Anywhere is Popsicle
Travelling the world for over a year, we’ve become accustomed to change as the only constant in our lives. Being in a state of perpetual travel forces you to critically evaluate all of your regular habits. We’ve lived in all sorts of accommodations from a luxury hotel in Las Vegas to a straw hut in India, and we’ve found ways to make all of them feel like home. The loss of routine exposes compulsions which have been acquired by interacting in similar spaces for maintained periods of time. At first, you find yourself reaching out for all your familiar pleasures and comforts within the confines of strange new lands. As you travel for longer you start realizing how much of your resources are going towards maintaining old habits in new places where it seems like you could do a lot better. You start trying local foods or taking the advice of locals, and actually find you’re enjoying yourself more as well. After long enough, you realize you’ve acquired the skills to be comfortable in almost any situation. That’s what happened to us, and now we’re in a Viennese garden while listening to Mozart, doing yoga and writing. Just believe that you have the option to live like the locals live almost anywhere in the world and you can set yourself free!
Sometimes we don’t know exactly what it is that got us to this point. We took a Vipassana meditation course a month ago and since then feel somehow like everything that is happening in the universe is in our favour. You start to learn that Anything is an offer, an invitation to trust, to experience, to make yourself vulnerable and get to feel and see and hear and touch and yes, even smell, everything that is around you like it is a lush phantasmagoria of your own brilliant design. You smile relentlessly and suddenly people are inviting you to live with them, like the mere fact of your presence is a blessing not only to yourself, but to people just like you, looking for a real connection to something bigger than us all: EACH OTHER.
We extend our stay in Helsinki because a Vegan yogi-sister from the Thailand teacher training lives there. At first we were only going to visit for a day after the biodynamic farm, but Galina’s glowing exuberance is infectious. Her vibrations always got to me. She convinces us to delay the trip to Berlin by five days. We try to do what we’d do if we weren’t travelling and just hang out reading, writing, cooking, wandering around the city, generally recovering from Asia. We are curious to experiment with Veganism. She swears by this lifestyle because it raises your vibrational frequency closer to the level of the good green Earth. Before travelling we thought we were sworn Paleolithics, which is a lot of meat, keeping you in Primal animalistic unity with the gravitational pull of the planet. That immediately ended in Detroit when we stayed with Italian relatives who made the most amazing homemade bread, cheesecake, and pancakes. Now of course we take on he diets of wherever we are, performing spiritual experiments on our consciousness by attempting the habits of locals. The flexibility is just as liberating as the ability to take your entire home with you wherever you go. Veganism is challenging when you don’t have a kitchen. We quickly feel more glowy and sense confirmation that we are aliens. It’s too much. One day we may be able to sustain it.
We are invited to a party of friendly strangers on the shores of Helsinki. Finland gives us a triumphant send-off that couldn’t have been planned. We happily sleep on the floor by the check-in counter at the airport next to other travellers doing the same. We arrive bleary-eyed in Berlin. We have no idea where to stay or what to do but by this point just have faith in the universe and somehow end up bundled up under our tarp in our hammock in Tiergarten park. We see another dreamer tying up his own hammock and reclining with a book. We smile and wave in silent acknowledgement. Our first German neighbour.
Once we feel well-rested enough, we rise, re-calibrate and walk.
Just walk. We started walking at the beginning of August 2014. We just walked out of Simcoe, Ontario, heading West, with the American border on the horizon. We packed only what we could carry when we left Toronto, and then only what we needed to survive when we left Canada. Now we’ve visited over a dozen countries, and we’ve realized we need even less than that. Since we consider nothing to be garbage, most of what I carry is nonsensical frivolity. I like it that way. It’s good exercise.
This is the Brandenburg Gate. This is Currywurst. This is free-wifi. This is salad buffet for 5 €. This is cafe after cafe after cafe. Pretty people. Mitte. This is cool hostel after cool hostel. Which one to pick? Two beds for the price of one private. One bed for the price of a hotel room in America. Cheeky clerk, big bed. Cuddle up and curl off into a driftful sleep. We were carrying a tent in Chicago, but that would have drawn too much attention when we camped in Humbolt Park and by Buckingham Fountain, the sound of the water soothing us into a magical daytime repose. Now we just have a hammock and a tarp.
Let’s hike down along the river that splits Berlin. More cool hostels. Ever cooler, the clerks cheekier as we go South. We eventually settle down in a tent on the roof of a hostel boat in the river along the Berlin Wall East Side Gallery. Sometimes having a thin roof that shields us from eyes and the elements, a shower and reliable wifi is more than enough to make us feel like we are living it up. We only book one night, but wish we could stay longer.
Feeling comfortable leaving all our earthly belongings in a locker next to our campsite, we set out on our first improvised walking tour through our neighbourhood, using only a free map we get at the hostel, and a compass. Every building is covered in art. Public, free, unauthorized art. We stop to see where we are on the map and see a little film projector symbol. It must be a cinema! We walk in.
“Ich spreche kein Deutsch (I don’t speak German).” The clerk tells me the next film is “Mad Max” in 5 mins. “The first one, with Mel Gibson?” He laughs. Of course it isn’t. In a half hour is a documentary about the Berlin Wall. It’s a great doc filmed over years by Mark Reeder, a guy who moved to Berlin from Manchester for the electronic music scene. Eventually the artists all freak out on the wall and start making it art until it loses its power and comes crumbling down. Going to the movies is like a religious ritual for me, and it’s been months since I’ve seen the inside of a movie theatre. Actually, the last time was pretty great: a VIP theatre in Phuket, Thailand with our friends (about whose adventure you can read here) where we watched Tomorrowland in our own private love-seats. We were served custom popcorn and all-you-can-drink beverages after grazing a gourmet snack buffet in the lounge. In this Berlin movie theatre you can have a drink in a cool video store while waiting to be summoned by your projectionist. We wish we could move to Berlin like the hero in the film.
The next day is spent in perfect contentment lounging in the tent as it rains. Berlin feels like home already. We book the hostel-boat tent for two more nights. Eventually we summon enough strength to take the train north to a place called Absinthe Depot, a shop with no bathroom and no chairs, where an intense German man serves you the magic tonic the traditional way, with cold water and anise, while watching your every move as you drink it. We meet two Americans who tell us this isn’t even the real deal like the stuff they serve in Prague. We’ll have to find out for ourselves.
On the third day we rose again. Today we set out to follow where the wall was all the way North to the Brandenburg Gate. What still stands of the wall is basically a monument to a crumbling order that no longer actually exists. We explore squatter homes along the West side. We are kind of obsessed with architecture after studying with the Earthship Academy on Easter Island, where we lived for six weeks learning how to rebuild human civilization in the case of hypothetical apocalypse. When we applied for this course, we notified administration that it would be our honeymoon. We went there two weeks early to make sure we could find a place where we would be comfortable. Once we got past the disbelief that someone would want to host us along with seventy other strangers camping in his yard, for free, we got our own bedroom in the home of a native prince.
Berlin reveals some sci-fi looking office building. We enter. It has strong acoustics. Perfect for singing “Don’t cry for me Argentina” as people come to look from their office windows.
At one place along the wall there is a fence that runs perpendicular with the it to the river, but there is enough room to get around it above the water. There is some guy lounging there who says “admission is free.” We go through one gate that even has camera surveillance system. I am glad to finally have our adventure caught on tape. There we meet a couple of guys loading fuel or something, telling us that they store it here. Eventually we come to an area that seems like a hidden community inside an old cathedral with a beautiful food garden, children’s area, and an outdoor movie theatre, cafe, and museum inside. We watch a fun video of a guy who attached a device to his bike that made a spray can arc, robotically producing a grafitti rainbow.
We contributed a lot to the art on the wall too.
It seems now that we just want to find ways of integrating with the culture and not just site-seeing and touristing. Though we tend to leave ourselves enough time to do that we just end up chilling like a local. Our favourite thing was just hanging on the roof of the hostel-boat on the rainy day. It reminds us of the rainy days we spent in our Japanese home in Tokyo. We spent one month in an airbnb there, our only real tourist expense. We tried buying groceries like locals but individual pieces of produce are packaged in plastics. We quickly learned you can easily get discount sushi or ramen for much less than the effort it takes to cook. We made a handful of very good friends who we miss very dearly. Performance art and electronic music. All you can drink 1 hr for 1000 Yen. They made us feel like locals in a place where we couldn’t speak the language or read any of the signs. But by the time we make it to Berlin, we don’t have time to do that.
Berlin is a living gallery of chaotic cultural convergence. Eventually we get to Checkpoint Charlie, the passage in the wall between communist and capitalist sectors. It’s just a little hut with a McDonald’s and lots of other shops right next to it to make sure you realize you are in the American sector. We feel a sense of American pride. Was it there in Missouri where we acquired this habit of staking our claim to a home by just planting a flag, or drawing a circle, or dropping a tarp? It was at that experimental hackerfarm where we learned how to live like royalty in a mud-hut just by overcoming our aversion to not having indoor plumbing.
At the Holocaust memorial we sort of get lost in it. Jumping from pillar to pillar, we later learn that this is not allowed. It seemed appropriate, though. Isn’t it after all a playful monument to the eternal Jewish spirit? At least that’s how we felt about the whole thing. We always feel like statues are meant to be climbed.
At the Brandenburg Gate there is a public art spectacle wherein a man is sitting on a platform at a table with a pitcher of water and two glasses. He goes on about the government doing nothing about people who are unemployed and underfed. He hadn’t eaten for four days. There were several cameramen. We feel inspired to do something radical like that too but don’t have the heart to tell him that it’s a lost cause, though I tried. Where will all the footage go? (Here is the footage of our encounter.) He probably wouldn’t be jealous that we immediately went into Dunkin Donuts and got a half dozen and two black coffees because it is the best deal. This is the first regular perculated coffee we’ve had since Thailand with our American hosts. It reminds me of home, of Tim Hortons. We met a couchsurfer before we left Canada who told us we’d miss the simple things like Tim Hortons and Swiss Chalet the most. I love malaing my donut into my coffee. Six times.
Learning about the communist sector on our last day in Berlin at the DDR museum, it seems pretty similar to typical voluntary socialism as you see it in North America. But back then people who didn’t conform were considered a threat and cast out as subversives. Specialty items were sold in luxury stores. The only legal way to break the mould was to go naked at the beach.
Money only buys you things: donuts, ramen, french fries, beer, shoes, phone plans, participation in a system of control or an all-you-can-eat buffet. These things have their uses. We have been to some of the biggest cities in the world, and the first thing you notice about all of them is the pretty things you can buy and the fancy places you can eat, particularly when they are ridiculously cheap or so expensive you can’t even look at them without paying some kind of psychological toll. This is how we literally taste what is going on in the space that we left after thirty years, where all that matters is your ability to buy whatever you want or have the freedom to eat as much as you want of anything. Your hunger is never satisfied.
Now we look for things that might actually be useful in the world in which we now live; the whole wide world. In Helsinki, we invest in Vibram toe-shoes because being barefoot isn’t always safe. We sampled Vegan restaurants there and in Berlin. Otherwise we try to participate in a gift economy mainly by seeking out other non-conformists on Workaway or Couchsurfing, since face-to-face cultural exchange is the fastest route to true integration. It’s always been about our relationship with the land and other beings. Why do parents teach you never to talk to strangers?
no matter where you are
if you just draw a circle
around you
from your point of view
whatever that may be
wherever you are
whoever you are
however much you have
you can draw a circle
you can take a flag and stick it in the ground
or you can just start hacking
you can even just relax and take off your shoes
because you’re already home
