Berlin Day 1

My first day in Berlin and the jet lag feels like a brick in my head. I wander to Maur park, which is at the end of the Oderberger Strasse (street) where I am staying, and make my way up a path to a long wall covered in graffitti. I watch young guys with spray paint create some truely marvelous tags. A team of three work their three pieces in a very similar wild style with a European touch -nice snakey lines that dart in and out of the tag like the trails of giant mosquitos. There is a steam punk tag that makes me grin. I stand listening to the multiple hiss of the aerosol and the clack clack clack of the ball bearing in the cans, suddenly I realize I am also hearing a Yan Tierson tune being played on an out-of-tune piano in the distance. I wander down the hill. I find a piano painted as John Lennon. There are six pianos in the park. There is a young man sitting at one playing a Radio Head tune. There is a girl sitting on a piano playing it with her feet. I find fliers on top of the pianos advertising a solo piano festival coming in August.

Exausted and hungry I find a place to stand near the above ground rail system to have a brautwerst chips and beer.

I realize that the knowledge that the heaviness of my decision to leave my apartment in Brooklyn has not hit me yet.

Elyas arrives home and we talk about the music he's working on. Mellisa makes me an incredible rasberry smoothie, we go out for beers in the evening and talk about how the U.S. has sold it's own people out to an incredible degree. How the citizen of the U.S. is the corporation and the populace are goats to be milked. How every empire was built on slavery. Someone mentions that the Chinese, the worlds 2nd largest economy has enslaved their own population for economic devleopment and how the U.S. benefits from that like second hand smoke.

The street Elyas lives on has been torn up, it's become trendy, there is a "German Garment" pop-up store. They tore out trees and they are putting in parking meeters. There is a jack hammer outside the window in the morning. The motor for the jack hammer hums a tone, when the jack hammer starts up, the pitch goes down a perfect 5th, like Beethoven's 5th.