Tag: Berlin

Guzzling round the globe

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

“Drink well and travel often.” — Anonymous 

Read, write, gab and guzzle — those are my priorities when I hit the bar scene on my world travels. I do this often, with gusto and curiosity and, of course, thirst. 

Bars, lounges, pubs, with their discrete quirks and personalities, present windows into a country, its culture and people. Dim and cozy, they are places in which to unwind after long days of investigation and staggering amounts of relentless walking. Drop on a stool, plop into a banquette, the body at rest. Let the slurping begin.  

In my travels I become quite the barfly — using the excuse, Hey, I’m on vacation! — bopping between the dive and the divine, the joint with the jukebox, brews and “Pulp Fiction” posters and the immaculate, high-design haven where cocktails shimmer in candlelight. I won’t deny a fine old-fashioned pub. There, Guinness is god, soccer roars on a Times Square of screens and that aroma is deep-fried you name it. I smell nirvana.

Teetotaler or tippler? Dry January — keep it. This is drenched January, considering how my brother and I behaved on our recent jaunt to Hong Kong. We drank not to excess, but often, be it at a bar, a restaurant, a hole in the wall, like the Japanese-themed joint with 10 seats next to our hotel. (We adamantly don’t do clubs. We’re not teenagers.)

Drinking is a spiritual event — spirits abound. Getting wasted is far from the point and is the poor man’s demolition of brain cells and his dignity, not to mention his liver. (“The liver is evil, it must be punished.” — Anonymous) Drunk? No, just buzz me in.

I like bars that allow dogs. They’re good company and rarely slur their words. 

Soccer may flicker on screens in some bars, but people-watching is my spectator sport. If luck abides, it can lead to meeting locals and fellow travelers, which I’ve done countless times. Some of my acquaintances remain email pen pals years on. They hail from Turkey, Vietnam, France, Japan, Lebanon, India and Spain. 

I’m not the most people-ly person, but these contacts are nourishing, even edifying. There was, for instance, lovely Lina in Beirut, a non-drinker who wound up driving me up the coast of Lebanon for a full-day tour that I never would have managed on my own. No strings attached.

I’m a promiscuous sipper, be it bourbon or beer, though I prefer my cocktails on the sweet and sour side, a little sting. My brother prefers the bite of bitters and high-proof browns. Gin and tonic is my go-to, but I enjoy perusing, and sampling, an inspired cocktail menu, and quality lagers are always an option (IPAs, not so much). I had a gin drink, the Pickled Cucumber Gimlet, at the suave, view-dazzling Avoca bar in Hong Kong that featured pickles and “fire tincture.” It was delicious — sweet, sour, a zap of spice. I ordered it again.

The stylishly casual bar in the Château Royal hotel in Berlin boasts of its “artistry, dedication and genuine hospitality,” and it earns those bragging rights. My brother and I liked it so much last October, and became friendly with the servers over six days, that we even had our morning coffee on its velvet barstools.

And that’s the thing. What makes a bar extra special, what makes you yearn to go back, are the people tending it, from the wildly tattooed and the wisecrackers, to the terse, humble and the tidily dressed, who (hopefully) have an impish twinkle in their eye.

Chatting with them you learn their names, where they’re from, how long they’ve worked there, and what, if any, are their day jobs (usually it’s something admirably offbeat and artistic). And it’s a mutual, symbiotic relationship. “You wanna be where everybody knows your name” goes the song. Well, yeah.

You might think these dimly lit haunts are precipitants of mortality, death’s lubricants. I counter they are refuges of relief, little saviors on life’s pocked avenues, pitstops of pleasure, at best taken in moderation. I drink, therefore I am.

Those great bars, whose names, courtesy of coaster and cards, we always remember. And those great bartenders, real heroes whose names we always get, and always, alas, forget. 

“Drink. Travel. Books. I went broke, but I had a hell of a time.” — Anonymous 

A fantastic bartender at the great Hong Kong restaurant Ho Lee Fook (a pun, say it slowly) serves me a zesty whiskey sour. She also created her own cocktail that she serves in tiny glasses gratis, a nice post-meal touch. We liked it so much, she joined us in another swig.
Knockout gin and tonic in Paris. A little frou-frou, but yum-yum.
Mixing our drinks at famed Italian restaurant Carbone in Hong Kong. That spread of food is the dessert cart.
Alkymya is a sublime little bar in Naples, Italy. That extravagant plate of bites is complimentary, and all the more amazing for it.
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Tiny bar in Tokyo — maybe eight stools — that I haunted often. Fun bartender on the left, and the colorful owner.
This friendly guy in Berlin makes his own top-notch gin — the name of it eludes me, but the recipe includes coffee — and he’s concocting a superb G&T for me.
At this lesbian bar in Hong Kong, The Pontiac, the signature cocktail is the Hobnail — blended Scotch, ginger, Averna, bitters and orange oil. Excellent. That what she’s making.

Wine tasting — look at the size of that “tasting” pour! — in Goreme, a small town in the region of Cappadocia, Turkey.
Our heroic bartending crew at the hotel bar at Chateau Royal in Berlin. True pros. True mensches.
Wonderfully friendly and accommodating bar gang at the barely year-old Socio in Hong Kong, which focuses on libations from the South Pacific. They gave us a generous sample of a unique Australian whiskey when we asked about it. Great drinks, lovely people.

Very cool bartender pouring my drink at Avoca, on the 38th floor of our Hong Kong hotel. He’s only been bartending for three months. Already he’s a master.
Owner/bartender at Bar Jake in Tokyo. The tiny place is a liquid tribute to “The Blues Brothers.” It’s goofy.

Berlin boogie

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

So there we were, rambling the hip Berlin sidewalks, hopscotching crumpled cigarette packs whose contents the locals so blithely puff, and glancing at the endless walls of colorful graffiti that looks like so much bubble-lettered gobbledygook, when we stumbled on a little shop that sells porcelain pups. Yes: glazed Great Danes and shiny Schnauzers. My brother and I peered in the windows, pointing, laughing, pining. Too bad the damn place was closed. We moved on, slightly crushed. Onward.

Berlin is a beaut. It may not be the prettiest or most charismatic city I’ve been to — you win, Paris, Istanbul and Tokyo — but it is relentlessly amicable, stylish, pulsing. The city, from which I just returned, has a big determined heart, still pulling itself out of the twin muck of Nazism and Communism, that makes it both a little staid and also, wildly, weirdly, the techno-rave dance capital of the world, a pent-up human energy explosion.

It’s an offbeat charmer, animated by a vibrant polyglot and a diverse people, be it leather-clad Eurotrash, Arab falafel slingers, or well-heeled bougies and their primly groomed doggies. It presents an alluring jumble of history and humanity, culture and cuisine, with a dash of decadence and the pesky ghosts of a bleak past that’s shudderingly recent.

We spent six full days stamping the streets, alleyways, museums and squares of this relatively young metropolis, whose US-backed west and USSR-backed east didn’t reconcile till the Wall came tumbling down in the great thaw of 1989. Much of the architecture looks shiny-new, replacements for the rubble left by ferocious Allied bombings during WWII.

Berlin was also rocked by rock ’n’ roll. We took a tour of  the city’s grungy, arty, DIY underbelly in a vintage 1972 Ford Econoline van driven by the shaggy founder of the Ramones Museum Berlin, which is really just a funky bar strewn with punk artifacts. It’s cool. The tour was happily heavy on David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s ‘70s stint in Berlin, which forged a collective creative milestone in rock, including Bowie’s wondrous “Heroes.” We can be heroes, just for one day. Or, in our case, six days.

A side note: For all its diversity — the Turkish and Arab worlds exert strong stakes — Berlin has blind spots. I saw fewer than three Black people in six days, and that’s troubling and hard to fathom for a US visitor. I googled this and read that most of the Black population lives in the so-called African Quarter, an area I’m pretty sure we didn’t hit and whose existence rather unsettles. Ignorance may place me out of my depth here; facts are elusive. And yet.

And now, a smattering of visuals — alas none of those porcelain pups that so capture the whimsy, artistry and dog-love of the bounty that’s Berlin … 

Berlin Cathedral with the famed, kitschy TV tower of East Berlin

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe — stark, contemplative, abstract

My bed at the lovely Chateau Royal Hotel, with mystifying skeleton-emblazoned canopy

The Tiergarten park, a 520-acre urban oasis in West Berlin, where I sipped a stein of lager in a leafy biergarten

Tiergarten

A bar I wish was open when I passed

Cafe Frieda, my favorite restaurant in Berlin, swathed in that glorious graffiti

Some of the bar staff at our arty hotel, a fantastically hospitable crew, slinging mean, creative drinks
Guinea fowl dinner at my second favorite Berlin restaurant, Eins44 Cantine

The iconic Brandenburg Gate, doing its thing, just sitting there, from the 1700s

One of my new Berlin buds

Tripped up on trips

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

One of the more jackassy things I’ve done lately is buy a small stack of books about Berlin, where I travel to in October, and buy a smaller stack of books about Hong Kong, where I’ve rather rashly decided I will travel to in January. That means I’m planning two big trips at once and it’s not financially healthy nor psychologically joyful. It’s kind of driving me crazy. It’s what is called, in polite society, a dick move.

I’m getting greedy. Or antsy. My wanderlust is in labor, twin trips ready to pop out. Travel is one of my prime passions, and when it’s piqued, I gotta scoot. Move over Berlin, Hong Kong is a’calling. 

After marinating for weeks in all things Berlin, I’m now thinking about Hong Kong more than the German capital. Honestly, I haven’t even read all my Berlin books and here I am scouring hotels on an overpopulated island with precarious ties to China. It’s like I’m leapfrogging, snarfing down dessert before the second course has even arrived.

Before I decided on Berlin, I made two false starts in my annual travel plans. I bought a ticket to Santiago, Chile, why I’m not quite sure. I scuttled that. Toronto (wha?) was next, until I ditched that idea, too. Then somehow Berlin — massive history, fine fall weather, beer, bratwurst and beer — zapped in my brain like a neon laser in a sweaty, druggy East Berlin club. Haven’t been there in many years, I mused, let’s check it out as a real adult, which is an entirely relative concept.

Berlin. Cool. Right on. My brother’s coming. Six days. It will be a blast.

And then Marrakesh beckoned. That’s right. 

In the midst of planning Berlin, the travel bug — a venomous, cackling black widow — bit again. It left an awful, itchy wound that somehow led me to Morocco’s great, dusty, tout-teeming desert carnival, even though I’ve been there before, if briefly. I stocked up on Marrakesh guides from the library. I viewed YouTube travelogues. I re-watched Hope and Crosby’s “Road to Morocco” (not really, but now I want to; it’s sublimely funny). 

But Marrakesh quickly proved a desert mirage. That place is hard work — posh but primitive, hagglers hectoring you incessantly, too many redundant souks or bazaars, and, this one gets me right here, open animal abuse, from chained-up performing monkeys to broken-down donkeys. I’m in no mood for a personal PETA patrol.

Back to square one in planning trip number two, which, recall, is preposterous as I’m still shaping up Berlin. So I decamp to the attic, where I read and research trips. The attic is my hermitage, my retreat, my man cave (wait, scratch that last one). After I nixed Marrakesh, I brainstormed places to go in January: Singapore, Taiwan, Croatia, Switzerland, Brussels, even Slovenia. Fail, all. 

I alighted on Hong Kong for myriad reasons: cool, dry winter weather, world-class cuisine, zesty street culture, neon insanity amid forests of skyscrapers and breathtaking mountains, island getaways, ravishing exoticism, Jackie Chan. 

And so I juggle two journeys, one in fall, one in winter. I try to keep my angst in check — the costs! the logistics! — and I think I’m holding it together.

“Boo-hoo,” you say. 

“Such problems,” you cluck.

I know, I know, I reply, face the shade of a ripe radish.

B-sides: Beatles to Berlin

~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

Lying in bed, listening to music, the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” comes on, and I’m entranced anew. What a weird, wondrous thing it is, this John Lennon tune from 1967. Not quite rock, not quite orchestral, the four-minute track is something like psychedelic balladry meets woozy dreamscape. Yet it grooves and sways. Lennon’s cryptic poetry garlands the song’s kaleidoscopic effects — strings, horns, Mellotrons, tape loops — arranged by studio wiz George Martin. The result is marvelously sui generis. Listening in a nocturnal haze, it hits me that “Strawberry Fields,” a late-period masterpiece, may be my favorite Beatles song, a strong statement considering how many stone-cold gems the band produced in a mere seven and a half years together. I love so many Beatles songs — “Here Comes the Sun” to “Blackbird”; “I Am the Walrus” to “In My Life” — that I’d be here all day typing titles I can hardly live without. I’ll take “Lovely Rita” and “Norwegian Wood” over “Across the Universe” and “Come Together,” but that’s like saying I’ll take oxygen over water. Impossible. Their music is that gloriously essential.

The wonder boys.

In Berlin, where I’m headed this fall, I’ve signed up for a whack-sounding tour called Get in the Van! DIY & Subculture City Tour, in which you board a classic 1972 Ford Econoline van and “explore Berlin’s subculture and all things DIY, past and present, from the 1970’s until now: the bars, the squats, the venues, the backyards and the basements.” David Bowie’s heralded Berlin years, with pals Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Brian Eno, are covered, as is the post-Wall cultural efflorescence of the ‘80s and ‘90s. The tour is run by the planet’s only legit Ramones Museum, a punk paradise bulging with artifacts and more from the fugliest band ever. The Ramones, who I saw live twice, were deep-dyed New Yorkers. A museum in Berlin? Besides the fact bassist Dee Dee Ramone grew up in Berlin, another reason for its existence there is that the so-called biggest Ramones fan resides in the city and opened the shrine to all things Ramones. I hear he shouts “Gabba gabba hey!” unprovoked. One can hope.

Back in black

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

After an unintentional hiatus of chronic brain farts, here are a few bite-size entries:

Tripping over trips

I bought a flight to Chile. And scrapped it. I bought a flight to Toronto. And scrapped it. Fickle? Right. Even after planning and paying I decided neither destination would slake my thirst for culture, art, food, action. So I scotched them in favor of the capital of the European Union’s most populous nation, that mad beehive of historical and cultural abundance, Berlin. Chile would have happened this month, Toronto last month, and Berlin, well, it’s a ways off — October. Yet as with any trip, I’m already committing vigorous reportage, booking tours and meals, boning up on the history and italicizing gotta-see sights, from the fabled Reichstag and remnants of the Wall (now vibrant murals) to Hitler’s bunker (that fetid suicide pit) and the enticing Museum Island — five museums colonizing a mid-city isle on the lovely Spree river. Sounds great, I think. Equally terrific: I got full refunds for the Chile and Toronto trips. Did I mention my brother is coming along? Fine company, he’s also a crack navigator, which is perfect for me who gets hopelessly lost the second I step out of the hotel. I’m the guy holding a huge, creased paper map upside down, battling fluttering winds.

Doggy style

I don’t laugh out loud very often while reading, but I did, a lot, soaking in Miranda July’s new novel “All Fours,” a warm, warped, touching, unashamedly naughty and riotous love story that goes places you’re never quite prepared for. It’s a joy. The story follows the romantic zigzags of a 45-year-old artist who’s a married mother but stumbles upon unlikely love with a much younger man who likes to dance. Sex, perimenopausal panic and motel redecorating ensue. It’s conventional until it’s not, both bawdy and bizarre, with just the right touch of July’s signature kookiness. Never has the writer — who’s also an actress and filmmaker — been more in control of her habitual twee impulses. And never has she been so seamlessly funny.

Doggy style part II

Cubby the magical mutt is, I’m afraid, getting old. The guesstimate age for this chipper rescue pup is seven to eight, solid middle-age in human years — paunches and ear hair, janky joints and jowls, gray and grumbles. Yet while he can be a bit creaky scrambling up the stairs and some tiny warts have mushroomed on his compact body, Cubs still plays chase with his stuffed Yoda and barks with shattering verve at the random car horn and rumbling UPS truck, more than ever in fact. But he’s also more neurotic than he was in his slavering, carefree youth. Sometimes if landscapers are extra noisy or the wind rustles the trees in violent whooshes the dog will quiver and hide under my legs or behind a chair. Also, his outside duties (doodies?) seem harder to coax out of him. Otherwise Cubby’s a hale old boy, snapping up treats and begging for belly rubs. He sleeps well, too, though his snoring can register 7.5 on the Richter scale. Those little earthquakes are a thing of most assured comfort.

His head looks enormous.