"Scares Away the Rats" ....Pt. 2!

First, I have to tell you about the plane ride. Glory of glories, I was sitting next to someone with post-nasal drip. The term "post-nasal drip" has never made sense to me. When did "pre-Nasal drip" happen? Now we're suddenly over it?

Anyway, if you ever find yourself sitting next to someone who feels the urge to snort his snot back up into his nose every couple minutes, don't make the situation more frustrating for yourself by counting the time that has elapsed between each snort. Just do the normal thing and listen to music on your iPod really loudly for seven hours or until he falls asleep.

By the time the digital version of the plane is hovering over Dusseldorf, I am comatose. When we arrive in Berlin, I am practically dead. Suffice to say, It takes me a bit of time before I settle into my life in Berlin. I am SO jetlagged. Not like the kind of jetlagged where you go to sleep really early one night and wake up really late the next morning and feel groggy but drink an espresso and get over it, but the kind of jetlagged where you lay incapacitated in your hostel bed for almost three entire days, only taking little breaks to down a gatorade and grab a croissant.

The short Italian man in the bunk above mine seems to share my restless sleepy temperament. With every twist and turn, every change from cadaver to fetal to cadaver and back again, he seems to move in a synchronized fashion. We are like the Naavi in Avatar, communicating through bedspreads and steel springs instead of hair. It is uncomfortable, and awkward, to see him in the morning, standing above me and putting on deodorant, his crotch in my face, knowing he'd heard me whimper a little bit the night before as my exhausted body continued to refuse to fall asleep.

The hostel room smells like dudes who smell like rotting Subway sandwiches. And halitosis. And death. The first thing I do after I've roused myself into consciousness is go and get a drink. It's 9 am but I can hear bleeps and bloops emanating from a locked wooden door about fifty feet away from the hostel entrance. I sit down in the bar and order a vodka orange juice from the supermodel bartender. She pours half a glass of vodka into my drink, mixes it with orange juice, asks me for three euros and then runs off to dance suggestively with a woman who looks like her sister. Then someone offers me acid. It's 9 am! This is, weirdly, the moment when I fall back in love with Berlin.

I wander dazedly out of the bar and spot two gays kanoodling over espresso. I stare at them as I'm walking and almost trip over a bike. There are old ladies schmoozing, tatooed hipsyers locking up their bikes, tall, skinny women riding bikes with little wooden carts filled with screaming children attached. I welcome myself to Europe.

I sit down at a restaurant and order a salad. "Salad? Do you speak English?" I ask the waitress with the requisite amount of shame one should feel for not knowing the language in a place you have flown thousands of miles to live in. "No, I don't speak any English," the woman says to me in perfect English. Then she smiles. "What do you want?"

I'd bought a German to English translation book written by Rick Steves- a proud monolinguist -but half the book was about beer. I could ask for an obscure lager but was still at a loss when it came to telling someone they looked sexy. However, I was actually enjoying not knowing the language. Life is so much more exciting when all you have to work with are the wild gestures and emotive facial expressions of an out-of-commission mine.

After ordering, I look at the pictures in a German newspaper sitting next to me. "La la la," I think to myself as I stare at the pictures.

The man next to me feels around his butt. It suddenly occurs to me that I am not reading some newspaper left to the population by a benevolent cradle-to-grave socialist country for general perusing, but this man's newspaper that he bought with his own cash money. I apologize and give it back to him, miming the universal expression of regret.

My food arrives but instead of eating it, I stare into the crowd of people sitting lazily about, munching on croissants, talking, laughing. "This is the life!" I think to myself and renounce all the epiphanies I'd had in New York about the importance of hard work and dedication.

I end up staying at the hostel for over a week. Staying in a hostel for such long periods of time is kind of like enrolling yourself in an international speed-dating service. Everyone starts with the typical questions ("Where are you from? What are you doing here?") but eventually you find yourself courting new friends and romanticizing their home countries. "France, wow, such a beautiful country," you say, attempting to conjure memories of the trip you took with your family when you still claimed you were straight.

Eventually, I meet two Israelis who seem fun.

"Hey, you're a gay right?" one of them asks me.

"What do you think of this shirt?"

"I think it's fucking ugly. Wear that one," I say.

"Hey, all right! That was a good tip, man! Yeah, you're good!"

I feel comfortably bitchy around them. The boys have a series of catch phrases they repeat, probably because they don't feel like coming up with actual English sentences around me.

"I don't give a fuck," is stated was frequently and emphatically as in a reality television show. South Park episodes were quoted with reverence. This was going to be a long night.

One of the first things we do is visit Alexanderplatz, home of Berlin's television tower. Soaring much higher than the space needle, but crowned with an orb that looks like Epcot, the building initially looks like a piece of space junk that just happened to land in the capitol of Germany.


TO BE CONTINUED!!!