glow.like.berlin

OR: HOW I LEARNED ABOUT TREND TRANSPARENT

One of the charming aspects of living in Germany is that periodically you are invited to immerse yourself in Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmare world. This is truly a delight for any person.

Yesterday it was a matter of officially registering myself as a resident of Berlin, receiving a card which will permit me to pay taxes (thanx) and getting sthg of unclear nature called a “rote Karte”, the last of which having mutated into my mission for today.

My notes begin like this: ‘the problem with writing when bored may be that you only ever have boring things to say’. o right. good point.

I go on to establish myself as a creepy ubahn character. ‘its fun to look @ppl until just that instant when it gets weird; they feel your eyes on them, maybe wonder whats going through your head, glance back, hostile, curious, alarmed, confused, bemused.’

Followed by a nonsequitur ‘wtf postnasal drip from antibiotics?’ i rly was wondering this at the time though (is it normal? still don’t know)

On the U8 I think about the U8. Chummy, harmless, it is nice and wide, like the U5, there’s enough space for everybody’s knees and elbows, babies and dogs. It’s full of friendly types like tourists and large clean families, shoppers and activeppl. it is not like the U1, cagey and hard, eyelinerstalebeerknowinglaughter. My furtive observational demeanor is definitively out of place here.

Outside, the weather is playing jokes again, one minute rain like the ocean turned upsidedown then it stops abruptly & before I have time to close it the wind has turned my umbrella inside out snapping one of its mechanical spiderlegs so it droops sadly now on one side like a tent left out in the backyard all summer. sometimes the sun comes out.

Shortly after I enter the preposterous beehive of hallways and offices and waiting rooms that is the Bürgeramt. having finished registering without a hitch and only a short wait, miracle miracle, I logically decide to travel around the corner to the Finanzamt for my Lohnsteuerkarte. Here I wander around until I find the Info-area, take a number, the ticker dings instantly, I walk in, notice how I had to take a number even though no one else is waiting.

The woman sends me back to the Bürgeramt. This is where Lohnsteuerkarten are to be had. I slink back around the block, get a new number (for which i also have to wait in a line in some obscure and unmarked corner of the waiting room) back to my seat, back to watching the sign like a digital alarm clock from the 80s, bigred lightup numbers chiming every 30 sec sounding like the seatbelt light on an airplane. 177. i have 188, had 165 earlier. if i’d known.

Now the number sign seems to be using it’s imagination, getting zany and bold, 245, 457, 321. 188?plz?

For reasons unknown, the Bürgeramt had a book exchange table downstairs, which donated these treasures to me:

While waiting i get sthg advertised as peach iced tea from the coffee machine, out drops a tiny crimped brown plastic cup and almost just as quickly it was frothing over with mysterious brew, this continued for 10 sec, fizzy liquid sloshing into the grate underneath. what I got, finally, tasted like when you order gingerale at a chinese restaurant but there is no syrup left in the fountain so you get like bubbly dishwater. drank it all.

There is a flat-screen TV in one corner playing a program called “Warte-TV für Berliner Bürgerämter”, this seems like the strangest thing thats happened all day. Now they are showing sthg called “Kleintier-Vermittlung”, helping rodents connect with other rodents, rabbits seeking chinchillas, bios include details like “had a cold”.

Finally finally finally it is my turn, I find the room, I sit down, I talk to the lady, she makes a big mean sad face at me, I don’t need what I think I need (Lohnsteuerkarte), in fact she can’t give me one just now, it is not allowed for me to have this. It has taken me 2 hrs to find this out.

So instead of throwing myself into oncoming traffic I spend an hour in a thrift store. Lindt 2nd Hand Clothes, Kortestr. 16 (tel 030 691 79 10), open mon-fri 11-18h. Slightly less self-destructive and just as effective at helping me forget my wasted day. at first went inside because it used to be a chocolate shop, still has Lindt signs all over the place, probably i was hungry. it is one of those weird berlin stores with baby doll heads and weird crocheted items for dubious purposes propped up everywhere you look. they have a pretty good selection, of course hand-picked and so multiple times what you would expect to pay for ‘old clothes’, youll pay btw 9 and 15 for a shirt, 20-30 for a dress. weird or interesting or “kult” items can be disproportionately exorbitant, this pair of white 80s overalls i thought were ‘kinda cool’ would have cost 70. but then i found this amazing fur hat (too small for my head but fit the mysize barbie it was perched on just great), only 24. in the end I emerged with a weird shiny green suit perfect for the court jester I sorta felt like.

but it is pretty cool, no?

so Rote Karte today, which, as I found out only today, verifies that I understand what typhus is and that i should stay home from work if i have it. They also made sure (via video and pamphlet) that I know how to recognize when I have it, since food poisoning is obv so fun its sometimes easy to forget ur sick. This was today: flashback to high school health class, a room that smells like chalk and sweat and dirty mopwater, rowed up mismatched chairs facing an open TV cabinet. The movie will be 18 mins says the woman who led us here from the waiting room like ducklings, wider than she is tall. The poor Spanish kid I saved from being sent home until he could return with a translator (he spoke some English) is sitting next to me, not understanding a word.

To recover I go shopping again. First I take the S-Bahn to Warschauer Str., Visby store on Gärnterstraße outfits me with a spacesuit, perfect for all this rain and hellweather.

finally on the way home, in hopes of finding thrift items NOT priced at twice what they cost when they were new, I hit Humana 2nd hand, Frankfurter Tor 3, a 5-story behemoth that somehow managed to contain nothing of value or interest, and even so was overpriced, besides an umbrella, another useful item for this weather, which i managed to haggle down to 3 euro, tossing my crippled one on the way out.

Humana might be worth investigating for raw amusement factor, though, the 5th floor being comprised entirely of what some alien interpreted as “TREND”, 50s/60s/70s/80s vintage, though it happens to be a selection of the most horrible things in the store, not necessarily even all that old.

Trend Transparent seems to be items made of brightly colored, fine mesh, something Topanga might have worn on Boy Meets World. Humana keeps the secret of this trend highly guarded.  (actually im pretty sure i knew about this trend when i was in 6th grade.)  Its time the whole world learned about trend transparent.