Bonkers 'on tour' in Germany again: The travel bit - Part 1: Berlin & Hamburg

It is two years since my favourite band, The Monochrome Set, last toured Germany.  On that occasion, they were promoting their new album, Platinum Coils, and I attended four of the gigs and sold the merchandise. And now they have a new album, Super Plastic City - also available in vinyl! (never say never...) - so it was time to hit the gig trail there again. This time the band started their itinerary with a one-off date in Paris, but I decided to join them in Berlin at the start of a six day circuit of Germany. And this time round I didn't have the responsibility of doing the merch either - Jane and her husband, who procured me that bottle of Méharées featured in my last post - were happy to do the honours.

NB I have decided to split this post into several parts - two(?) to recount the travel aspects of the tour, and one to cover the sniffing side of things, which was by no means all shop-based this time...

Berlin 

St Patrick's Day dawned bright and...what am I talking about?  I was stirring well before dawn to catch a train to Birmingham airport.  And having got up at the to me unimaginably early hour of 4.30am (says she, easing into the swing of German syntax before I have even left England!), I was uncharacteristically ravenous by 7am, and ordered French toast with bacon in a branch of the diner chain, Frankie and Benny.

When my food arrived, I was crestfallen to see that it looked to all intents and purposes like fried bread, with no fluffy yellow quilting, and only barely detectable trace elements of egg in its greasy core.  I ate one slice because I was hungry, toyed with the other, and decided to complain to the waitress when she predictably popped back to inquire if everything was all right with my meal.  She then fetched the chef, a kindly Indian gentleman, who apologised profusely and explained that he might not have been '100% sure' how to make French toast, and that he deferred to my judgement on how it should be.  'Definitely with...you know...egg.' I piped up brightly.   Then before I knew it, the waitress had presented me with a voided bill for £0.00, even waiving the cost of the perfectly decent pot of tea I had ordered with the toast.

So that little customer service coup put me in a cheerful frame of mind, which was further reinforced by a curious sign in the ladies toilets.  The term 'multi-faith washing' seemed to imply that you must be a member of a minimum of two religions to qualify to use these facilities, which on the face of it seemed an unlikely scenario.  Baptist and Buddhist?  Methodist and Muslim?  It was a conundrum.

After a quick shufty in the Duty Free (to be covered later in 'The scented bit'), it was soon time to board the flight. As I stood queuing on the jetway, I caught a glimpse of the two pilots in the cockpit and gave them a searching stare. It was just after the terrible business with the missing Malaysian plane, and the flying public everywhere was ultra-twitchy.  One theory at the time was that - for whatever reason - the pilots of MH370 had deliberately deviated from their flight path, so I was trying to suss out if this Germanwings duo looked like the sort to have other, undisclosed travel plans.  Suddenly, the first officer turned round and smiled broadly in my direction, and I decided that my fears were probably unfounded...

Germany began in fact the moment I set foot on the plane: for the flight attendant wished everyone 'Guten Morgen', even the passengers with a complimentary copy of the Birmingham Mail tucked under their arm. From this point on, there was no real milk, only the condensed travesty that is Kaffeesahne, and as we touched down, the captain wished us all a 'pleasant remaining day'.

The Germans knit too - yay!

I jumped on a bus to my hostel in the east of the city.  It was a huge, echoey, rabbit warren of a building, that turned out to be a former school.  Rather unexpectedly for such budget accommodation, it boasted a pool, but as I learnt when I pitched up there in my costume at 8.11am the next morning, it didn't open till 10am. Why of course it didn't! - the young people who make up the typical clientele will still be in their pits until gone noon...

How could I miss it?!

Back to Monday though, and the first gig at Monarch in Kreuzberg, a scruffily modish area south of the river. Even though I had been to two previous gigs bang next door to the club in question, I still couldn't find the entrance. 'Never being able to find the door of a venue, however many times you have been there before' is in fact an incontrovertible rule of the German indie scene, and after staring quizzically at assorted unmarked doors covered in a palimpsest of peeling posters and stickers, I was relieved to see the band's drummer suddenly hove into view, who was able to escort me the 10 yards to the club.

Bass player's eye view

The venue was upstairs, with a large expanse of windows along one wall overlooking the Kottbusser Tor metro station.  This prompted the guitarist to quip, mid-set: 'I wonder how many bass players have been lost out this window?  Look, the putty is still fresh!'  Other trademark features of Monarch - and most such grungy venues - is that it was smoky(!) and very, very dark.  I could just make out the flock wallpaper which was an eerie match for my blue brocade trousers.

My trousers!

This unexpected coincidence prompted the band to throw down the gauntlet and dare me to coordinate my trousers with the wall coverings in every venue.  Given the capsule wardrobe I had brought with me and the unknown decor of all the clubs to come, I hadn't a hope in hell of pulling off this stunt, but airily accepted the challenge regardless.

The wallpaper!

Another 'running gag' on the tour was the vanishingly small dressing rooms.  At Monarch, a table football table was pressed into service.  By the time we got to Bavaria, the sight of band members stripped to the waist outside the men's toilets didn't prompt so much as a raised eyebrow.

The Monarch gig was enthusiastically received, with a number of regulars in the audience whom I recognised from previous tours.  These included a Japanese lady with striking long blonde hair, who danced enthusiastically in the front row, thrusting two toy bunnies before her like a pair of furry maracas.

The dancing bunnies

After the gig, Jane and her husband headed straight back to their hotel with the merch case, while I did a spot of impromptu roadying.  I carried the bass player's guitar part of the way back to their eclectic, comprehensively graffiti-daubed accommodation, then joined them at a nearby kebab shop for a quick snack.  I took it upon myself to negotiate the menu in German, notably the various sauce options and choice between chips and pitta.  Yet again I fell into that trap of 'involuntary raw onion consumption': trying to effect a triage between halloumi cheese and the mountains of accompanying lettuce and red onion garnish was a doomed undertaking.

Hamburg

After the abortive pool incident first thing, it was a relatively short train ride to Hamburg next day - just two hours - and I was lucky to be able to check into my hotel off the notorious Reeperbahn pretty much immediately.  Jane and her husband were staying in a former brothel(!) that had been converted into a hotel, and it didn't open till 3pm. But of course not!  For in the red light district no one does any business that early...;) Although my hotel was geared towards conventional check in times, it was bang next door to one of the many sex shops and lap dancing clubs in the street.  Which you could say was entirely in keeping with its name - 'Grosse Freiheit' ('great freedom').

My friends' rather blue - and bullish - ex-brothel

My deceptively saintly hotel, with en suite strip joint

After a quick lie down, I decided to revisit some old haunts by the harbour and grab a bite to eat before the gig.  In particular, I recalled a bijou and inconspicuous venue called the Goldener Pudel Klub, housed in a concrete bunker, and was curious to see if I could find it again after a long interval.  I narrowed the field down to two 'bunker-esque' buildings, then caved in and asked someone...

Goldener Pudel Klub - still surprisingly hard to find - the door takes even longer

Next up, I headed for a favourite restaurant along the quay, where I got stuck into what ex-Mr Bonkers used to term 'big fish'.  Or rather 'three small fish in batter', which collectively could be equated with one big one.  Somewhat intoxicated from an overly large small glass of wine with my dinner, I strode purposefully to the venue in the drizzling rain - any loitering along the way can readily be misconstrued round these parts.

That night's venue, Astra-Stube, is a converted bakery that holds about 10 people comfortably, but is billed as having a capacity of 200.  I am not sure how many were in that night, but suffice to say that ordering a drink on one side of the room or using the toilets on the other involved the burrowing skills and force of character normally associated with tunnel engineers.  The audience was packed soooo cheek by jowl that when people posted photos of the gig on Facebook the next day, I recognised their avatars and cover photos from having had a forest of phones waved around just inches from my face. In this club the dressing room had shrunk to a small dark void under the merch table where sundry band members had risked chucking the odd belonging.

Steve the drummer warily eyeing up on-stage 'sharps'

The stage was similarly 'compact', and there was a very real concern that the band's guitar headstocks could do someone a mischief.  Add a pall of cigarette smoke into the mix, a large brown dog threading itself between people's legs, and a suffusion of red light, and you had the quintessence of the alternative music scene in St Pauli...

After the gig, we flagged down taxis in the busy intersection outside.  Jane couldn't resist ribbing me about 'standing on street corners', but I suppose it had to be done...

Coming up: Cologne, Augsburg - and Berlin again...and The Scented Bit!

Bonkers "On Tour" In Germany: The Travel Bit Proper

Okay, so it has become customary in these trip reports on Bonkers to have at least one post devoted to a roundup of observations from my travels: part miscellany of mishaps, part random trivia spotted along the way, so this is that post. Excluding a couple of items which fell more naturally in my earlier "tour post", such as the German penchant for grungy music venues, with their unmarked doors and copious amounts of graffiti - and - rather surprisingly - loo paper.

So here are some other things that struck me during my week on the road (or on the train, rather) in Germany, in no particular order.

THE "ENJOY YOUR FLIGHT" MISNOMER

This one has been brewing for a long time...Have you noticed how the captain will always say something along the lines of: "Sit back, relax, and enjoy your flight!"? How odd. For given that in my case we are talking a short haul flight, with hard and relentlessly upright seats, overpriced meal deals involving brown sludge topped with hot water posing as luxury hot chocolate, and irritating scratch card promotions - that's always assuming you don't have a toddler kicking the back of your seat or a stag party in the same row - I don't personally see what is particularly enjoyable about it. I have heard rumours that on long haul flights with Qatar Airways your every whim is ministered to by almond-eyed Miss World contestants thinly disguised as flight attendants. Well, I know they are good for Earl Grey tea while flying over the Pyrenees, say.

IMMIGRATION ETIQUETTE: THE DEMISE OF SURNAMES

Not so long ago, I remember the gradual replacement of the term "Christian name" by the more neutral "First name" on documentation such as visas and landing cards. I can understand the rationale for that, because not every person passing through an airport is a Christian - far from it. But lately I have noticed a parallel trend to subsituting the term "Family name" for "Surname". What's that all about? Might "Family name" not count as discrimination against single people, who don't exactly constitute a whole family unit as such, albeit they will usually have had one at some point. But as a term for your "last name", it strikes me as overly populous. Just saying.

PICKING THE WRONG QUEUE AT PASSPORT CONTROL

We've all done it - and I seem to do it more than most - namely pick the longest queue at passport control, which turns out to have all the suspected illegal immigrants in it. In our increasingly multi-cultural society you would think that no particular ethnicity or other aspect of someone's appearance would strike the passport control officers as out of the ordinary. Perhaps decisions to stop and grill visitors at the border about the purpose of their stay is due to some irregularity with their passports, or a telling travel pattern that is somehow suggestive of illicit work.

I always used to think that a large amount of luggage might be the giveaway, but based on my own observations this doesn't seem to hold up. I've seen visitors get stopped who arrive with a single item of hand luggage, the better to deflect suspicion perhaps? Maybe they plan to hotfoot it down to M & S with their first week's wages and buy a triple pack of shirts and a pentuplet pack of pants. Or maybe they have got the art of handwashing their smalls down to a fine art. These are the sort of whimsical thoughts that flit through my mind during the long queue shuffling vigils at passport control...

CONCRETE VISTAS FROM HOTEL ROOMS

On this trip two of my four hotel rooms, in Stuttgart and Berlin, looked out onto a building site. For 50% of my accommodation to have such an uninspiring aspect struck me as well over the odds, and by the end of the week I was finding the sight of cranes level with my hotel window strangely reassuring.

WATER METERS IN UNEXPECTED PLACES

In Hamburg I was startled to find no soap in the shower cubicle, not even one of those annoying squeezy wall-mounted dispensers, whose displacement of soap I lamented in this earlier post. This meant that I had to nip out of the shower several times in the course of my ablutions to squirt some soap onto my hands from the dispenser over the sink before jumping back in again. There was, however, one unexpected fixture in the shower cubicle, namely a pair of water meters! We have a water meter under the sink in the kitchen, but this was my first encounter with two of the things in a shower. There was a red one one for hot water and a blue one for cold. Additionally, the shower had a hot and cold tap, also coded in red and blue. However, it took me a full five minutes of running freezing water from the red tap to realise that the hot tap was in fact the blue one. And of course meanwhile the cold water meter was cycling through merrily, swelling the coffers of the local utility company, Hamburg Wasser, as yet another punter was fooled into wasting water unnecessarily.

Okay, so this photo shows yet another unexpected place for a water meter - imagine this same style, but fitted to the wall in the shower!

ABUSING WASTE BINS

While we are on the subject of waste, there were two incidents on this trip where I flouted the strict German guidelines for waste segregation. For as is increasingly the way these days, public litter bins typically come with four compartments: Paper, Packaging, Glass and "Other Rubbish". However, I was in such a rush to jump on my train to Berlin that I rammed an empty Chinese takeaway container, complete with bag, cutlery and residual gloop, into any old hole out of the four without even stopping to look. And not an hour later, I bought a choc ice on the train, but didn't like it. So at one of the first stations we came to (sorry, Göttingen!) I leapt off the train during its two minute stop and hastily stuffed the ice cream detritus in another unidentified bin compartment, knowing full well that my abandoned Magnum would shortly have melted into a milky puddle at the bottom, whicht some poor refuse disposal operative would have to swab off.

POINTLESS PRETZELS

This observation is also long overdue...for reasons best known to himself the bass player donated a packet of pretzels to me in Darmstadt, which I dutifully ate on the way up to Hamburg. What a spectacularly pointless foodstuff are they?! Yes, the best that can be said about pretzels is that they are a "rigid, cylindrical, salt delivery mechanism". And that is being kind.

NON-MARAUDING YOUTHS

After the Stuttgart gig, I was making my way back to my hotel about 1.15pm, when two lads approached me in the middle of the shopping centre and very politely asked if I knew a good pub that opened late. And there's me thinking that if push came to shove I could clock 'em with the glass water bottle I had mineswept from the venue. Well, I know what Stafford is like at night, so I guess my view is a bit jaded. Later I told this story to a friend, who remarked:

"Glad your 'late night encounter' wasn't as scary as it could have been. I guess speaking German helped - I wouldn't have had a clue what they were asking for, and may well have hit them with the bottle anyway."

A TRABANT LIMO

Okay, until I saw one of these with my own eyes, I would have dismissed the phrase "Trabant Limo" as a contradiction in terms, but not so. "Stretch Trabants" are very much alive and well in Berlin, and must surely be the last word in quirky and stylish transport for anyone attending a red carpet event. : - )

NB You can't see the cranes looking this way!

And here's a photo of yet another grungy venue in Berlin - you can't have too many, if you ask me.

Photo of Qatar Airways from globaltravelerusa.com, photo of visa application from docstoc.com, photo of UK border control from news.carrentals.co.uk, photo of water meters from makingthishome.com, photo of waste bin from solarnavigator.net, photo of pretzels from evilmadscientist.com, photo of Stuttgart from en.wikipedia.org, other photos my own