There is a well-engineered, streamlined, and many times practiced protocol for your journey. Allow me to introduce you to it.
First, you will browse several different websites catering to students looking for rooms in Berlin. These sites will allows you to search specifically for places in the neighborhoods you are interested in, and present you with endless lists of potential places of shelter.
You find one that looks nice. Decent price, good neighborhood. If you are lucky, you may be able to email them, but more likely there will be listed a phone number by which you may inquire further. Prepare the following: German phone; pad of paper; handkerchief; and a deep sense of humility. Take three deep breaths and dial.
No, you didn’t accidentally dial confusion - that came of its own accord, as if by uninvited conference call. Unfortunately, confusion has better reception than you, so you will just have to talk louder. Somehow, you will get the important points across and will be given a time for a Besichtingungstermin - a visitation meeting. Wipe the cold sweat off of your forehead with the handkerchief.

A better term than visitation meeting might be interrogation, though there will be no man in a fedora smoking in the corner - he won’t be wearing a fedora. After being shown the apartment, you will be sat down in the kitchen with the other inhabitants of the apartment. The ringleader, armed with pad of paper and retractable pen, which they will incessantly click, will ask you many questions. They will begin simply - your name, where you’re from, why you’re in Berlin and so forth. Then they will segue without warning to more challenging ones, both in language and in content. (Have you heard of this obscure German band? No? Schade.) Having so destroyed your will and confidence, they will ask you if you have any questions for them. In all likelihood, owing to your crippled dignity, you will not. However, having been asked, you will feel obligated to come up with something, thereby forcing you to come up on the spot with the most asinine imaginable question. (Well, yes, I suppose we do like spaghetti.) Don’t worry, you’re right on track. Having broken out again in a cold sweat (you forgot your handkerchief, didn’t you?), you will write your name, phone number and address on a list of 20 others who have come before you, and you will be shown to the door.

And now the final phase. I hope you kept your deep sense of humility handy. After waiting several days, you will receive an email. Your heart will leap. Could this be it? The answer, my friend, is no. Likely, it will say something like:

hi Leute,
unser kleines Zimmer hat ab jetzt einen neuen Bewohner und leider ist es keine/keiner von euch.
grüße,
so und so.

Translation:

hi people,
our little room now has a new inhabitant and unfortunately it is none of you.
best,
so and so.

Head up, my friend. You’ve got three more Besichtigungstermine today.

-Micah

Footnotes:
1. I might be exaggerating a bit. And I’m honestly having a great time. A more conventional update will come later - perhaps when I’ve found a place.
2. If something seems to good to be true, it probably is. For example, if you get a reply to your wanted ad (suspicious in itself) offering you a furnished room in Kreuzberg with several others, when you go to visit you will probably discover that the three people living there are between 40 and 70 years old, will fit the stereotype of “eurotrash” unbelievably well, and will then sit you down for tea and not let you leave for over an hour, discussing how intelligent they are, while one of their dogs insistently tries you eat your pants and bite your hand off.

I am going to Berlin for 11 months on a scholarship, called the International Reciprocal Scholarship Exchange Program, or IRSEP. As its name implies, it is a reciprocal exchange program at the U of M, currently with programs to 6 countries. (If anyone reading this is eligible to apply, I highly, highly recommend it.) After an extensive application process, I was selected was one of two recipients to go to Germany. This is an amazing blessing.

This scholarship provides me with direct enrollment at the Freie Universität Berlin, one of two major public universities in Berlin. The direct enrollment means I will have access to the full course catalog there, and I will be in regular classes alongside regular German students. This is rather intimidating. I am anticipating a bit of a crash course in advanced German in my first months there.
The academic calendar in Germany is significantly different than in the US. Lectures for the Winter Term run October 13 - February 14, and Summer Semester runs April 14 - July 18. This leaves a hefty two months between which should be quite apt for traveling…
While the entire course catalog is open to me, I will be concentrating in areas that will transfer to my concentrations of Global Studies and German back here. Probable topics include European Politics, International Relations, German Language and Literature, and so on. I register at the beginning of October.

The scholarship is quite permissive with regards to living arrangements as well. I was given the choice of staying in a dormitory for foreign students, living in an apartment arranged by the university, or being given money to find my own arrangements. I chose the latter. My plan is to find a Wohngemeinschaft or WG, literally “living community.” Essentially they are groups of students living together in apartments, with varying degrees of communal living. They are quite ample and diverse, and should enable me to get a very authentic experience as a student in Berlin, as well meet a lot of people. Finding one is my first order of business upon my arrival. (Immediately on arrival I will be staying with a good family friend who resides in Berlin.)

Well, these are the big things. As of now, I am somewhat packed. Excited, antsy, nervous, sanguine, panicked - I am all of these things.

Anyways, life promises to get very interesting very soon. Which is more than I can say for this vapid disquisition.

With that, I will end this insufferably banal post. I plan on writing up another one soon comprising an overview of why and how I am going to Germany.

Liebe Grüße,
Micah

After stagnating since Chicago, the bicycle has decisively asserted itself again into my life. On a whim and a call from a friend, I went to Coldsprints last night, a winter roller racing series here. It looks like this:


reaching into the damp suitcase of pain

Originally uploaded by bestkept



To my absolute surprise, not only did I qualify, but I made it to the quarterfinals before being knocked out by an actual track racer. The races are essentially 20-30 seconds of hell. The rollers have very little resistance, so you immediately spin up to very high speeds (I averaged 41 mph) and then you have to spin like the dickens for 500 meters. Painful, yet addictive.

Tonight, given the balmy 20°F weather, I went on a Saturday Night Ride, a weekly informal group bike ride occurring every Saturday night year-round. It was an excellent ride.
This compounded with a No-Name alleycat race tomorrow night and StuporBowl, a very big winter alleycat next Saturday, makes me excited to bike.
And for the long term: look out, Paris-Brest-Paris 2011.
At the time I was in Weiser House, there was much talk of the Free School they were in the process of founding. A free school is essentially an organized school where anyone may teach a class and anyone may take one. They are generally free as in beer, and free as in speech. I think there are some very exciting possibilities here. Which is I was most delighted to find tonight that there is a burgeoning Free School here in the cities. It is called EXCO, or Experimental College, and they’ve got a bunch of excellent looking courses happening this spring (registration open now!).
Looking through the course listings, I found the very interesting course entitled “Gentrification and Minneapolis Neighborhoods“. Two peculiar points of note: a) I was really made familiar with the concept of urban gentrification in my time in the collectives, and b) one of the course’s instructors is my friend Andrew Bender Dahl, whom I met last summer going on Saturday Night Rides, whom is radical, whom I had been meaning to catch up with. Oh, life. You’re so cheeky sometimes.
What else has really come together? Ah, one last thing, which also happens to have been inspired by Chicago and realized with bikes: I came upon a couple of guys who apparently raid a dumpster full of Naked juice quite regularly. I’m going with them on Tuesday. Lots of free juice, conveniently preserved in the cold weather: good. Meeting new people here as a result of a chain of events and things learned in Chicago: yes. Bicycles: for sure.

So what is this? Surely this post cannot synthesize as well as life. But the question is, how interesting or boring is this stuff? I am quite interested in your opinion. (also known as “comment,” for which a mechanism has conveniently been implemented) Blogging again, I am met with the same dilemma of where to go with this: I can stick with very thematic posts, essays if you will, but inspiration for these tends to be sporadic. Or I can go the more “report of my life” style. But this is always much more boring for me, as I imagine it must be for anyone who attempts to read it. I mean, the only really fun part of this post, for example, was coming up with what little cohesive stuff it had, i.e. the first paragraph. I have this very active drive to write again, but I have so far lacked any cohesive thematic ideas to write about.

It will come, it will come…

P.S. In the middle of my qualifying round at Coldsprints, a lace on my left shoe wrapped around the pedal spindle. I was going 45 mph at the time, which didn’t bode well for the shoes. Rather than just breaking a lace, the grommets got entirely ripped off one side. Whoops.

What follows is an very lengthy account. However, for the sane ones who do not have the interest to read this beast, it can be summed up thusly: I surfed collectives in Chicago, met my friend Max at a Chicago jail, took him and friends West to Omaha, crashed at an anarchist house there, then headed North up to Brookings to spend a few days with my friend Wes, cut across Minnesota to Chippewa Falls to see Mariah, and then home. And it was amazing. On with it, then. Actually, one note: In reading over this account, it seems to come across as a bit flat - I seem to have failed in getting across the true feel of this trip. I hope the events can at least speak for themselves.

In the days preceding my departure, I began to get a nasty skepticism about whether this trip would work. Travelling without a plan and expecting to run into great adventure is a pretty gutsy move. I had never done anything of this sort before, so I really didn’t know what to expect. My fear was that I would drive to Chicago and have nothing to do and no one to meet for a week, and come back home with little gained but a gas bill.

The moment I arrived at the place I would be staying in Chicago, however, these fears were alleviated.

The drive to Chicago was extremely foggy. I stopped in Madison to have dinner with my brother, Noah, and would later find out that the reason I had a dickens of a time getting back on to I-90 was a 100+ car pileup that happened there. Anyways, I got to Chicago fine and then found my home. This was a place I had found through The Couchsurfing Project, a site which I very highly recommend for any traveler. It was listed as a warehouse having 16 people living in it. And how!

This is Weiser House, an activist collective in the Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago. 16 people currently pay rent, with many guests in and out. It is the second floor of an old warehouse. On one side, it is bordered by freight train tracks, elevated to match the height of the floor. Trains regularly rumble by, reminiscent of the apartment of The Blues Brothers. I am pretty much in love with Weiser House, having had dreams of living in a warehouse for quite some time now. Here are some pictures:

Everything in the house is collectively run, with people cooking meals for the collective most nights, chores assigned, and so on. They had a car for collective use as well. After I got there, a couple people just got back from the Odwalla Factory dumpster, and procured a huge booty of Odwalla goodies:

I pretty much lived on this stuff in Chicago. Expiration dates are really more of a suggestion, anyways. But I’ve had enough Chocolate Peanut Butter Odwalla bars for a lifetime.

I slept on a random bed that first night. Woke up around 10:30 to an absolutely beautiful day-I believe it broke 60°F. It was also muggy as hell. I was sweating in a sweatshirt and jeans. I did the half hour ride downtown and rode around downtown Chicago for a couple hours, just getting a feel for the place. I almost got laid out twice, one of which involved somehow sliding diagonally across an intersection, ending in a pretty sweet recovery if I don’t say so myself. It was a lot of fun, anyways. Riding around gave me a feel for how absolutely huge Chicago is — it made Minneapolis seem tiny in comparison. I managed to snap a couple of pictures in between avoiding death. They aren’t the best, I just attached my camera to my bag strap and occasionally held it up for a picture.

I also made a pilgrimage to Intelligentsia Coffee, quite possibly the finest coffee establishment in the Midwest. They allegedly don’t let their baristas touch a drink being served to customers without six months of training. This is, incidentally, the only place I spent money for anything in Chicago.

And worth every penny. That is a double traditional cappuccino. Bellissimo. That’s a word, right?

I also had the misfortune of 3 flats in Chicago, all of which conveniently happened within a mile of me seeing a bike shop. The second time I came across a pretty sweet bike shop called Irv’s in the largely Chicano neighborhood of Pilsen. It had the most ridiculous bike bling. I wish I could build up a ridiculous scraper bike with this stuff.

Anyways. Eventually found my way back home to Weiser House. I was quite glad I got back when I did (around 4 pm), because not long afterwards a magnificent thunderstorm swept through. A giant thunderstorm on January 6th in Chicago. So, I observed the thunder storm and read for awhile, until around 8:00, when things began to get quite interesting. Some people were talking about how a couple of guys had gotten arrested earlier and were going to do jail support for them, waiting for them at the jail and being there when they get out. It turns out that Bush had been in town that day, and a couple of them had gone in front of his motorcade with a giant banner. The plan was to just stand there, until someone yelled “Push!” and they charged a bunch of mounted police, and one guy knocked the Chicago Chief of Police off his Segway. Whoops! Anyways, most of them got off with misdemeanors, and a bunch of people were biking over to the jail to meet up with them. I asked if I could tag along, thinking it would be a neat opportunity to see the city at night. It wasn’t until we got outside that we realized that it was still pouring. There was occasional thunder and lightning as well, which made it a rather invigorating ride through a January Chicago Thunderstorm to the First Precinct Jail. And wet. Very wet. This was a memorable experience.

It was at this jail that the most curious thing happened. Also waiting around doing jail support was Max, a friend I went to South with. Yes, just running into an old high school friend waiting around a Chicago jail in a January Thunderstorm. It turns out he was doing much the same thing I was, just getting away and traveling around the country for a bit. He was crashing at another activist collective in town called Lowercase Collective. There was allegedly a feast happening here, so it was decided that everyone would go there. One of the guys I had biked to the jail with has previously been a messenger, and he lead me on a very long, fast ride across town to Lowercase. I must have biked 30 or 40 miles this day. Alas, Lowercase was lacking the promised feast, but good conversation was had with the Lowercase residents, my friend, and others. I realized that it was 3 am, and no one was biking back to Weiser all the way across town, so I crashed at Lowercase that night and peeled the clothes off my body.

In the morning I headed back to Weiser, and spent the day getting dry and warm. It was still perfect temperatures, and a bit drizzly. Max called me, telling me he and some friends are headed West and wondering if I would want to drive them a ways, maybe St. Louis or Des Moines or Omaha. In the spirit of the adventure, I agreed. The next morning, I drove over to Lowercase and picked them up. They were Max, Emily, Pete and Vince. They were hitchhiking and trainhopping to the West Coast, most likely to San Francisco. It was a really fun group. It was decided I would take them to Omaha. They threw all their packs in the van and we were off. We ate food that we had, Odwalla bars and dried apples and pita bread. We didn’t know where we would be staying in Omaha.

We got there around 8 or 9, walked around the Riverfront a bit, and generally came to the consensus that downtown Omaha on a Thursday night isn’t particularly exciting. Emily and Pete decided they would start hitching then, so I drove them out to a truck stop outside of town. A common theme: I was sad to see them go, off on a much more grandiose Kerouac-ian adventure than I. Myself, Vince and Max drove back into Omaha to try to find some people or a place to stay. We got good and lost and found ourself in the hip neighborhood, and we were walking past a pizza shop when Vince caught the magic word: the Pizza Shop was a collective. It was closed, but he got the attention of an employee and started asking about the activist/collective scene in Omaha. Turns out there isn’t much of one (who knew?), but there was one house with couple anarchists living there. We asked if we could crash there, she gave them a call, and to our pleasant surprise, we had a place to crash in Omaha. We headed over and met Henry. He was a very interesting guy, had lived many places, hitchhiked and trainhopped around the country, and was spending some time in Omaha. We crashed for the night and in the morning I took Max and Vince out to the same truck stop for them to hitch from. I was very jealous of their continued adventuring, and I’m afraid my appetite for such an adventure has been whetted irreversibly. Hitchhiking this summer? I hope so.

After seeing them off, I headed North to Brookings, SD to spend some time with my friend Wes. Brookings is a town of about 18,000 on the East border of South Dakota. This life was such a stark contrast to the one I had been living in the collectives. The lifestyle there is a very minimalist one, antimaterialistic, a life one might expect of the ideological contrarians of capitalism. It was really refreshing, an aim I would like to take in my own life.

Brookings had homes very much full of stuff. I had a good ironic chuckle when at a friend of Wes’ house I found a decoration above the toilet reading in hip bold lowercase, “simplify.” I counted 18 bottles of stuff in the adjacent bathtub. Ah, but it is the thought that counts.

Another stark contrast was the things I was doing. Brookings largely ended the more adventurous part of this trip, which was a bit saddening. Time was constraining. In any case, I had a fun time with Wes and his friends for a couple days. On Saturday, I cut across Minnesota to Chippewa Falls, WI. My excellent friend Mariah is about to set off on her own adventure in France, and she and her friend Paul were having a little gathering for a proper send-off. It was a good last stop for the trip. From there it was a return to Minneapolis. I got home around 11 pm.

So that was what happened in this week, and I must say, I am really impressed by how well this worked. I only wish I could have continued on West, hitchhiking to San Francisco. Time will tell on that one. My life has undoubtedly been changed, and what this account is missing is all the profound experiences that are so much harder to put into words. Maybe I’ll try to do that with a bit more time.

To close, here are some more pictures:

That’s the exterior of Weiser House, the Weiser House cat (named Cat), and a typical view of the some of the Chalkboards at Weiser House.

Dream on!