Transgenialer Christopher Street Day: Alternative Pride in Berlin

June 23rd was Pride in Berlin and we celebrated! Berlin actually has two prides, one is Christopher Street Day, the main one, and then there is the Transgenialer Christopher Street Day, the alternative one. We decided to check out the alternative one and marched with them the whole way from Treptower Park to Heinrichplatz to a mix of techno, pop, Bikini Kill and the Butchies, which took several hours. There was a big group of us, including some visitors and a friend from my German class at Smith College who lives in Paris. We kept bumping into other people on the way.

So far I've been to Northampton, MA Pride many times, Brighton Pride in England and Long Island Pride in high school. Somehow I've never been to NYC Pride, which is silly, but will happen one day. Anyway, what is different about this pride is that it isn't commercial at all. A lot of the big prides seem to be mostly stuff like "Coca Cola!!....with rainbow flags...Mercedes!!....with rainbow flags, etc.". Here they blasted lots of music and occasionally gave speeches, which I actually didn't understand much of besides the "Bioladen Prenzlauerberg Bourgeoise", but oh well. We had fun, then we wandered around the street fest afterwards for awhile, took a short break to recharge and get coffee and warmer clothes (for me), then came back and danced in the street until they shut everything down at midnight. Except for a mishap where I was gay bashed by a thorn bush in Görlitzer Park (maybe it wasn't the best place I've ever decided to pee...), it was a fabulous day.

I think the entirety of Berlin was covered in glitter. Did I mention my new obsession with glitter? One day I spent 22 EUR on Claire's just on different types of glitter. It's an addiction.

Pictures!

 

Ready to go!

Pride is clearly the time for ridiculous outfits. Some creepy guy asked me out for coffee on the way to my friend's flat, it went something like, "Du siehst so chic aus, lassen uns eine Kaffee trinken, ich wohn einfach um die Ecke!". Possibly the most inopportune time to hit on me, a lesbian, on the way to PRIDE in a ridiculous colorful outfit, wearing huge rainbow feather earrings, covered in glitter. Someone missed the memo about what day it was. Sorry dude, wrong team.

We'resoexcited!

Still excited.

Note the fantastic headband and pure unadultered excitement.

Yay gay! Unicorns! Rainbows!

If you join our group, you will get covered in glitter. Just a warning.

Happy!

I'm not sure what I'm doing here, but I like it.

"Homophobia fuck you in the knee!" Indeed!

This is the moment we got tired and tried to fix it. Being excited for so long will do that to you.

Please note the rainbow feather earrings, thank you.

Street fest! Lots of people!

Fahrradsternfahrt Or That Time We Biked on the Autobahn.

On June 3rd we decided to do the Fahrradsternfahrt (literally bike star drive), which ended up being one of the most fun things I've done in Berlin so far. My friends Nicole, Marion and I biked about 25km through Berlin through major roads and on the Autobahn (highway), through a tunnel and all places that were normally dominated by cars, but were shut down for us during the ride. We took the shortest route, but all the various routes led to an environmental fest in the center of Berlin by Brandenburger Tor going from the very ends of the U-bahn (subway) lines out in the country (see the map of all the routes above). There was even a very ambitious group who left at 3am and biked all the way from Poland! 

Afterwards there were a bunch of speeches and stands, where I overheard that there had been 150,000 participants and that this is currently the biggest bike demonstration in the world! I really thought it was just going to be a small critical mass type thing, but as we rode we picked up more and more people and by the end we were swarms of bikes filling up the highway in every direction! 

For those who don't know, Berlin is a very bike friendly city, so much so that I was able to overcome my fear of biking around cars, buy myself a bike and have since become bike obsessed. I'm still not hardcore enough to fix my bike myself, except for something like putting air in the tires, but I think I've become bikesexual. I've started checking out bikes instead of the people riding them. My first thought after I bought my bike, having only ever ridden a bike around my small neighborhood when I was a child, was "Oh fuck, now I have to ride it home, maybe this was a bad idea." Now I'm considering buying a guest bike so I don't have to take the U-bahn when I have guests over! 

 Anyway, while there are many bike lanes all through Berlin separated from the street, there are still areas and streets that leave something to be desired. One example was leaving the bike happiness zone of our big bike ride on the highway to being thrown into the traffic in the center of Berlin with no bike lanes and construction forcing us to share tiny single lanes with cars on the way to get Mexican food after our trek. Okay, let's get to the important part....pictures! 

Nicole and I biking on the highway.

The beginning of our journey at Alt-Tempelhof!

Here is the group in the beginning.

About to bike onto the highway and into the tunnel.

We've collected more people! We had to wait like 45 minutes for them to clear the highway at this point.

Biking through the highway tunnel! Blurry, but awesome!

And back into the light!

Biking on the highway!

Marion can bike without hands. I am jealous.

Fellow highway bikers!

There you have it! This next picture was from the Environment Festival and is completely unrelated, but here is a woman milking fake udders for your enjoyment...

So come to Berlin and bike with me!

May Day 2012

On May 1st, we went to the May Day festival in Kreuzberg, which is this mix of riots and street festival. Here is some info taken from an article on May Day on the Exberliner Website (full article here):

[O]n May 1, 1987, a fight started between the police and the autonomists. Ulrike S. remembers watching the events from her flat on Lausitzer Platz, where she used to live with her small child: “The police attacked all of a sudden. Someone helped the women and children escape to the basement of a nearby café, where we waited for things to calm down. It wasn’t until late at night that someone came with a VW minibus and got us out of there. We couldn’t set foot in our apartment for three days because it was saturated with tear gas.” In the course of this Kiezaufstand (“neighborhood uprising”), a Bölle supermarket was burned to the ground. The ruins stood as a reminder of the event until a few years ago, when the enormous mosque opposite Görlitzer Bahnhof took their place.

The 1987 riots were so impressive that the following year, the Kreuzberg lefties decided to hold their own, “revolutionary” May Day demonstration. After the trade union demonstration in 1988, up to 10,000 people gathered at “O-Platz” (Oranienplatz) under the rallying cry “No liberation without revolution”. They marched down “O-Straße” with their arms linked together, their red flags and homemade banners flying, and their faces covered with black ski masks – the uniform of the old-school autonomists. This day, like so many May Days to come, ended in rioting.

...In 2001, with the summit siege in Genoa on the horizon, the conservative Berlin government banned the demonstration – which drove even more people out onto the streets for a massive illegal protest. More than 5000 riot police, brought in from across Germany, couldn’t keep the situation under control. Some 270 officers were injured; 289 people were arrested.

...When the prohibition failed, the city came up with a new strategy: it would fill the streets with party-goers, music, food and beer. This was “MyFest” – presented as an initiative by residents, but financed by the police. In 2005 and 2006, the demonstration was pushed out of the heart of Kreuzberg by MyFest, but soon a counter strategy emerged: the activists held a concert at the edges of the event, featuring well-known international musicians like Kenny Arkana, from France, and Banda Bassotti, from Italy. At 6pm, the demonstration started there and thousands of people joined in.

We ate vegan baked goods for breakfast that morning at Cupcake in Friedrichshain, walked around in the sun, wandered through the festival and hoards of people sipping margaritas and nibbling on street food and listened to various bands as we walked by until the crowds got a bit too much for us. Afterwards we headed to Tempelhof park in Neukölln to chill out and try to find this open air dance party we heard about. While we were sitting on the grass some guy offered to stretch me out on this swing thing, so I had to do it, right? Funny pictures follow. I got my first sunburn of the season and it was a beautiful day, quite perfect for my first May Day.

Rudy, Thea, Rikke and Aleks. Excited for May Day!

So many people

On the way to the park in the U-bahn

Myriam, smile so I can take a picture of these people doing crazy yoga!

Some guy stretching me in this swing thing, lolz.

Doesn't look awkward at all.

Walking to the Open Air party

 And that was May Day in Berlin!

Teufelsberg - The Devil's Mountain

We broke into an abandoned American spy station! A couple/few months ago we went to Teufelsberg, apparently the highest hill/mountain in Berlin where you can see the entire city. Here is some info taken from Wikipedia:

The Teufelsberg (German for Devil's Mountain) is a hill in Berlin, Germany, in former West Berlin. It rises about 80 meters above the surrounding Brandenburg plain, more precisely the north of Berlin's Grunewald forest. It was named after the Teufelssee (i.e. Devil's lake) in its southerly vicinity...It is an artificial hill with a curious history: It was heaped up after the Second World War from part of the rubble of Berlin, approximately 75,000,000 m³ (98,000,000 cu yd) all over the city, during the following twenty years as the city was cleared and rebuilt...

...The US National Security Agency (NSA) built one of its largest listening stations on top of the hill, rumored to be part of the global ECHELON intelligence gathering network. "The Hill", as it was known colloquially by the many American soldiers who worked there around the clock and who commuted there from their quarters in the American Sector, was located in the British Sector. Prior to establishing the first permanent buildings there in the very late 1950s, Mobile Allied listening units had driven to various other locales throughout West Berlin hoping to gain the best vantage point for listening to Soviet, East German, and other Warsaw Pact nations military traffic. It was also used to supervise the West Berlin Air Corridors. One such unit drove to the top of Teufelsberg and discovered a marked improvement in listening ability. This discovery eventually led to a large structure being built atop the hill, which would come to be run by the NSA (National Security Agency). At the request of US government, the ski lifts were removed because they allegedly disturbed the signals. The station continued to operate until the fall of East Germany and the Berlin Wall, but after that the station was closed and the equipment removed. The buildings and radar domes still remain in place.

We climbed through a hole in the fence and wandered around. There were actually lots of people there, which took away the whole "we're going to get in trouble" fear, even if it's apparently still illegal. The Americans used this place to spy on the Russians during the war, and, as they are also apt to do, completely abandoned it without cleaning up any of their shit afterwards. As you can read above, the entire hill/mountain is actually made of rubbish covered in dirt and the giant balls were used to pick up Russian radio signals. We climbed into one of the giant balls and the acoustics were amazing. People were playing flutes and singing opera and banging on shit. Check out the video below to get an idea! Here's one more fun fact I found on Wiki:

During the NSA Operations some other curious things happened: It was noticed that during certain times the reception of the radio signals was better than during the rest of the year. The 'culprit' was found after a while: it was the Ferris wheel of the annual German-American Volksfest Festival on the Hüttenweg in Zehlendorf. From then on, the Ferris wheel was left standing for some time after the festival was over. While there were rumors that the Americans had excavated a shaft down into the ruins beneath, that was never proven, and was likely based on reports that those who maintained equipment in one of the first enclosed antenna structures accessed the upper levels of the inflated dome via an airlock that led to a "tunnel" that was embedded in the structures central column. Speculation as to what might have existed within the highly restricted area frequently gave rise to rather elaborate but false rumors; one theory stated that "the tunnel" was an underground escape route.

Lolz Ferris wheels.


Without further ado...pictures!

On the way, best thing is you can get here via pub transit.

There were lots of holes in the fence that had been fixed up.

This was on the wall of an area filled with prison cells.

Going up? Good luck with that.

Graffiti

The background is an outline of Teufelsberg.

Marion standing by this random little fence in the building.

Has definitely seen better days, whatever this was.

June and Marion exploring.

Me really excited about this door going nowhere.

On the way up to one of the balls.

Marion and Myriam can fly!

View from the top. Balls!

The structures were covered in canvas.

Talk about doors going nowhere. Something REALLY interesting must have been in this room for them to cement it in there.

A sign advertising apartments that were planned to be built here...and then weren't.

And the promised video of inside one of the giant spy balls at Teufelsberg...

If you're in Berlin, you should definitely make a trip over there!