Tissu in the trees

Photographer Joerg Modrow snapped these pics of me practicing tissu in a tree at the recent Fusion festival in Germany. Read about the festival here at the B EAST magazine website.

On the first of each month

On the first of each month, the city is redressed like a set change in a play. Fresh posters are pasted over the faded and tattered advertisements which tired eyes have grown immune to. Rents are due and leases are expiring. The streets become temporary storage platforms for all kinds of furniture in transit. You could believe that the city lived out on the footpath, on the first of each month.

I live near Kotbusser Tor in Kreuzberg. “This area is the poorest square kilometer in all of Germany, and the most dangerous,” my new housemate told me with a hint of pride. The vista afforded from the U-bahn station is of slack-eyed drug pushers and the homeless with their dogs squabbling beneath a backdrop of rotting concrete housing projects.

Walk a block south for more uplifting scenery. Pass the Turkish children playing on the footpath, the street vendors shouting vegetable prices. Pause on the bridge and refresh your eyes on the views of the Landwehrkanal, where swans neck and fight and scramble out of the path of oncoming barges, where trees drape long green curtains across the riverbank, where cosmopolitan diners sit at the water’s edge.

I live halfway between these two extremes – the ugly train station and the calm canal. Mine is a confused street that can’t decide if it wants to bustle or bust. Shops thrive and fold at an alarming rate. It’s been just four weeks since my arrival, and already a small café-bar has thrown open its doors, while a kebab shop and a mobile phone dealer have papered up their windows, a small office appeared out of nowhere from behind graffitied steel shutters, and a dusty old bar has had its fixtures torn out in preparation for a revival. Most heartbreaking of all is the South American bead-and-trinket merchant who spends all day hunched and smoking outside his empty shop, watching each passing pedestrian with desperate eyes. I look away when I approach – I’m afraid I might take pity on the bloke and end up walking home with an armful of ugly bulbous necklaces.

My bathroom window offers a sweeping view of the courtyard of the building, and perched on the toilet seat I watch a microcosm of inner-city life. An obese woman lives on the ground floor of my building. I see her struggle up the five-step half-staircase to her door and I wonder, cause or effect? A cat on the third floor arches its body precariously out the window to steal a glimpse of the goings-on below. An old man several apartments across mimics the cat’s pose. Perhaps they should be introduced. Down in the grassy courtyard, several round-figured matrons swathed in black headscarves hold congress while their infants scramble around their legs. Young folk trek in and out all day and night, depositing and retrieving their bicycles in the communal racks. I watch this all from the toilet seat in our poorly-lit bathroom wonder if they all enjoy an equally entertaining view of me. Probably. But as my friend Eleanor explained, putting yourself momentarily on display is all part of high density living. “Sometimes you show a bit of flesh, sometimes you see a bit of flesh. It’s all give and take.”

The Queen of the building is a grey-haired South American immigrant who keeps a shop by the main door. She sits outside day and night, presiding over the comings and goings. “Don’t ever tell her anything about your personal life,” my housemate cautioned, “If you do, the whole building will know about it.” A terrible gossip, an incorrigible match-maker, a meddlesome old witch. Her shop is stocked with alcohol and little else. She makes her money by keeping the tenants well oiled. Purchase a beer from her and you are guaranteed a week of smiles and hellos each time you pass through the front door. Dare to return home with a bottle from elsewhere and she'll fix you with a gaze that could burn through your skin. Once I returned with an entire case of beer from a supermarket in preparation for a day in the park. It cost me a week of wrath and scorn at the door.

Like a blind man recovering sight, my perspective of the city is developing as my German vocabulary grows. Coversations overhead on the U-bahn, once indecipherable babble, bloom to life as I decipher words. The dishevelled young girl who hobbles through the carriages isn’t begging for money, she’s pleading for something to eat or drink. It’s a city of hard luck. Perhaps there are some things I’d rather not understand. Standing in the carriage, a shaggy-haired boy reads sheet music as if it were a magazine. He smiles at the cresendos. There’s a misguided poster on the wall for a language school offering “Deutsch für auslander”. Who exactly are they advertising to? Down the train, noisy nasal Australians accents shriek on about their boozy evening excursion. I change carriages at the next station.

Everything goes

“It’s a place where everything goes,” a friend told me, describing the atmosphere of a certain Berlin bar, and at first I thought he had confused the cliché. But after two months in this city, I realize that he meant what he said. There’s a difference between a place where anything could go, and a place where everything actually does go. ‘Anything goes’ is license, ‘everything goes’ is it’s realization.
It is most immediately visible in fashion. There is no single fashion trend. Every imaginable clothing style is on display all at once, in a confusing mishmash of glam, trash, retro, futro. The hideous fluoros of the 90s combine with the plastic neons of the 80s, while 70s cool and 60s mod style get equal representation – often all thrown together on the same walking mannequin. Scan the dancefloor at a nightclub and you’ll get a history lesson and a glimpse of the future all at once.
“Our concept of time is getting shorter and shorter,” explained Ben, a recent acquaintance. “The cycles of repetition are shrinking. We are already replicating the styles of 2000 – that was just eight years ago. Soon we will be repeating what was hip just one year ago. Where does it end? What does the present look like? I don’t know anymore. And what is the future? In our minds we still have a obsolete vision of robot men and flying cars. That’s an image of the future from thirty years ago or more. We haven’t even updated or formulated our own picture of what the world will look like in twenty, thirty or fifty years.”
Ben’s bedrooom was a reflection of this ideology. His own artwork, canvases of multi-layered one-inch lines by their thousands, shared his wall with record sleeves that, five years ago, would have been considered embarrassing to display. He played music through an I-pod, amplified through a boxy tape deck. A flip-through selection booklet of Pantone colours was fanned out on the floor showing nothing but shades of grey. He used old punk t-shirts as pillow cases, and under his bed lived an army of sneakers representing the past two decades.
Pinned to the wall, his mantra, and perhaps the mantra of everyone today – “I don’t know”.

Backgammon with Gogol Bordello

Sunday nights at Dr Pong

Weekends, Yola and I wander across Prenzlauer Berg to Dr Pong, our favourite Sunday night bar. Each night in every bar and club is different, they shed their customers like old clothes and shuck on new outfits for the following evening.

It’s hard to find Dr Pong unless you’re with a local. The shopfront windows are covered in opaque plastic. You’d think it was abandoned until you shoulder the heavy door open, and even then you might confuse it for a premise undergoing renovation. The walls are bare, the floor concrete, the lighting stark fluorescents. A clutter of chairs sulk at the edges of the room with beer crates for company. In the center of the room is Dr Pong’s altar, a wide blue ping-pong table.

Head into the backroom and you’ll find a motley collection of drinkers chilling on ratty old couches sipping cheap beer. The music is as varied as the clientele – reggae one night, electronica and pop the next. Last time we visited we were treated to David Bowie. He’s been stuck in my head ever since (“Ain’t there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?”).

Epic table tennis games are always in progress. Hard-core players bring their own bats which they carry in special cases and wipe clean after each match. The rest of us can hire bats from the bar. When enough people have arrived, it’s time for the community game to begin.

It starts when a player bangs the table with his bat (I’m not sure how the authority of this player is asserted. It’s an unspoken right of the alpha ping-ponger. Whoever dominates the table takes charge of the night). Everybody rises from their chairs, resting their beer bottles against the wall to protect them from the madness that is about to ensue. We form a big circle around the table and begin to rotate slowly, knocking one hit to the player at other end of the table. Miss a shot and you’re out of the rotation. Hold your nerve, and you might make it all the way to the final few rounds.

The fun really begins when the circle has whittled down to five, then four, then three players. The pace becomes frantic as they sprint around the table, desperate to make their shot. Their bodies are at savage angles to the floor, their shoes squeaking loudly as they run. It reminds me of that Gary Larsson ‘Far Side’ frame – “The fear of being chased by timber wolves around a kitchen table while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor”. Sometimes one of the players does slip and flies off into the chairs, and we’re all glad we stashed our beer bottles against the wall. When it’s down to two players, they finish off the game as normal. Then the alpha player bangs the table, and it all starts again.

Similar community games can be played on Wednesdays at Café Morgenrot, a cheap and friendly drinking spot for an eclectic crowd of activists, queers, unionists, musicians and the mentally unstable. Morgenrot’s ping-pong has a psychedelic twist – it’s played under black lights, normally to a soundtrack of old soul music or skater punk, depending on who is working the CD player.

Enjoy ten seconds of poor-quality images from Morgenrot’s basement… starting now:

Berlin picnic

Street Spirit

Urban discourse on my walk home this morning:

“Kein Kameras im dem Kiez” – No Cameras in the Community: A soon-to-open shop in Prenzlauer Berg heavily vandalized because of two security cameras installed above its door. Looking around, I notice there are very few cameras at all in the city. Compare this to London, a city that proves the only prediction Orwell misjudged was the date.

“Berlin Raucher Rally!” – Smokers Rally: A public demonstration against the anti-smoking laws hardly seems necessary. The laws are proudly flouted in every bar and club in the city. One of my favourite drinking spots, Morgenrot in Prenzlauer Berg, has erected a tiny shrine with skull-and-crossbones imagery – “In Memorandum – The Public Smoker”. The irony is that Morgenrot’s backroom is still one of the smokiest in the city.

“Flughafen für Superreiche? Nein!” – An airport for the super rich? No!: Campaigners against the recommissioning of Berlin’s central Tempelhof Airport are drawing heavily on the city’s working class sympathies. The airport, they argue, would only be affordable to VIPs, a notion against the city’s flattened concept of privilege and entitlement. They seem to forget, though, that with oil supply due to dry up in the next few decades, any form of air travel will only be accessible to the super rich, no matter what airport they fly from. I’ll probably be making my trip home on a ship. If I ever leave, that is. I can’t imagine returning to any apathetic city where citizens take such little action against the elements of their society they oppose.

I am more me

Interview yesterday with Peter Moren, singer from the band Peter, Bjorn and John. We spoke about the difficulties of whistling live on stage (the band has a looped recording for when his mouth gets dry while whistling “Young Folk”), the danger of playing harmonica while bearded, and his appreciation of good old Brisbane band The Go-Betweens.

His solo concert was pleasant, though not the greatest singer-songwriter performance I’ve attended. But he got me at the end by pulling out a song with some piercingly insightful lyrics:

So the question is; have I felt more alive than now?
I must happily disagree.
I laugh more often, I cry more often,
I am more me.

It sums up how I’m feeling right now, living in this welcoming city that has a comfortable subculture for everybody to sink into. I’ve never felt so content in my own skin.

"This isn't a party"

Apartment inspections in Berlin are starting to feel like casting calls. University semester resumes next week, and the city is crawling with young people searching for a cheap room in a funky corner of town.

Nine o'clock on Tuesday, I arrive at a Kreutzberg apartment as arranged. It's nicely positioned at the eastern end, equidistant between the hotspots of Oranienstraße and Warschauer Straße, a bargain at 200 euros a month. The listing had been online for less than 24 hours.

I walked into the apartment to find it choked with people. Fifteen or so folk stood milling around chatting gingerly, sipping beer and wine.

"Sorry to interrupt your party - I've come to look at the room," I said to somebody.

"This isn’t a party,” they responded, “We’re all here for the room.”

The two residents were flittering around madly, shaking hands and asking questions. Everyone seemed to have a ten second window to make an impression before the hosts hurried along. The doorbell kept ringing as more hopefuls arrived.

At least these hosts had the decency to give us all a beer while we endured the experience. At a previous inspection, two overly efficient teenage boys had handed out printed questionnaires on A5 paper, which they then stacked twenty deep artment , wh on a table for later reading. I wrote "Don’t bother" on mine and walked out.

While the others posed in the kitchen trying to impress the hosts with their forced friendliness, I excused myself and wandered off into another part of the house where I had spotted a piano. I sat down and played three or four songs in my jaunty six-fingered honkytonk style, enjoying the weight of the keys under my fingers, drowning out the sounds of fakers fighting for attention. When I had satisfied myself, I returned to the kitchen, said goodbye and left.

If I wasn't going to get a room out of the visit, I might as well get a few minutes of musical enjoyment instead.

"I’m getting a tan from your sunshine"

Yola closed the front door behind her with a curious look on her face. "You know, it's so weird. I normally never notice these things, but… Come outside and have a look," she said. I put down my coffee, shucked on my boots and followed her into the street. "There!"

It took a few seconds to register what she was pointing at. The Prenzlauer Berg street looked the same as it always did – bicycles chained to every imaginable protrusion, grafitti crowding the facades, dog-walkers and pram-pushers strolling with scarves tied tight against the afternoon chill. "Look closer!" Yola insisted.

Parked directly in front of her building was a huge brown campervan. It looked like a giant beetle, with a roof curved in the style of '60s caravans. The numberplate, like all European numberplates, bore the blue-and-gold twelve-star symbol of the European Union, and the three-letter code indicating the country of origin. This is what Yola was pointing at. The letters 'EST'.

The side door of the campervan was latched open, somebody rummaging around inside. I rapped on the window, readying for a stilted conversation in my broken and half-forgotten Estonian (My brain has an unfortunate glitch – it can only handle one foreign language at a time. Now that I have started learning German, my Estonian is slowly being erased. The other day I struggled counting to twenty in Eesti – my head replaced half the numbers with German numerals).

I should have guessed that the currents of life would swirl in such a direction as to reconnect me with Philipe. When his head appeared at the door of the van, I wondered why I hadn't foreseen it. Ever since I met him across the counter of his funky second-hand store in Tallinn, Philipe has appeared at key moments, like a sage, to deliver phrases of reflection and inspiration. He is toweringly tall, with long dark hair and startling, captivating eyes. They stare wide and deep into your subconscious, and you feel yourself drawn into them as if hypnotized. He carries the air of a mystic, aided by his Arabian features – though he is of Swiss origin. He speaks slowly and sincerely, as if he is gently divulging a secret knowledge of the world.

Philipe stepped out of his van and embraced me silently for a long time. I thought for a moment he may be crying, for his hug had the pull of a desperate person who finds an friend in dark moment of isolation. But when we separated I saw he was smiling broadly. "I thought I would find you here," he said.

---

Philipe left Estonia after his shop on Lai street in the Old Town was forced to close due to greedy rent increases. I don't think Tallinn will recover from losing the little oasis of creativity that was Lai 10. He and his girlfriend Kati had an eye for cool. They would hunt out the best second-hand items from markets across the country and sell them for a modest profit. I still have a leather jacket picked from the racks. Behind the shop was a backroom with couches and a record player where friends would gather until late in the evening. The ceiling was lined with fake red leather, bought from a car outfitting workshop for a bargain. The room was illuminated by dozens of old lamps, casting shadows across the carpets and grandma wallpaper. Bands would use the low-roofed shop cellar as a rehearsal space. The start-stop noises of amateur jam sessions – whiny electric guitar riffs, uncertain plodding bass notes, the over-enthusiastic crash of over-played drums – were constantly vibrating up through the floor.

Philipe and Kati ran the shop for several years, weathering fluctuating income and shoplifting. He told me once about observing a pilfering in progress. "I saw a hand come through the door and lift a jacket off the rack. I jumped up and ran to the door and kicked it closed and slammed the hand in the door. Then I threw the door open and kicked the shopstealer in the arm. When I looked up there were two huge angry looking Russian guys standing outside. There was a moment when I looked at them, and they looked at me, and we all realized that they could kick my ass if they wanted. I grabbed the jacket back and shut the door and locked it."

I ingratiated myself into their circle of friends by dropping by one day with a bag of coffee. In that way, Lai 10 became my second living room, a little haven in the Old Town where a conversation, a beer, good music and advice on upcoming concerts were always at hand.

One day I walked in to see the racks empty. The shop had become a victim to Tallinn's runaway real estate boom. The landlord had received an offer from an upmarket baby clothes retailer to occupy the shop at higher rent. "Who wants to buy expensive baby clothes in the Old Town?" someone asked. No one, as it turned out. The baby outfitter went bust after a month. Philipe and Kati's eviction had been entirely unnecessary.

Philipe left Estonia shortly after. I remember sitting with him by the river in Tartu having epic discussions about his plans to visit an anarchic commune in Romania, and to build a bar constructed entirely of old beer crates on a beach on the Black Sea coast. But Philipe is born to wander, and I knew I would eventually find him again in some corner of the planet. Little wonder that I found him living here in Berlin, the giant refugee camp for Europe’s alternative and artistically-minded.

---

At this moment, Philipe was helping a friend move house. Men with large vehicles are always in demand. I chipped in for half an hour, carting boxes down several flights of stairs. “I’m getting a divorce,” told his friend, who happened to live across the road from Yola’s building where I was staying. “I tried living with my wife and child, but we only lasted two weeks.”

Philipe was full of energy, looking wilder than normal. “I came straight from a club,” he said. I checked my phone. It was 3pm. “I was at the Golden Gate club. It was wild. Everyone partying their asses off. Every city needs a club like this. It’s a place where everything goes.” I thought he’d confused the saying, but later it occurred to me that perhaps he meant what he said. After all, there’s a difference between the possibility afforded by the concept of a place where anything could go, and the reality of a place where everything actually does go.

“Now I’m going to a squat down on Kanstanian Allee. There’s a course on lockpicking. My friend learnt how to do this. She opened the lock to the roof of her building in Friedrichshain. Now we can climb up and walk around on the roofs. There are hundreds of meters of beautiful old roofs to look at. It’s amazing up there.”

He promised to take me along to look at the roofs before he departed, cumbersomely maneuvering his huge campervan out of its parking place. He took off with a flash of his huge smile and a wave.

Every time I meet Philipe, I wonder if it will be the last.

---

“How do these things happen to you? You have such amazing luck,” Yola said after he left. Since my enthusiastic arrival she has been rediscovering her own city, her creative impulses firing. “I’m getting a tan from your sunshine,” she said with a laugh.

An artist in Neukölln

My phone was out of credit, so I called Klaus from a Turkish telephone cafe. There's hundreds of them around Hermannplatz. It pulses with a multicultural buzz. Friction causes heat, after all. Throw enough cultures in one suburb, they’re bound to rub against each other and create energy.
I was slightly surprised when Klaus threw open the door. From his voice, I was expecting somebody younger. Klaus was in his fifties, stout, short, with a thick face that looked moulded from clay. Or perhaps that's how I remember him because his apartment was full of grotesque clay sculptures, all twisted and abstract representations of the same face - his own– invariably. There were canvases, too, huge frames leaning unmounted against the walls, stacked five or six deep, occupying nearly every free space in sight.

He invited me in and began flustering about his phone, explaining why some calls and messages had gone astray. “These mobile phones, I can’t use them. How do I read my messages?" he asked, and thrust me his phone. I confessed I was somewhat of a Luddite. "I've only owned one kind of phone in my life, and I can't use others. I can't even use an Ipod," I told him apologetically, handing his handset back.
His apartment was huge, three or four big bright rooms on the first floor overlooking a busy side-street. It was messy without being dirty, cluttered with half-finished sculptures, blocks of clay, boxes of photographs, a guitar sitting on a chair, a piano wasting as a bookshelf.
As we talked, Klaus invited me to look through a shoebox of pictures of his artwork and the models that inspired them. I saw immediately that he had a taste for youngish women, none exceptionally beautiful, but all intelligent-looking. The kind of plain and pleasant girls you might meet at a bookstore. Some were posed topless, though this seemed to be an entirely unnecessary removal of clothing, as Klaus's paintings were exclusively of faces. Huge abstract faces, painted with thickly with hundreds of brush strokes, stared in on the room like a crowd.
“Why do you paint only faces?” I asked him. He considered for a minute.
“I guess it’s easy for me. It's the simplest thing to paint," he replied. I suppose I was hoping for a more meaningful answer, but then again perhaps we all take the path of least resistance - in art, in life.
He spoke a lot but listened little. Twice he asked what I was doing in Berlin. His hands were constantly moving, and his eyes jumped around the room.
“My mother is from Riga,” he told me, when I spoke of my Estonian roots. “Never been there. It’s so far away. I’ve been to Australia. I travelled through Asia to get there, through all the 'stans. I got to Bali and sailed on a yacht to Darwin. At first they wouldn't let me in, but eventually they gave me a transit visa. I fell in love there. And in New Zealand. I went to Samoa, I had a girlfriend there.” He seemed to fall in love quite easily. "But let me show you the room.”
The room for rent was in another apartment several blocks away, one Klaus kept as his painting studio. He was offering it up for several months as he had decided to focus on clay sculpture, something he preferred to do in his home.
I went on foot while Klaus balanced comedically on a bicycle, an umbrella held aloft against the mild drizzle. Once his handlebars hit a protruding rubbish bin, and I had to stop him from collapsing sideways.
“This area is changing,” he told me as he cycled slowly. "It used to be full of Arabs, but now more young people like you are moving here. In the south of Neukölln, some streets are run by the gangs. You can't walk without getting challenged."
His studio was up four flights of stairs. Unlike his apartment, this set of rooms was messy and dirty. The floor was a virtual canvas, splashed with colour, though the walls were sad and bare. In the small kitchen sat a single stove, a box of onions, an upturned crate used as a table, and a tiny fridge crowned with empty beer bottles. The room for rent was big and bright, with a double mattress on the floor. A real artist's squat.
“Turn the radio on, would you?” he said, pointing at a small boom box, and we attempted to continue our conversation over the drone of the transmission.
“Who else lives here?”
“A man. He's about 30. I think I have to have a talk to him today. I don't like how he keeps the apartment." The apartment seemed to keep itself in its current shape, I thought. There wasn't much anyone could do with it except exist. No doubt he would have taken unkindly to any redecoration, given that it was his studio space. I peeked quickly in the other fellow's room - Doc Marten's by the bed, several action film DVDs piled near a TV on the floor, a Misfits album on a shelf. I'm a misfit with Misfits fans.
“What do you think of it?” Klaus asked me finally. He was attacking a lump of clay on the window sill as we spoke, gouging at it with a knife, forming it into another of his twisted faces.
“It’s nice,” I said, and I meant it. It seemed a genuinely interesting space, not necessarily comfortable.
“I know it’s nice. I know it's fucking nice, but what do you think of it? We have to fucking talk about it.” I couldn't understand his sudden rash of irritation.
“I don’t think it's for me. I like to live with people, people I can interact and talk to. This place feels a bit isolated. It's probably good to work in, but not for me to live in."
I would have taken it to, that shabby room with its paint-crusted floor. Except that I'm more concerned about who I live with rather than where.

I am a donut

I land on Yola's doorstep at 6am, grey and creased from the overnight bus ride. Yola arrives one minute later, fresh as the morning air. “I've been out all night dancing to The Cure and Joy Division at Lido. I haven’t gone there since I was sixteen! And look!” She holds her hand aloft - her little finger is mummified in layers of sticking plaster, “I cut my finger when I was dancing. It bled all down my dress!" Her blue-and-white striped cotton dress looks like a child's painting smock, smeared with red. She lets out a laugh. “What a night!”

"I need a bicycle, where can I buy one?" I ask Yola as we drink coffee in the diluted afternoon light, which bounces off the sides of the Prenzlauer Berg buildings and into her kitchen window.
“You should buy one for 160 euros," she says, with German matter-of-factness, "That way you know it won't break."
“I don't even have 16 euros right now.”
“Oh, I know! There's a bicycle out on the street. It has been there for months. Whoever owned it must have moved away."
We step outside for an afternoon walk. She shows me the bike – one of hundreds chained to posts and trees up and down the street. Berlin is a giant bicycle parking lot. My machine covered in dirt, the back tire is flat. A thick metal U-bolt holds it to a post.
"No problem, we can just go to a bike shop and hire a metal cutter. They rent them by the hour," she tells me. "Or perhaps this man has one." A tradesman has his panel van parked at the curb, its rear doors open as he arranges his equipment. Yola has a bright conversation with the tradesman, a round-faced fellow who pulls a circular saw out of his van in a flash. Yola claps her hands as the U-bolt falls open in a shower of sparks. She races inside to fetch a bottle of wine as a reward.

Down at the bike shop, it’s as busy as an airport check-in counter at Christmas. There’s to be a transport strike tomorrow, the repairman tells me when it's finally my turn. Everyone is getting their bikes fixed to ride to work. They're booked up a week ahead for repairs, but he lends me a box of tools and lets me change the inner-tubes out on the street.
The sun takes me by surprise. It must be 20 degrees outside. I haven't worn a t-shirt out for over six months. They say sunlight makes you sneeze, but for me it causes involuntary smiling. I’m smiling so much, I make other people laugh when they see my face.

The telephone answers after the first ring. I'm still chopping garlic for dinner - my little gesture of gratitude to Yola for giving me temporary refuge. I put down the knife as the girl answers "Hallo?"
“Hallo, sprechen sie English?”
“Yah, ein bisschen.” Good start.
“I'm calling about the room… is it still available?"
“Yah, but first I must ask, how long will you take it for? Because we only like to rent it for six months at a time."
“I’m not planning in leaving soon,” I tell her. “Six months sounds fine to me.”

Part Two, in which locals complain about those scary foreigners

Our first guest at the hostel was an unkempt-looking Dutch boy who arrived late on a Tuesday night and promptly joined us at a nearby bar for a beer. He was en route to an unusual destination.
“I’m going to visit a friend in jail,” he told us. “I knew him in Holland. He’s a good guy who did some bad things.”
We migrated to Zavood, Tartu’s infamous student dive bar, where it took the Dutchman about 15 minutes to catch the eye of a petite blond girl. We gave him his key and a mud-map of directions home, then left him to his fate.
The next morning, when he had failed to show up, I told Colin we should quit this business. “Our first customer, and we lost him! He didn’t even sleep in the bed.”
He finally returned late in the afternoon, smelling like he needed a shower, and stayed for two more days. He was even polite enough to pay for the night he didn’t stay.

Winter is here, but barely. A dusting of snow covers the rooftops every few days, then melts away to miserable pools of brownish water in the gutters. The Emajogi river has frozen and thawed at least ten times since our arrival.
The ravages of global warming might mar the landscape, but they haven’t hurt our business. We hosted two Belgian film students who travelled here in the hope of creating a documentary about ice fishing on Lake Peipsi. For the first time in living memory, the mighty lake has refused to solidify.
The Belgians spent a week camped lakeside at a village of old Russian fisherman whose livelihoods depend on the ice. Old men whose small wooden cabins contain shrines to Lenin, virtual museums of Soviet kitsch. With no ice to fish upon, the men spent their time guzzling vodka and carousing loudly, much to the Belgians’ dismay.
They retreated to our hostel to wait for the freeze. After a week they gave up and went home, ignoring my suggestion that they had perhaps stumbled upon a better documentary topic than their original synopsis.

Are you local?

Our arrival in Tartu has sent a shiver of fear around town. Our neighbours were the first to voice their concern, calling to the city council to complain about the “foreigners” who would soon be terrorizing the staircase.
Our building hosts a strange assortment of businesses: A hairdresser, attended by one of our guests, who had to direct the non-English speaking barber using hand signals; a statistics collection agency; the consulate of the Russian Federation, which on Sunday acted as the diaspora voting station for the Russian presidential “election”, attracting a stream of babushkas and mustachioed old men; above us, a handful of student apartments; bellow us, the office of the Estonian church newspaper. It is these clergy-journalists who seem most afraid of the riff-raff we host. They were concerned (we heard, through the local gossip chain) that foreigners might soon be breaking into their office to steal their computers.
When we were visited by a journalist from Postimees (the national daily newspaper), Colin and I were quizzed about the moral fibre of the ne’er-do-well backpackers we intended to attract. “Do they have any money? Do they all take drugs? Will they all play guitars on the street?” the reporter asked us.
The result of the interview was this story (click to read it), which was overwhelmingly positive, pointing out the benefits of Tartu being on the backpacker route, and calling for a bit of tolerance toward these scruffy young travellers (photo on the left courtesy of Postimees).

Colin contracts backpackitis

A cautious cousin of mine recently travelled Europe staying exclusively in hotel suites. “You never know who you could meet in a backpacker hostel,” she reasoned. “Exactly,” I retorted, “That’s what makes them so interesting.”
Aside from the evils of communal living, there are of course health concerns that might deter wary folk from hitting the backpack trail. Alongside bed bugs, tinea and pregnancy, there is another disturbing condition you may contract while backpacking.
I hereby announce to the medical community the discovery of “backpackitis”, a disease recently observed on a Canadian traveller in Estonia. For the sake of anonymity, let’s call him “Colin”.
Colin has spent the last two years travelling Europe with a pack strapped to his back, thus qualifying him as a “backpacker” (carrying objects on your back is an essential part of this form of travel).
The repeated strain of the pack against Colin’s right shoulder blade led to the development of a large puss-filled aberration which could otherwise be described as the world’s largest pimple. After its initial appearance as a small lump, the pimple swelled to nearly the size of an Australian 50 cent piece within several weeks. It developed several separate heads and began to push painfully against nerves.
Home remedies failed to relieve the pain. An attempt to pop the mammoth pimple with a sterilized pin failed, as the tensile strength of its surface resisted penetration. Finally Colin was forced to present to the emergency room of the Tartu hospital, where the doctors were anticipating his attendance. “We heard about you. You’re the foreigner with the huge pimple on his back,” the triage nurse told him. Tartu is a small town, after all.
He was taken immediately into an operating room and anesthetised. Colin was denied the pleasure of watching his enormous pustule explode under the scalpel. Each time he turned to observe the doctors at work he was reprimanded. “Don’t watch, it’s too disgusting,” they told him. He returned with a hole in his shoulder about the size of a pen tube across, five or six millimetres deep, from which puss and blood continued to ooze for several days.
The wound became a point of intense amusement at the hostel at which he resided. Other guests gathered around to stare into his cavity, shrieking in disgust. Despite being warned of the potential harm caused by backpackitis, many travellers continue to trek the globe using this dangerous and unpredictable form of travel.
Stay on the safe side. Keep away from backpackers and hostels. Except ours, of course, it’s fine.

Part 1, in which Colin schemes to open the hostel

It was about seven weeks ago that we concocted the notion of opening the hostel. Tallinn was frosted over with a layer of snow, a late November dump that persisted for a week or two before being washed away by dull December rain.

Colin was noodling away on his laptop, as he does all too frequently. That’s one bad habit he has picked up from Estonians. I have considered writing to Wikipedia asking them to block his access for his own health and my sanity. Usually he Googles useless pieces of information to pepper our conversation. Occasionally, however, his interweb access has purpose.

Since we met some eighteen months ago, Colin and I have been idly plotting to open a bar of our own, something every drinker dreams of at one point in their life after realizing how much cash they pour into bar tills. We progressed a little further than the average dreaming drinker. We found a few potential locations, but problems arose each time we began negotiating to lease them. One basement seemed ideal, but consultations with a few wizened locals revealed it had a history of flooding each spring thaw. The building’s project manager insisted such a problem did not exist, but we erred on the side of caution, not wishing to see our furniture and bottles floating around in three foot of water come March.

After that disappointing setback our search became a little less vigorous. Occasionally Colin would trawl through online property sites searching for suitable locations. His head would bob above his laptop lid. “Hey Joel, there’s a store on Pikk .. oh, it’s 90,000 a month….” His head would droop again. The search would continue.

Colin was at it again that snowy day when, for some reason, he decided to enter “Tartu” into the search engine instead of “Tallinn”. Tartu is a city I’ve always had a soft spot for. It’s such a vibrant little town. In the daytime the streets are full of university students striding off to class. At night they come out in droves to party in the town’s many bars.

The property search engine spat out a few results, among them a large apartment in the center of town at a relatively low price. Colin’s brain started to whirl. The apartment certainly wouldn’t work as a bar, but maybe… His next search was on Hostel Bookers, the main website backpackers use to plot their travel. It retuned exactly what he expected – Tartu had only two or three accommodation options, none of them typical backpacker-style hostels that young travelers expect when traipsing across Europe. His head bobbed up. “Hey Joel….”

Seven weeks later and here we are, lounging on beanbags in the common room of our new hostel. We’ve called it Hostel Terviseks. Terviseks means “cheers” in Estonian, quite appropriate as it’s the first and only word a lot of foreigners learn, and something that is said frequently in this lively town.

I’ve now moved to Tartu semi-permanently. I don’t plan on settling here, but for the mean time I’ll be enjoying the student lifestyle in this chilled out town. Feel free to drop by anytime. There’s a beanbag waiting for you.

The Navigator

I used to tell travelling companions that if I were a superhero, I would be called “The Navigator” (You have to say it in a low gravely voice to get the proper effect). My superpowers are an uncanny ability to find my way through the unfamiliar streets of an exotic foreign city. Lost tourists staring hopelessly at their upside-down map would gasp in surprise and joy when I appeared to direct them out of shadowy backstreets. “Who are you? Why are you helping us?” they would ask. “They call me The Navigator,” I would answer, and disappear with a sweep of my cape.

My self-adopted secret identity was born one drizzly March evening several years ago in München (the German city you anglicisers might know as Munich). As a cadet reporter for The Courier-Mail I had been dispatched to Europe to compile a travel story, flying courtesy of the good folk at Thai Airways and Contiki Tours (I am contractually obliged to mention the trip’s sponsors each time I mention it in print). It was the fourth night of a twelve-day express circuit of Western Europe, the kind of trip that allows unadventurous suburbanites to travel without the discomforts of discovery, and return home satisfied in the knowledge that they had “done Europe”. Contiki achieves its comparatively low prices by housing its guests in large hotels on the fringes of cities, then bussing them into the town centre for sight-seeing day trips. The downside of this out-of-town accommodation model became apparent that evening in München.

There we were, our misfit coachload, heading from our outskirts hotel into town, all eager to sample the famous beers of the city, presumably served in chunky glass steins by buxom red-cheeked women in a noisy beer house with long wooden tables. Just as the coach parked, our chirpy tour guide informed us that we would have until 8pm to eat, drink and return. “Of course, you can stay in town later if you find your own way back to the hotel”. Eight o’clock ticked by, and needless to say we were all well involved in a hearty drinking session at a suitably cliché beer house, mindless of the fact that our hotel-bound tour bus was departing to the city limits without us.

As we stumbled out of the beer house onto the cobbled München street, we became aware of our predicament. We had little idea where our hotel was or how to get there. What were we to do? I looked around at our pathetic group of twenty or so drunken tourists and realized that someone had to lead the flock to safety. The Navigator in me was born not out of desire but necessity, for without me that miserable lot would have frozen to death. Or, in a more likely scenario, they would have hailed a taxi driver, who would no doubt have taken them on a circuitous route and charged them an excessive amount of deutschmarks (this was after the introduction of the euro, but I prefer to use the old currency names. They sound more old-timey and make me sound more distinguished).

I led them to the nearest metro station and, despite my unfamiliarity with the city and my inability to read German, I managed to locate the appropriate line of transportation, the connecting bus, and the route home. I shepherded my straggling flock onto the last service of the night and delivered them safely to the hotel, where our chipper tour guide wasn’t waiting up late gnawing her nails in concern for our welfare. Contiki has a policy of leaving no-shows behind, and I have a sneaking suspicion the ol’ München beer hall visit is a strategy to half the tour group to lighten the coach load and save on fuel a policy its diligent customers appreciate for helping keep tours on schedule (sponsor’s alteration). There in the hotel lobby they lifted me to their shoulders and chanted my new superhero name in admiration and appreciation. Or perhaps that was the hotel security guard carrying me on his shoulder to my room. I’d had a few.

That’s all a very long-winded introduction to the real guts of my story. You see, I used to call myself The Navigator. That was until I hit Prague. That wonderful slacker city with its mess of streets and numbered suburbs had me licked. Or perhaps it was the cheap pilsners and the constant waft of jazz cigarettes. I’d had a few.

What was I doing in Prague? Well, that requires a little more backstory….

After eighteen months working at a certain Baltic newspaper, I realized I was wasting my time. I’d slaved away at a redesign of the ageing tabloid, which looks about as professional as a high school student newspaper. That’s not fair, actually. I used to run a student newspaper and it looked far more reputable than this old rag.

I had spent countless hours of my own time overhauling the thing, making it look something akin to an upmarket British tabloid. The redesign was ready to go to production when the owner of the paper, a Latvian banker who fancies himself a Baltic Rupert Murdoch, decided he liked things just the way they were. “Our readers are old, so our paper should look old too,” was one of his gems of wisdom.

I considered attempting to use logic to convince him of his stupidity, but then realized that I would only be helping an undeserving businessman succeed. I quit the paper, followed closely by the editor, who had also fought for the redesign. I hereby offer an insightful observation from the ever-prescient Scott Adams that aptly illustrates the scenario (replace the word “circuit” with “newspaper”):

The result of that decision was that I became unemployed for the first time since the age of fourteen, when I talked my way into a job as a projectionist at the Caloundra cinemas. Somehow, though, I just can’t seem to stay idle. I picked up a bit of work on a magazine called B EAST, a fashion and culture quarterly that focuses exclusively on eastern Europe. I had always admired its edgy style and attitude, and was a convert to the magazine’s mantra that eastern Europe was a far more exciting and inspiring place than the stale old nations of western Europe, bloated by their riches and lazily resting on their expired reputations.

At first I was only supposed to write a feature story on my adventures in St Petersburg, but I ended up editing the entire issue. When time came to lay out the pages and send the magazine off to the printer, I headed down to Prague to meet with the designer and go through the page proofs.

Where ever I travel, I have little concern for a city’s historic sights or famous landmarks. Observing history obstructs your view of the present. I’d much rather discovery a city’s living culture and experience how its people live here and now, something that is only possible by meeting the locals and sharing their lifestyle. In every city there are people willing to open up their homes and lives to like-minded strangers. You just have to find them.

I found Jakub and Lucettia through a friend from Tallinn. We arranged to meet at an art gallery opening where money was being raised for one of the landlocked Asian nations (Nepal? Tibet? Bhutan?). The art on sale was average, but the people were interesting. Prague's art scene seems more earthy and threadbare than in other pretentious cities. It was all jeans, sneakers and old t-shirts, wine from plastic cups. We sat outside in the cold and sipped tea.

"I love listening to you all speak Czech," I said to Lucettia quietly as a conversation rumbled away around the table. "It sounds like a friendlier, happier version of Russian." She places a hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh.

Lucettia works in Czech's booming film industry as a second assistant director. She just finished shooting a video with Prince, who shut down Prague's famous Charles Bridge for several days for filming. Before that came Rihanna, who shot a clip in a Prague nightclub. She tells me stories of working with Terry Gilliam on "The Brothers Grimm" (although surprisingly she hadn't seen the brilliant documentary "Lost in La Mancha", a must-see for any fan of this eccentric director). But she grew tired of working with celebrities, and subsequently turned down work on the "Chronicles of Narnia" sequels now in production. She now focuses on music videos and advertisements.

"Last month I was in Austria for a Canadian beer commercial. It was in the mount-ayns for the snow. But then the director wanted a spring background. Twenty men spent a day sweeping the snow off the mount-ayn," she tells me.

Prague has an indifferent attitude to its status as the Hollywood of Europe. It treats its famous visitors with slight contempt, especially when they close off city streets and landmarks.

Czech anyway has its own proud history of local cinema, as I found out on a visit to one of Prague's not-so-clandestine "coffee houses" (the Amsterdam kind of coffee house, where anything but coffee is on the menu). I accompanied Jakub to the coffee house as he met with the establishment's owner, for whom he had recently acted as wedding photographer. In the wedding snaps she laughs at the camera, a joint in one hand and a drink in the other. Her wedding dress is a white gown adorned with hundreds of orange ping-pong balls.

The bar is hazy with smoke. Everyone in the room is either rolling, passing or smoking a joint. Amsterdam, now in the clutches of a conservative resurgence, is beginning to reel in its liberal attitudes. Prague, however, is gladly accepting the crown as Europe's new capital of chill. There's little that isn't legal, and anything that is illegal is ignored or tolerated. This is the country once known as Bohemia, after all.

Increasing the coffee shop's trippy atmosphere is a large screen playing old Czech movies. There's one by Karel Zeman, a legendary director who combined animation, puppetry and live action to create a stunning style of special effects as long ago as the 1950s. In one, colonialists battle dinosaurs with cannons and bayonets. In another, travellers venture under the ocean on seahorses. The images are a mesmerizing pastiche of colour and artistry. Fans of Michel Gondry should find Zeman's films fascinating. I've got a copy of the films, which I'll gladly send to anyone interested.

Jakub is equally fascinating. A paramedic and a photographer, he combines both profession and passion by taking pictures as he works. In one series I find particularly fascinating, he photographs street posters that layer and peel away, revealing random and unintended compositions. Eyes from one poster peer through a tear of another, words collide, juxtapositions emerge.

Lucettia rags on Jakub for always being late. "He is always sitting at the piano, playing when we should be getting ready." It must be the most pleasant of all inconveniences, I tell her. Jakub's self-taught honky-tonk style of performing is the kind of playing I try to emulate when I bang away at chords, six fingers on the keys instead of ten. His music rings around their chilly wooden apartment, deep from within his grandmother's ancient upright piano. "She brought it from Ukraine when they came here," he tells me. The skeleton of another piano sits in the corner of another room - an old grand piano, perched upended against a wall, its curved body now home to a bookshelf instead of strings.

With Lucettia and Jakub I experience Prague’s bubbling art scene. They are forever purveying photographic exhibitions, some in large galleries, others in the basements of arty cafes or on the walls of restaurants. Jakub hopes to exhibit his work one day, but for now seems content to keep his work private. “Is not so important for me for everyone to look,” he says humbly.

Leaving Prague by train I experienced one of the final, and now non-existent, divisions between west and east Europe. Crossing the Czech-German border, customs guards went through the carriage inspecting passports and cursorily searching luggage. Now, only weeks later, that controlled border crossing no longer exists. Czech, along with most other eastern European nations (including Estonia) has become part of the EU Schengen zone, which means you can pass from the top to the bottom and west to east of Europe without presenting your passport. Previously the new EU nations were still obliged to maintain controlled borders. I didn’t mind the mild inconvenience of being one of the final travellers to be scrutinized and questioned in this quaint and extinct tradition as the train sailed through the castle-studded hills of central Europe.

More fun with languages

I’m sick of talking about language. Every day I seem to find myself in at least three conversations with locals or foreigners about the Estonian tongue – its quirks and difficulties, interaction with Russian speakers, the Tolkien connection…
“It’s more fun with languages!” I often cry sarcastically as people around me begin analysing humorous Estonian words and phrases. Yes, the word for ‘cheers’ sounds like ‘terrible sex’. Yes, there is a celebrity named Tiit Sukk. Yes, the word night – “öö” – sounds like someone vomiting.
But when the grand old Australian Broadcasting Corporation asked me to put aside my aversion to discussing languages and record a set piece about the Estonian tongue, how could I say no?
I recently recorded a radio documentary piece for a show called “Lingua Franca” on Radio National – you know, the ABC’s talk radio station that old people listen to? It’s a very old-worldy radio show, one droning voice for fifteen minutes. The telephone line connection wasn’t brilliant either. But if you listen for long enough, you will get to hear me recite the first line of the Estonian national anthem, which is surely worth the wait.
The piece aired at the prime hour of 3.45pm on Saturday November 24 – just as the nation was heading to the polls to elect Kevin Rudd as prime minister. But I’m sure the ratings will show that the voters of Australia put aside their thoughts about the future of our nation and chose instead to tune into my controversial think-piece on Esto-Russian interaction. In fact, my impassioned delivery may have helped swing preferences in several marginal seats...
Listen here: ABC Radio National

Devil's haircut

Here’s me doing my best Darth Maul impression (although I’m supposed to look like a lizard). I’m made up for a circus performance – a corporate gig for a company’s product launch. Yes, I have sold out. Dodgy video cour