Victory of the Plants

A number of things change when you cross the Pyrenees. The people are more contained and reserved. They smoke their spliffs without the little cardboard filters. And the brakes on bikes are reversed. I learnt this when I was riding along with Thea through wine country taking a video on my camera, when I had to suddenly stop. Now, if you learn nothing else from this email, just remember that in France the back brake is on the right of the handlebars and the front brake is on the left. Those contrarian Gallic scoundrels.

The last time I remember crashing a bike was when I was nine years old and went down the big hill out at the botanical gardens in Wanganui, even though mum told me not to but my mates were watching so I did it anyway and went really fast and crashed. This time I didn’t cry as much, but I felt like an ass, because it wasn’t anything like as awesome. Clutching at the left (front) brake I found myself stopped quite suddenly and catapulted over the handlebars and into the tarmac. I took the skin off my knuckles and elbow. For the next few weeks I couldn’t slide my right hand into my pocket without ripping up my knuckle scabs.

Soon after my humiliation, after frittering away a few more days in French wine country sleeping, drinking and making food, I said a temporary goodbye to France and took a bus to Berlin, leaving my Scottish friend Thea to go and stay with my New Zealand friend Theo. I’m sure there’s a joke there to make about their names, but I can’t think of one.

Now, I consider myself reasonably well informed. I can probably name half of the leaders of the ten most important countries in the world. So how is it that it has escaped my attention that in a country as familiar and important as Germany they do a fundamental thing completely differently? You may not know this, but in Germany they don’t go poos like you and I. Their toilets are different.

I didn’t know there was even that much variation in toilets to begin with, besides the squat toilets of the East and our Western-style thrones. But there is. Toilets in Germany all have a flat ledge that your turds sit on, before they cascade into the bowl and are spirited away down the pipes when you flush.

Seriously, search ‘German toilet’ on Google images. It prevents splashback, I suppose, and lets you properly examine your stool. Next thing I know you’ll tell me that in Lithuania they only poop in recline, or that Macedonians use a funnel.

I can’t tell you exactly what percentage of German toilets have a poo ledge nor can I tell you what its German name is. It’s probably called the Scheissefläche or Fäkateller or something similarly Teutonic. My research only came up with something in English: the ‘Continental shelf’.

“I think I can get into this poo ledge thing,” I said to Theo as I padded into his room about a week into my stay with him.

“Yeah,” he said without looking up from his guitar, “but I always find myself having to help it over the edge with the toilet brush after I’ve flushed”.

“Mmmm,” I replied plaintively, as I shuffled over to my backpack. Perhaps sloping it slightly would help, I thought to myself. I’ll write to Angela Merkel.

Berlin is more than a little bit scruffy. Many of the incidental instances of plant life like the patches around trees, the little gardens on road barriers and the grass strips next to sidewalks are untrimmed and growing vigorously. You often see weeds pushing through the concrete. There are big old trees with their discarded leaves accumulated on swathes of slippery concrete. The tangled, unkempt, wild feeling gives the impression that the plants are taking over the city. I quite like it.

As well as the impending Victory of the Plants, there is a lot to like about Berlin. People say that the true golden years of alternative Berlin have passed, but they say that about a lot of places. Whether or not the drugs were better, the rent used to be cheaper or the music was louder, Berlin still has an unmistakeable vibe about it.

Theo told me about a scene he saw in a night club one night. He entered one of those multi-story, multi-room mega-clubs to find, in the middle of the common area, a guy on all fours, clad in leather or latex with a leash around his neck, the other end of which was held by a lady, and a large dildo sticking out of his bottom. People moved past without taking much notice. I suppose the fellow was probably a software developer or insurance salesman by day. It’s that sort of place.1

Theo has lived there for a while now, playing music (he makes the music for all of my video blogs). He’s even got himself a stormy little artist’s romance with a visiting art student from California. They listen to hip hop together in his loft and allegedly make wild late night love after watching the Berlin sunsets on the roof. He has since said goodbye to her (in Paris!) and written about a thousand songs about his feelings. Sturm und Drang.

While I was there he invited me on a weekend tour with the two-piece band he plays in. It was my first experience as a groupie.

On Friday morning, Theo, Leila (his band mate), Katy (co-groupie and friend of Leila’s) and I loaded into a station wagon, guitars and drums in the back, and headed out of Berlin. Our destination was Halle, a quiet little town that was hosting HerFest, a one day festival of bands fronted by women. Theo, obviously, is not a woman. But I’ve often heard him speak positively about the suffragette movement and, besides, he was only playing drums at the back so wasn’t dominating the stage, oppressing the women, like most men can’t help themselves but do.

As you can imagine, the audience was about the politest that has ever existed. Sheepish dudes in skinny jeans and dreadlocked hippy girls, doing their bit to stick it to the patriarchy on a summer Friday evening. I’ve never been a fan of the patriarchy. In fact the patriarchy can piss off as far as I’m concerned. After a couple of hours of defiant feminist rock I was sitting down to pee.

The next morning our rock n roll station wagon left Halle and rattled across Germany to Offenbach, a small industrial city on the outskirts of Frankfurt, for our next gig. Theo and Leila were playing a set before a Saturday evening screening of a French movie with overdubbed German at a bourgeois café on the banks of the Main.

I helped them to carry the amps and drums down to the stage down by the river and then retired to the backstage trailer to eat some little sandwiches and open the bottled water. And shoot up some heroin.

I joke, of course. Actually while they sound-checked I read some news and had a lie down. Life on the road was tiring me out. When I got up I stuck a couple of beers in my back pockets and strolled down to the grassy bowl where they were playing, thinking that if I couldn’t provide any really strong drugs or easy women I could at least bring Theo a beer.

As the sun lowered over the Main, Theo played a few songs on his guitar and then the two of them played their set. I sat in the white plastic chairs laid out in front of the stage and filmed them, trying to sneakily capture the girl in the front row who was nodding her head dreamily to the music and whose eyes were fixed intently on Theo as he tapped away on his drums.

I suppose that to this girl in this provincial satellite town, a touring Berlin band would have been rather exotic. Behind me on the grass bank small groups of young professionals and middle-class socialites chatted in the summer twilight and watched with glasses of wine and plates of nibbles, waiting for the movie. The mosh-pit was going nuts. Such is the life of a Berlin musician.

After almost two weeks staying with Theo, I left Berlin and flew across the Alps to Milan, then took a train to Genoa. The train cuts through rolling green hills, emerging from dark tunnels to rattle along above rushing streams that glint in the sunlight. At the coast it comes out of the hills and pulls into the grand Piazza Principe station, all stone pillars and sculptures. You emerge from the cavernous, airy atrium into the heat of the plaza and the narrow street down into town.

Genoa spreads from the port up to the houses and pastel apartment blocks of the scrubby surrounding hills. I found myself standing in the piazza outside the train station without a hostel reservation having blithely bet on one of my fifteen couchsurfing requests to come through. Unfortunately all of my entreaties had gone unrequited (it was the height of summer, after all).

Defeated, after trudging around all the desirable places in the town centre, I called the only youth hostel with a spare bed, located a bus and took a long winding ride up the hill to a charmless concrete building that looks down on the harbour and city centre. I checked in, had the mandatory chat with the Italian guy on the desk about New Zealand, confirmed that yes, indeed I am a fan of the All Blacks, collected my sheets and room key, climbed the stairs to dorm room 230 and collapsed on the bed.

When I awoke it was dinner time and I was alone in the room with the low sun warming my feet through the window, making me sweat. I left the hostel to find somewhere to eat in the surrounding neighbourhood. I could see the city lying in the soft light below, and onwards out across the Mediterranean. I walked up and down the steep streets but all the shops were closed. Tumbling down from the open windows and balconies I could hear Italian families eating their dinner with a clinking of plates and indecipherable Mediterranean chatter. An elderly man helped his wife in her summer dress up some stairs on their evening walk. Cars and vespas zipped past me around the hairpin turns on their way home.

Eventually I found a dark and musty bar and bought a sandwich on dry white bread, a small packet of chips and a can of coke, for which I handed over far too much money. The man behind the bar eyed me with visible distrust, as though I had asked him for a tub of Vaseline and the phone number of his eldest daughter.

I found a spot on a bench next to the elderly man and his wife. A container ship was unloading in the port and the domestic sounds of the evening were beginning to slow around the hillsides as the light continued to soften and the golden strip of sun stood out sharper in silhouette against the hills.

I had left Bilbao five weeks previously. I had visited friends in France and in Berlin and I still had a month and a half before I was due back in the Basque Country to find a place to live and start a job.

As I watched the swallows dance above Genoa in the warm, retreating evening, I asked myself, what do I want to do now? Do I want to party? Head down the coast and jump from hostel to hostel, burning through some of my money? Or do I want to find some organic farm somewhere in Iberia and settle down for a spell of labour and boarding? A friend of mine was about to turn up in Morocco, perhaps I could take the last of my dwindling savings and explore North Africa with him? Out to sea, below the pink horizon, a container ship slid slowly across the harbour.

1 I actually sent the above paragraph to Theo to check for accuracy and he had a correction to make: "My only note would be that in fact the man clad in latex was having said dildo be manipulated by the woman’s equally striking 6-inch leather heels... and he may have actually been passed out... but a PG version is perhaps what you had in mind.”