berlin 1

30Jul10

and berlin was pretty, capital p and all pink 🙂 am sure ‘pretty’ is not the word very commonly used to describe the city, and maybe one of the adjectives berliners would not be too happy with… but i really thought that the city is pretty…

i loved all the stones, and the shades of grey and black and ash it brings as a common background colour for the entire city.. and the red and dark brown/black combinations, the sheen/reflectiveness of glass and cold/opaqueness of steel combinations, the yellow and green and black of the leaves on the roads, and all the colours of the graffitis… the east and west berlin walk signals… the greens and the water… the greens and the water 🙂

umm… well i liked the city… this description is not only entirely subjective, but am also talking only about a bit superficial niceties… there are lotsa issues with the city of course… the gentrifications, the polarisation of the city, marginalisation of migrants,  failures of the education system, dependence on social security, the burden and commercial possibilities of the ‘alternative’ culture etc… and i did had insightful cross-cultural discussions about all that… but really not in a mood to talk about that hehehehe

the surface of berlin is pretty… my kind of pretty… a grey base and lotsa colours… and beautiful textures of the base… with all the multi-pattern pavings… okay, allow me be po-mo (terrible labeling) and to say that it is all in the surface… there aint no depth… or rather the depth is right in the surface… berlin has one of the most democratic surfaces i have seen in a city… you talk about any social issue and you would have a graffiti on that… or stark contrast of bricks in renovated and non-renovated buildings standing next to each other in districts facing gentrification… or different historical archi styles next to each other… the history and the present is right there on the surface…

and so for a person alone in an unknown city, walking with a map trying to figure out which street will take me to the workshop venue, the city offers plenty of excitement… expectedly, it would be a very different experience to live there… but am not here writing a description of how it is to live in berlin… this is a note on how it is to walk in berlin… and i walked and walked… and if you are in berlin you should walk and walk… and frequently sit down with a radler (beer+lemonade)… preferably besides a river/canal/other water bodies… but maybe it is not so nice to walk in all the neighbourhoods in all the times… i dont know about that… i did had a disturbing a funny incident when two guys were walking behind me, around midnight, singing a song in english about welcoming foreign people in germany and how germans love to beat people up… might be a late night sense of humour… might be something else… but that is not enough to change my opinion of the city… and of course, this late-night-incidence side of berlin reality is represented on the surface in nazi graffities… which is also duly contested by large anti-nazi graffities… all on the surface… so when i talk about the colours of the city, dont tell me i am not political enough lol

Filed under: urban   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: berlin, colour, graffiti, images, memory, politics, stone, surface