About fleas and bikes

I actually had a mission regarding the flea market: a bike. The bike I dragged along from Finland is good and nice and my precious, little, nearly-15-kilo, masculine-to-say-the-least darling baby, but it’s an impossible mission to find mudguards for its 29” tyres, and it isn’t the most practical thing to ride in a skirt. And I must admit I feel a bit nervous with leaving it outside bars and clubs during the most hectic hours in the weekend. So I wanted a bike that was a bit more... let’s say casual.

And a bike I found! It was somewhat a pig in a poke, for Mauerpark is absolutely packed and cobbled, so there really isn’t much of a chance for test driving. But I managed to negotiate the price from 50€ to 35€ (yes yes very special price only for you my friend), noted that the bike had a no-good hand brake but functioning pedal brakes, was big enough for me (I’m quite tall and the majority of the bikes were pygmy-sized!) and had mudguards, so I concluded that I wouldn’t lose too much if the deal turned out a dud.

And I must say I am amazed with how smooth a ride it is! Ahem, I mean, I saw from far that the bike was just a pearl at the bottom of the ocean waiting for that sharp-sighted pearl fisher to collect it... It’s a bit tough to get going, but once in motion, it actually is quite a fast thing! And moving from point A to point B effectively is something I deeply appreciate :)

In Helsinki that bike would be somewhat of a nuisance though, as it feels as if the city is nothing but up- and downhills, uphill especially on the way back home from just about anywhere. My flat is located in Alppila (“alppi-” is “alpine” in Finnish, and “-la” is a “shire”-like suffix in place names (like Hampshire, Yorkshire, Leicestershire), although not meaning anything originally), and it sure lives up to its name. But Berlin is flat like a pancake, which is nice. I’ve now ridden back home from school yesterday and today, about 13 kilometres, and it’s been but a pleasure.

Apart from being flat, Berlin is also quite biker-friendly with its cycle paths. There are quite a lot of them, and when not, just dive in along with the cars. The traffic isn’t especially heavy, despite the city being so big, and more often than not the right lane is half full with parked cars, so half of that lane is unused anyway and thus is safe for bikers. Cars (or their drivers, maybe) are quite considerate, I haven’t had the feeling of having to be scared for my life thanks to road raging drivers. It seems to me overly easy-going drivers that don’t care to fuss about being in a hurry or traffic rules are more of a danger :) Today I was almost bumped into when a car was parking and drove halfway on the pavement (which had a cycle path, along which I was riding), and clearly the driver was just so in his/her thoughts that he/she didn’t pay attention to what he/she was doing. Another car drove 15 km/h straight along for maybe 200 metres with the winker on, until he decided to stop, and one van stopped in the middle of a crossing without winking or giving some other sort of warning sign and started unloading :D It’s amazing how no one gets nervous, they just put on their winkers and drive round whoever is blocking the way.

Oh yeah, in addition to buying a bike and a lock to it, I went a bit crazy with earrings... I bought five pairs of them. But they were all so cute and locally made, so I just had to buy them! Just look at them, can you blame me?

!

The peg and banana earrings I bought at Unikat Kantine’s stand, who had a whole lot of other lovely jewellery. I think I’ll have to visit them again next Sunday, because I want scissor and fork+knife earrings too...

There’s also a new flea market opened in Friedrichshain, Revaler Straße 99. I came so late that it was practically closed/over already, but the location is absolutely magnificent! It’s an old train reparation plant, with lots of ruined former halls and such, and now, in addition to the RAW flea market (RAW = Reichsbahnausbesserungswerk, the Reichsbahn’s (DDR's railway company) reparation plant), there’s an indoor climbing hall, a skate hall and the bar/club Cassiopeia, which seems really nice. I’ll have to visit both the flea market and Cassiopeia at a better time! I tried to take pictures of the place, but I just didn’t manage to capture the atmosphere at all, so I’ll have to leave that to better photographers and their equipment.

Sleep deprived in Berlin

Phew, as I mentioned when presenting myself, I have the tendency to always have a crammed calendar. I don’t quite understand how, but the feeling is ever present also here in Berlin, despite the fact that I have a lot less work to do.

I point my blaming finger at the German course, which starts at an unholy hour in the morning (at least when one has to take into account the time it takes to get to the FU situated in the middle of nowhere, also known as Dahlem), and thus makes me adapt to a completely crooked rhythm of life. Or well, tries to make me, as I am unable to. Of course, the nice little schoolgirl I am, I do get up at an abnormal time in the morning, and even go to bed unnaturally early to avoid being ready the next morning to give up three-quarters of my kingdom and my left leg just to be allowed to sleep. But it just doesn’t make any difference whether I have a good 8-hour sleep every goddamn night or not.

No. I’m not adapting, I won’t be adapting, and I doubt I ever will be able to adapt, if "adapt" is understood as an odd habit being assimilated into/as the norm. I’m. just. not. a. morning. person. To my defence, I’m not the kind of non-morning person who’ll always be grumpy, bitchy and/or mute until the day is way passed noon. I am able to communicate in a civilised manner, get stuff done and so, but I’m just TIRED. Know what I mean?

I wouldn’t be so worked up with having to flip my rhythm of life, if it didn’t feel so frustratingly pointless. Our course starts at 9:30 and ends at 13:15 every day until mid-October. That’s all the regular programme I have! Why, for the loving mother of god and all that is holy, cannot the time of the whole course just be moved a few hours forward? Say, 12:30–16:15? And of course excursions with their own exceptional timetables.

Speaking of which, we had our first excursion today with the theme architecture. We didn’t have any lecture yesterday (which we found out around 10:30, make a wild guess who muttered a few words about the lost possibility of sleeping in...), and we were given no information on the excursion beforehand, relying entirely on Wednesday’s lesson. Great. Well, our teacher did show up in the afternoon, as there is a film shown at the FU every Wednesday afternoon (not anything mandatory, more like a film club), and she was the only one with the DVD. There she informed some students, who for their part informed others – Chinese whispers, the basic method of information in the 21st century. E-mail is so 1993. The rumours said Thursday 10 AM at U-Bahnhof Tiergarten, which doesn’t exist: there’s either the Bahnhof (station) for S-Bahns in Tiergarten in Western Berlin, or the Station for U-Bahn in Tierpark in the East. I asked whether it was the U- or the S-Bahnhof, got a reply “U”, and as I didn’t exactly know what the programme or route was, I assumed then it was U-Tierpark.

*BEEEEP* Wrong answer! It actually would have been quite interesting to hear about the architectural and infrastructural history in the West, as I am quite unfamiliar with it, but instead ended up spending the morning in U- and S-Bahns making my way through to West. (I don’t need to mention the lost sleep, do I?) I caught up with the others in the cafeteria in Akademie der Künste, where we spent an hour or so (at the cafeteria, I mean), then we travelled back East to Friedrichshain for the last hour or so :D Oh well, next time I know to double-check with our info-challenged teacher instead of making my own assumptions.

Hm... I actually was going to write about the bureaucracy of Berlin and its universities, and not froth about morning wake-ups like a madwoman, but I guess I’ll have to get to that in the next post. Hopefully by then I’ll have some flat news, too! Keep your fingers crossed :)