of media/art/film activities going on.
My first couchsurfing host told me about a bathhouse right on the river in former East Berlin which included a sauna and swimming pool. Longtime pal BB came all the way from Praha to visit me for one night, which was super rad in itself, but radder still was our experience in the bathhouse:
First of all, it’s in a dark alley. On the river. If this was Brooklyn or Philly I would probably have turned around, but it was Berlin, and therefore an odd sense of security permeated the place. I can’t explain why. So we show up a little after 9pm, after getting lost. We go into the changing room, a very small room with lockers and such, only to be a little shocked to find it’s for both men and women. There are no stalls, no toilets, not much separating people from each other. BB and I turned our backs to one another and changed modestly, me in my expensive Nike bikini which I’d just purchased for the occasion. We then walked outdoors in the snow in flipflops and bathrobes across to the sauna and swimming pool, which are covered with a white bubble in winter.
We walk in and…oh. Look. Everyone’s naked. And when I say everyone, I mean every single person. Is naked. Without their clothes on. Walking around, drinking coffee at the bar, sitting in chairs outside the sauna, getting out of the pool. Men and women, old and young, but mostly around our age. Mostly fit. BB and I looked at each other. We walked over to the pool and stood there in our bikinis. The water was pretty cold.
“Dude,” she said. “I’m going to take my top off.” What? No! Clothed solidarity forever! “Should I take mine off too?” I asked. “Should we try to fit in?” We agreed this would be best. But then we looked around and thought, wow, everyone is staring at us because we’re the only ones wearing bathing suits. If we leave the bottoms on, they’ll still stare at us because the clothes draw even more attention when everyone else is naked. The only way to blend is to do as the Romans. And in this case the Romans were Germans and they were enjoying a midnight swim/sauna in nothing but their birthday suits.
Around this time we came to verbal and emotional grips with our American sense of repression. And we acclimated, like good relativists who understand social context and attempt to become participant observers — in this case, participant observers who paid 16 euros each to sit in a heated room with 11 other naked people for two hours. And so we shed the bikinis and tried not to look at each other or anyone else. Except directly in the eye.
After about 23 seconds in the sauna, I remembered I hate saunas, because they make me feel like I am going to die. So I quickly left and spent the rest of the night swimming. Naked. With some other naked people I’ve never met and will never meet again. And then they left the pool, and I was on my own. Both ends of the pool opened up into the night air (you could swim under the rubber roof covering), level with the river so you felt like you were in it. It was cold, and snow began falling. There I was, alone in East Berlin at nearly midnight, naked in a commercial bathhouse in the river with snow falling on my head. Another intense degree of radness.
Back in the changing room, scores of naked people ignored each other as they put their clothes back on. We joined them, impressed at how far we’d come in acclimating to Euro culture, but realizing that this progressive milestone would quickly fade after leaving; we knew we’d go back to hiding our bodies, or wanting to. Even in front of buck naked Germans.
The goal of this trip, besides the conference, was to see if I wanted to live in Berlin. Because maybe the rumors weren’t true; maybe Berlin would not be as cool and amazing and as appropriate for my professional future as everyone had said it would be. But of course it was. And of course I would like to go there immediately. And guess what? Some of my Goethe Institute German even came back to me, and I realized that I actually like speaking this language, and with practise I think I could really do it. I could live in a flat with large windows and a great bathtub, I could eat brown bread with all-natural margarine and drink black coffee, I could bicycle to work and go to film festivals. Or I could at least blog about it, and hope things work out.
The end.
