The End of 2007 is Near!

Last Tuesday I spent the afternoon with PE (our first, unexpected, visitor) as R already mentioned. It was great to see her and catch up on all the great things going on with her right now.

After that we went over to SS and Br's for dinner and so that I could cut Br's hair. This was a great excuse to buy some hair clippers I have been meaning to get from Media Markt.

After leaving SS and Br's we met up with PE and her friend from undergrad in London who is currently living here, Ma. Ma is actually German (from outside of Hannover) but has spent the last 10 years in London, so her accent is a great mix of German and British English. This is when we went to Erdbeer ('Strawberry') that R also mentioned, and I had a great Erdbeer Daiquiri.

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Last Wed, we had a much more successful time trying to meet with our visa counselor at Babylonia. We got lots of advice and some magic numbers, like after rent and insurance the German government expects for you to have about 345Euro/mo. to live here, and if you can prove you have that you should be fine for a permit. We feel fairly confident about where we are at to apply, although the longer we wait, the less money we have...but I guess that is also the longer we are here, so it evens out in the end. She suggested we go to the 'amt' sometime after the New Year but before I start my language classes on the 14th and gave us both a form which says we are taking classes for the upcoming year which will hopefully help us in acquiring a student visa. With a student visa you can even legally work 90 days a year (or on average about 2 days a week), which will be perfect when that time comes. I think that we are going to try and work it out so that we go that we go apply on the same day as SS and if Br can come he could help us all out with his German speaking skills. But, everyone says it depends so much on who you get to review your application and even what kind of mood they are in. But, Babylonia also gave gave us some info on a German government office that helps people who are applying for visas, especially if you run into any problems with the amt.

I learned recently that part of the German 'left' politics is a very pro-immigrant stance. While walking by a squat we asked Ma what this phrase meant that we kept seeing, and she explained it meant something like "foreigners stay, nazis leave", which summarizes the position. All of a sudden it made a lot more sense why an ex-squat like Babylonia would be helping foreigners (and esp. refugees) so much with language courses and free visa counseling.

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We then stopped at SS's to pick up my hair cutting supplies I had left there the night before. We stopped for a light meal at a restaurant/bar around the corner and had a baguette sandwich and some German spaghetti dish that doesn't really have marinara sauce but more of an olive oil based sauce with savory onions and mushrooms and other spices. It was better than it sounds or looked like but was a bit heavy.

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On Thursday I experienced another closing of the circle of friends-of-friends. Way back on Dec. 2nd I posted about meeting SS's friend Gr. Gr works for an artist, WN. After learning this I checked out his site and was intrigued about a lot of the work, esp. some early painting trays he made.

A while back I also contacted the one person I knew was living in Berlin, EB, but last I had talked to her (at Vision Request back in May) she said that she would not be staying the winter in Berlin because she couldn't take the cold gray weather (and was shocked that we would consider moving here in November). I emailed her anyway and she got a hold of me on Wed. (too bad 'cause she knows PE too and just missed her) but we made plans for Thurs. night. I showed up at her apartment, near KW, that is only about a 15 minute walk and was introduced to her long time boyfriend, who just so happens to be the same WN that Gr works for! I had actually even met him briefly when her visited Skowhegan, where EB and I met. Now that is a crazy coincidence.

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On Friday was Br's birthday party which was at a kinda random place a DJ they knew was playing. It was called Abraxas and was in Charlottenberg, and area of town on the other side of Tiergarten we hadn't been to yet, so we had no idea what to expect. We first stopped by Ma's because we had invited her along. She is staying at some friend's apartment on the edge of the Mitte, kinda near the Reichstag. The apartment was right on the Spree and was pretty amazing. There were lots of familiar paintings, but not familiar enough for us to be sure of the artist's names, and Ma didn't know either. There was one large painting in the dinning room that was a large white canvas with kind of topographic layers of transparent spectrum colored resin pours. If anyone knows whose work this is, please let me know because it is driving me crazy that I cannot remember who it is.

So all three of us headed out about 11:30pm (Berlin party-time). Abraxas was slow at first but soon was flooded with an older crowd, maybe in their 40s and 50s. It was also a surprisingly mixed crowd (in all senses of the word) esp, for Berlin which general is far more white than what I am used to from San Francisco. It was 'Funk and Afro-beats' night, but there were a mix of various other genres like Salsa. We later learned that this bar historically has been known as a place that white women come to meet black men. This was a strange parallel to a film we had seen recently in the WWII Fassbinder movie "Die Ehe der Maria Braun" (or something like The Marriage of Maria Braun) where she marries her husband Hermann on the front lines before he leaves for battle, falsely hears he is dead, and starts working in a club where black US soldiers come for German female companionship. I won't ruin the rest of the movie, and since we watched it in German I can't really give exact details anyway, but is was really good. Anyway, whoever was there it became exceedingly obvious this was a bar people came to pick up other people, which was fairly entertaining, but since none of us were looking for 40+ year old companionship, it was not exactly 'our scene'. We had fun though and ended up staying until about 4 am.