Die Hard Three

So all my gear arrived safe and sound. The window was soaking wet for some reason but otherwise fine. When I getting my luggage tags at the airport in Berlin the guy asked me how much the items weighed. All this obsession about staying under weight and the airlines never even verified it.

I’m back at work today. It’s been 203 days since I’ve been to work “proper” (from June 6 to Sept 15 I was on French language training). I’m looking forward to seeing everyone – it’s been a long time.

I have to catch the bus in a few minutes. This morning I managed to wake up without an alarm clock. With the Christmas holidays I’m going to get to extend this for another four days.

Wish me luck.

So my crazy rush to get everything done before I leave Berlin is now over. Everything is out of my hands and into theirs.

Sorry, throwers? Baggage handlers.

The pilot said it’s going to be eight and a quarter hours gate-to-gate. I’d set my timer – 5:24 now remains in my vacation.

I like flying east to west. The departure was delayed by an hour and a half so this means we’re going to get a few hours of sunset. I’m on the south side of the plane and the view is nothing short of spectacular. Since we took off I’ve taken about eight hundred photos and watched one episode of Cheers.

Does anyone know if the whole series took place in this one bar? I'm impressed if it did.

But seriously this might be the nicest sunset I’ve ever seen. Check it.

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Originally I was supposed to come home on Thursday but I changed my ticket about three weeks ago. I’m dying to get home so I can be with a certain Swedish-speaking someone.

Oh Stieg Larsson, how I missed you.

There’s been a number of things that have piled up that I have not had time to write about. I still got a few hours left so what the hell, the wine is free, I have not slept in thirty-six hours, I managed to score a window seat with no one next to me – so let’s go.

Last week I saw a movie in the theatre and there were over thirty minutes of commercials and previews beforehand. Thirty minutes. When I asked the ticket-seller, “What the?” she simply replied, “Welcome to Germany”.

At first glance the Germans appear to have messed up their street addressing scheme. Last night were were looking for Stephen and Sandra’s hotel and one side of the street had buildings going twelve, thirteen, fourteen, etc, and the other side was all two hundred and thirty-five. This is crazy you say. But no, at every intersection each street sign with the street name has a direction indicator and a range of numbers for that block. This is waaaay better than doing the even numbers one side odd numbers the other.

And the coolest street name on the planet.

Grosse Pointe Blank is the best movie ever made. I have no idea why I did not like it this much the first time I watched it.

Johnny Mnemonic is the worst movie ever made. It’s even worse than when I saw it in 1995. They start by saying “in the second decade of the twenty-first century” and then they show the date: 2021. Now maybe it’s just me, but isn’t 2021 the *third* decade of the twenty-first century?

They put me on the early flight because there’s a snow storm in Frankfurt and everything is backed up. I managed to check in the toilet and the window through to Ottawa but I was not able to get the customs stamp to collect the VAT. Didn’t have enough time.

We end up sitting on the tarmac for about two hours and we end up leaving about thirty minutes before my original flight.

Here’s the weather in Berlin during take off.

Nice.

And landing at FRA.

Just like Die Hard 2

See you in Ottawa.

There was no sleeping for me – with all that crap I have to do at the airport before my flight. The subway starts running at 05:00 and I plan to be on it shortly thereafter. Flight’s at 10:10.

I manage to get everything packed but I’m still worried that my two boxes are going to go over weight.

When I was in the Netherlands I picked up a bunch of hinges like the ones they had in Finland except Dutch. So I’ve got twelve of these hinges to bring back and they’re pretty heavy. I decide to pack them in with the pieces from the two jigsaw puzzles I purchased – Lemon, these are for you. This is the package I shipped separately yesterday – thirty-six Euros. Blah.

With the cistern box I can remove stuff but the other has only three elements – two parts wood, one part window. You take any one of those away and this whole endeavour is pointless.

I was chatting with a friend on the Gmail trying to figure out a way to determine the weigh of the window and the wood when it hits me: what’s the density of plywood? I went online and chose the most dense plywood I could find – better safe than sorry. Three minutes later I had my answer

w = 2 x (volume for one piece of wood) x (density in kilograms per metre cubed)
w = 2 x (0.820 x 0.620 x 0.008) x (700)
w = 2 x (2.847)
w = 5.69 kg – well within tolerances

Much better. I should chat with G more often – he makes me step up my game.

My last night in Berlin was a perfect ending to my time in the city. I got to hang out with Sandra and Stephen and we visited Checkpoint Charlie, Brandenburg Tor, the Holocaust Memorial, Friedrichstrasse Weihnachtsmarkt, Alexanderplatz Fernsehturm, and we drank a ton of Glühwein. We then went to my favorite cafe / restaurant / bar (Cafe Fabisch) and enjoyed a pint of good German beer.

At 22:00 I gave them my monthly pass (there’s two days left) and send them on the U8 back to their hotel.

I dropped by the Doner shop to say goodbye to those guys who gave me food. I tell them “I’ll be back”

Berlin

As you are all aware I have a very ambitious schedule planned for today. It’s supposed to go something like this

• 09:30 – take tram to Baumarkt
• 10:00 – pick up window, purchase some wood to protect it during travel, wrap everything up
• 10:30 – get to the airport
• 11:45 – drop of the window at the left luggage counter
• 12:00 – get to Pottsdammer Platz
• 12:30 – have lunch with Eva
• 13:30 – get back to my apartment, pay my rent, hand back the second set of keys, pack up a parcel to ship to Canada, ship said parcel
• 15:11 – collect my buddy Stephen and his sister Sandra from the main train station

I should mention that the airport and the Baumarkt are at almost opposite ends of the city. This truly is going to be a stress test for the Berlin Public transportation system.

I manage to make it to the Baumarkt just after 10:00 – when I get there I notice that they open at 08:00 and not 10:00. Oh well, next time. I grab a cart and go pick up the window. I ask the dude if he can cut me two pieces of wood 82 x 62 cm. The lesson from this exchange is to check the local cost of the merchandise. I’d been planning all along to use some plywood to protect the window. At the Home Despot in Canada I would have simply gone to where they have the saw and grabbed a couple of scrap pieces for about four dollars. But this is Germany so dude sells me two pieces of 8 mm plywood that cost – get this – twenty-one Euros. Unbelievable. This window purchase is quickly climbing into the non-profitable zone.

But I forgive him because his last name is Sandmann.

So I get through the cash, and of course they have a workbench set up for customers to wrap all their gear. I use the last of the duct tape and then finish with the packing tape. It looks terrible but it should do the job.

Pack station!

I head out across the parking lot catch the tram. The package feels really heavy. I start to wonder if I’ve broken the twenty three kilogram limit. Lesson: next time bring a scale.

When the tram arrives it’s 10:48 – almost twenty minutes behind schedule. I get to the S-Bahn and I have to wait another ten minutes for the S43 to show up. It’s 11:30 by the time I make it to Brüsseler Strasse where I have to catch the bus to the airport. Just when all hope seems to be lost, the bus shows up just as I get to the stop. Five minutes later I’m at the airport. It takes about three minutes to drop off the window at the left luggage counter and three minutes after that I’m on a bus heading to Hauptbanhoff where I have to wait another three minutes for the next bus to take me to Pottsdammer Platz. I start out thirty minutes behind schedule and I arrive fifteen minutes early.

The rest of the afternoon goes by without a hitch (too soon?). Stress test passed.

There was an added bonus – the last bus I took was a double-decker and I got to sit up top at the front and I took some great pictures of the Reichstag and the Bundes-something-or-other.

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I have not been fully honest with you about the German toilets. They are wonderful and amazing and all that, but it was not always so.

You see, there are many different types of toilets over here. Most of the ones you will encounter in any recently renovated buildings will be of the modern kind. They are similar to what we have back in Canada – a bowl of water with a flushing disposal mechanism. Now the older ones, they’re not like this. They’re not like this at all.

I’m reluctant to write about this (well, no, not really) but if you have issues reading about what every single human who has ever lived, does almost every single day of their lives, then you can just skip this right now and go watch my all-time favorite YouTube video.

The rest of you, let’s go.

You see, hundreds of years ago, humans used to get sick and die. Today this happens, but much less frequently. One of the ways the ancient peoples checked for heath was to inspect (I’m borrowing from Marge Simpson here) their leavings. I guess that, often times, written in the leaves, would be things that had not yet come to pass (pun *not* intended – I’m ripping off Lord of the Rings here). What I’m saying is, they could tell if they were beginning to get sick.

So the Germans looked at this and came up with a way that made the whole inspection phase of the process as efficient as possible. Problem is, that when medical science started ramping up, these inspection-efficient toilets were already installed all over the place and probably many of the factories were tooled only to make these types of toilets. I visited a Baumarkt in Dusseldorf in 2004 and they had the old toilets but none of the stores I visited on this trip did. Believe me, I looked.

Now to be fair to the Germans (and unfair to the Dutch) I was only able to find one of these old-style toilets in the Netherlands. I mean I know where I can find them in Germany, but I did not go to these places on this trip.

So with our further adieu, here for your viewing pleasure is one of the old style toilets (from Holland).

Notice anything “wrong” with this?

If you can’t see it, here’s a “proper” one to assist with your analysis (also from Holland).

See it yet?

The best thing about the old design is when people use them for the first time. A Canadian or American or Australian who first visits Germany finds everything about the country to be really advanced. It’s like being transported into the future. Everyone is driving BMW and Mercedes, the trains go super-fast, the highways are spectacular, all that stuff.

And then they encounter one of these toilets.

The first thing that goes through his mind is “when are we going to be getting these back home?” but not in the I-cannot-wait sort of way. The procedure of going to the toilet is identical so the person knows what to do, but the intermediate state of the system is quite different from what he’s expecting.

This was all much more interesting in the pre-Internet days because afterwards all you want to do is find out what the hell just happened. But if you’re a visitor to a country, this is probably not the sort of thing you want to bring up with your hosts. Most people try to be as discrete as possible in the first place – discussing what just happened in the WC is usually not considered polite dinner conversation.

I’ve often thought about installing one of these old-school toilets at my place just for shits and giggles (pun intended this time). Make the washroom ultra-modern with super-high-tech everything: heated floors, a mirror with embedded lights, fancy marble tile, gold-trimmed fixtures, but with an in-wall cistern that supports a nineteen-forties-era German inspection toilet. As the guests return to the party, the bewildered looks on their faces would make the whole effort worthwhile.

Does anyone here know if a non-underground train was proposed for the City of Ottawa’s light rail project? It would not surprise me in the least if it did not even occur to anyone that an elevated train could do the job and I think this has to do with the general perception of Canadian trains.

To explain what I mean, I will tell you a story.

When I was younger my dad used to take me fishing up the Ottawa Valley. There were two places we went to quite often. One was just outside of Pembroke and the other was a few kilometres past Deep River – birthplace of the atomic medical isotopes. What these places had in common was that they were both small rivers that were located right below railroad bridges that were part of Canada’s only transcontinental railway.

Once when I was about eight years old, we were out there fishing under one of those bridges (I can’t remember which), and I was having a very successful day. When I was a kid I *loved* fishing, similar to the way a regular person loves roller coasters or the Space Shuttle. So I was sitting there by the edge of the water, my bobber floating about half way across to the other side, I was staring at it intensely because I thought I had a bite (there was a current so it was hard to tell).

Then, all of a sudden there was a blast from an air horn that sounded like a cold war-era, nuclear-powered, air-raid siren and this massive freight train came barrelling down the tracks overhead. It was like I was at ground zero for the end of the world. I crapped my pants, jumped up, threw my rod away, and ran out of there as fast as I could. I thought that the bridge and train were going to come crashing down on top of me.

Yes, that’s right – a train made me crap my pants. I imagine most people have had similar experiences – Canadian trains are incredibly noisy and scary. There’s some sort of regulation in Canada that says any time a train crosses a road it has to blast that stupid horn. It’s no wonder no one wants to be within ten miles of one of those things, let alone next to the tracks.

As a Canadian-train-fearing Canadian it’s really strange to be in Germany. They have all these massive trains that travel at incredible speeds and they are all super quiet – even the freight trains. I must say, they sound almost pleasant. I’ve been a couple times to this restaurant near Hackeser Markt. An upscale place, the staff are super-friendly, they brew their own beer, and Jürgen Prochnow once stopped in there for lunch – it’s located just two blocks away from where they were filming a scene for the sequel to Das Boot – the direct-to-video “Der Zug”.

What I find so incredible about this place is that it’s located directly below four separate railway lines (two S-Bahn lines – eastbound / westbound and two Deutsche Bahn lines that service east / west Regional Bahn and ICE trains.) A train passes overhead at least every four minutes but no one in the restaurant even notices – it’s that quiet.

All of this leaves me wondering for how long the equivalent restaurant-underneath-a-Canadian-railroad would remain in business. Probably not very long, with the customers crapping their pants every five minutes and all.

Not very long, let me tell you. Not very long at all.

Yesterday I went to the Christmas Market and one of the booths had the exact same wood-burning three-level oven from the Weihnachtsmarkt in Leipzig. This tells me that it was not custom made and I bet, if one were so inclined, you could find these things for sale on the Internet and they probably won’t be that expensive. This guy was selling a different type of bread-cheese-meat thing.

Target date - Winterlude 2013. Who's in?

There was also a booth set up by my new favorite radio station – Berliner Rundfunk 91.4. They were promoting the Berlin Eisbären (hockey team) and they had set up mini-rink where one could try and shoot the puck through a goalie made of vinyl. I did poorly but the guy was nice and gave me a prize anyway.

Or was it "the goalie did well"?

I assembled two jigsaw puzzles during my stay in Berlin and I listened almost exclusively to this radio station while I puzzled. It was a very strange experience. German radio is exactly the same as what we have back home but with many major differences. I will list them for you now.

1. Often times they don’t play the whole song. Sometimes if the news is about to start they’ll play the first twenty seconds of a song and then just fade to the news. On of my friends out west says that one of the English radio stations in his town (he’s near an American military base) actually promotes that “we play the entire song”. I asked the dude at the hockey booth and he was surprised to learn that this occurs. I guess if you’ve only ever listened to German radio you wouldn’t be able to tell.

2. During the first six hours of listening it was the greatest radio station in the world and then things started to change. At the beginning they were playing a whole bunch of songs / artists I rarely or never hear and it was kinda refreshing

• Gordon Lightfoot – just one song, but still nice to hear some old school CanCon outside of the Great White North
• Eurythmics – many songs I’d never heard before
• Neil Diamond – some songs
• ABBA – non-ABBA Gold
• Zager and Evans – In The Year 2525. You have to hear this one
• Falco – not just Rock me Amadeus, he had another song
• Chris Rea – Driving Home of Christmas
• Lynn Anderson – Rose Garden (this one was on the Zodiac soundtrack and I loved that film)
• Roxette – SwedeCon!
• Phil Collins / “Genesis” – A few different songs (when’s the last time you heard “Land of Confusion” – it’s even more relevant today)

Then it started to get repetitive. Like very. That Zager and Evans song was one of the strangest ones and this was the first time in my life I’d ever heard it. I thought it might have been just a song they threw in there for fun. Nope, two days later there it was again. And then again the next day.

What was once special has now been lost.

3. My German is just good enough to understand about forty percent of what was being said during the news. If you have not heard, over the last couple weeks here in Berlin some Grinch has been dressing up like Santa Clause and visiting various Christmas Markets around the city and giving out free drinks laced with some sort of blood-vomit-inducing substance. When this story broke I did not know the German word for “poison” so I was at a loss for what was going on. A couple of days later one of my Berliner friends informed me of the situation.

In light of all this I’ve stopped my practice of accepting free samples at the Christmas markets.

I’ve been promising everyone that I’d be bringing a toilet with me to the airport and on the flight back to Canada.

On that note, I found out that the Baumarkt next to the giant Ikea (that’s bigger than the one in Ottawa) is having a sale: 20% off everything in the store. I think that’s pretty ambitious. Normally shops in Germany are only open a few Sundays throughout the year and when they are, it’s kind of an event. I’m expecting it to be a zoo. To make matters worse, I’m meeting a friend at the Hauptbahnhof at 15:11 and I want to get the VAT refund so I have to fill out all that paperwork at the checkout. This will take time.

I’ve only got two hours to do all this. For this special sale they’re only open from 13:00 to 18:00. I’m on the tram on my way to the store. It’s not too full and I’m hoping it’s going to be like this for the return trip. I brought work gloves with me from Canada for just such a situation. It’s calling for rain at some point this afternoon – the gloves will help.

Of course the Berlin public transportation system is way more effective than I thought it would be – I’m forty minutes early.

I exit the tram at the same time as another bargain-hunting Christmas shopper. Ulrike tells me all the stores in Berlin are open this Sunday – she’s going to the Ikea. I don’t want to wait in the rain so I go with her – Ikea opens their restaurant thirty minutes before the store proper.

They let us in at exactly 12:30 and we take the escalator upstairs. She grabs a juice and I take a beer. We chat until about 12:55 when it’s time for me to go. I want to be at the Baumarkt for 13:00 when the doors open – if I’m late all the toilets will be gone. A gaggle of shoppers are standing around the restaurant waiting for the Ikea to open. I look around: there’s a single escalator but it’s only going up. The only way out is… through the store – and they’re not letting anyone in… I’m trapped in the Ikea!

At *any* other time this would be awesome, but not today.

Three of the longest minutes of my life later they open it up and let the shoppers in. I rush down the stairs and take a shortcut to the exit but of course when I get there they have not yet opened these doors. So I’m stuck for a second time inside the Ikea!

Let us in!

No, let me out!

The ironing is just killing me.

Finally this lady shows up to open the door and I escape out into the rain. I dash across the parking lot to the Baumarkt. By a stroke of good luck the exact same clerk that helped me the last time is working today. She doesn’t speak a word of English so once again my German language proficiency and Pictionary skills are going to be put to the test.

This time I’m getting the mini-cistern – it’s small enough to fit on the plane without having to go over-sized luggage. I also decide to pick up a window. I did all the measurements and weights and everything is within spec. I have a per-item budget of

• one hundred and fifty-eight linear centimeters (about sixty-two inches)
• twenty three kilograms (fifty pounds)

The window is

• 11 kg (13 kg under)
• 60 x 80 x 10 = 150 (8 cm under)

The cistern

• 11 kg (13 kg under)
• 82 x 51 x 16 = 149 (9 cm under)

There is another problem – I can only take one item with me. The clerk tells me I can buy the window today (and get the discount) and then pick it up tomorrow. This is good – they open at 10:00 and I’m having lunch with a friend at 12:30. But I’m just delaying the problem. When Tuesday morning rolls around I’m going to have to get both items to the airport somehow.

To defeat this I’m simply going to take the window to the airport before Tuesday morning. If I can make it out of the Baumarkt by 10:30 on Monday I should be able to do all this before my lunch date. This will be the ultimate test of the Berlin public transportation system. Their web site says an hour forty with twenty minutes at the airport. We’ll see.

The cistern box has been opened so we take a few minutes to go through all the stuff to make sure everything is there. It is and we pack everything up, grab the window, and head for the bathroom scales for a final weight verification. We’re good – everything is within spec.

All there.

I manage to get everything I need, cistern, window, handle, actuator plate, and two of an item that does not have an English-language name (Kühlschrankschleppscharnier). I also sign up for the VAT refund. Total time is just under an hour.

I head out into the rain to catch the tram. It’s just after 14:00 and I have to be at the Huptbahnoff to meet my buddy in sixty-eight minutes.

Would you mind taking a picture of me and my toilet?

I manage to make it home, drop everything off and get out the door again in only forty minutes. By the time I make it to the S-Bahn I realize I’m going to be about six minutes late. I message my buddy and he informs me that he’s coming on tomorrow. I check the email and find out he’s absolutely right.

So my friend in the Netherlands that had the baby, she was telling me that it was a non-standard birth. The baby was aimed in the wrong direction so she had to have a c-section. Everyone is fine but it’s pretty amazing that if this had been in the not-too-distant past there’s a good chance that both mother and baby could have died.

When I was a kid I used to wonder why I was so fortunate to have been born in a nice, safe, first-world country, in the good half of the twentieth century. I remember my parents took us to see Gandhi in the cinema when I was ten years old. It was usually after incidents like this that I would become most thankful for my good luck. I was told beforehand that the film it was based on a true story and it was a pretty violent for a ten year old.

See the problem was, when I was a kid I thought that there was someone (God) who was responsible for distributing people’s souls when they are born. I thought there was a chance I could have been born in India in the year 1053 (for example).

Slowly the Canadian education system and entertainment industry managed to chip away at all the misconceptions in my brain. I think the soul-distribution one died in my grade eleven eleven biology class. There are two others worth mentioning.

The first was that gravity is not caused by the Earth’s rotation, it’s caused by its mass. For this one I blame the makers of the movie Moonraker – I seem to remember that they lost gravity in the space station when it stopped spinning. The Earth spins. Seemed logical enough.

The other time was when I was four my dad went to Chicago for a business trip. I was told he was going to another country and I had no idea what country was. My only frame of reference was this globe we had –  someone had pointed to a place on this globe and said “we live here” so I thought when he said he was going to another country that he was actually going to another planet. True story.

I wonder if kids these days are as dumb as I was or has TV and the Internet made them all smarted.

I want to go to there