i keep a diary

February 05, 2005

Baltic Vacation Part Five: On to Berlin

Despite how late we'd stayed up the previous night, we managed to get out of bed before noon on Saturday so we'd at least have some time to enjoy our last day in Tallinn before flying to Berlin later that afternoon.

Saturday, February 5th

Grant and Jake trying to motivate to overcome our hangovers and lack of sleep and leave our hotel room.
We decided to go to McDonalds (cheapest restaurant in Tallinn!) and order all the weird variations on the menu. That way you don't feel too guilty about eating at McDonalds because you can justify it by telling yourself that you're still experiencing something new.
Right? Like how many other times in your life have you eaten a "Maitse Peekonit?"
Mmmmm...surprisingly tasty!
And that's not an apple pie! It's a pie filled with some sort of pink tasty berry that we were unable to identify! Let's hear it for international cuisine! Woooo!
Here's the Le Galaxy Cabaret where Jake and I had gone two nights earlier.
After lunch we walked around for a bit but quickly realized we'd already covered the entire Old Town section of Tallinn several times over. So we found a coffee shop and just decided to hang out and kill some time in there.
The coffee shop turned into a time warp that we didn't end up escaping until three hours later. The sun had long set and they were setting up all these huge white balloons in the Town Square in order to prepare for some festival.
Neato, right?
Here's a picture with people passing in front of them that gives a better idea of how large they actually were.
We got back to the hotel, packed up, checked out and were about to hail a cab for the airport when Jake announced that he had to take shit. He wasn't able to get back into the room, but there was a toilet in the lobby he could use. So Grant and I are sitting in the lobby waiting for Jake and suddenly this piercing alarm goes off and is echoing through the whole lobby.
It was soooo loud, but after like 30 seconds it stopped.
Turns out that the bathroom in the lobby that Jake was using was equipped to accommodate handicapped people (see the big fold-down metal arms on either side that a person can use to lower or raise themselves off the toilet?).
The bathroom also came equipped with this: a rip-cord alarm that you could pull in order to let the hotel staff that you need assistance. So Jake was sitting there having a shit and absentmindedly wondered what would happen if he pulled the ripcord - which resulted in the deafening alarm that Grant and I heard out in the lobby.

A few minutes after the alarm stopped, Jake came back to the lobby and explained that it had been that caused the alarm to go off. He explained that as soon as it went off, he jumped up off the toilet, pulled his pants mid-shit, up and just ran out of the bathroom so that the hotel staff wouldn't kick in the door and find him in there. I was like "So, they opened it up to find an empty bathroom? I wonder what they thought happened?" Jake goes, "They'll think some guy fell in the toilet but managed to get it together and wheel away to a clean getaway." Hahaha. We hailed a cab and arrived at the airport with plenty of time before our flight to Berlin. So we passed the time perusing the latest issue our our favorite Estonian periodical (sorry FHM)...
...Tiit Sukk!
I tried to sleep, but my nap was cut short when I bolted upright because I heard...
...Jake pulling his nuts out in an attempt to brain me. Foiled!
So now where just sitting there talking about Berlin. We were flying there to meet up with a guy named Brandon. None of us knew him - he was a reader of this site and when he read on my site that we were going to be going to traveling to Estonia, he emailed me and told us that after we were finished there that we should fly out to Budapest, Hungary - he'd put us up and show us the town. He provided me with a link to his website, so that we could assure ourselves that he wasn't a kook and that he'd be fun to hang out with.

After a few more emails back and forth trying to solidify plans and dates, Brandon emailed me the following suggestion:

"food for thought: i don't know what your overall time in europe is, or how you're planning to get around, but if you fancy a weekend in berlin on the way down to bpest, i'm more than game. i've got friends there we can stay with no prob in either kreuzberg or prenzlauerberg, and i'm always looking for excuses for weekend-ers. i love that f'n city. easyjet now flies tallinn-berlin, and berlin-budapest. it would mean meeting up in berlin on a friday, and then heading down to bpest on sunday."


Free places to crash in Berlin and Budapest? We were in!
While we were sitting there, this woman in her late thirties walked by us in a pair of tight jeans that gave her the deepest, darkest, most well-defined camel toe I've ever seen. It was so impressive that I decided I to approach her with the old "Wow, you look so much like my Aunt Sally - can you and I take a picture together so I can show her" routine that I always use when I want to take a picture of someone without them knowing the real reason I want a photo.

I tried that bit on this woman but she said "No." I pleaded a few times trying to convince but she held firm. When she walked back past a few minutes later, I tried to document her amazing mooseknuckle with a hip shot from my camera, but I didn't manage to capture it. I did, however, manage to send Grant into another fit of hysterics (that almost rivaled the one he had when Jake showed the camera his deep-shaved asshole) by remarking in awe as she passed "Jesus, look how deep it is! It looks like she got fucked with her pants on."
We found one-way EasyJet tickets from Tallinn to Berlin for about $45 a piece! Insanity. A short flight later and we were saying...
"Hallo to Deutschland!"
We didn't have a cell phone - so we were counting on directions emailed to us by Brandon to take the bus and then the subway to Kreuzberg where his friend Ferdie lived. Brandon would be waiting for us there.
We got our hands on a bus and subway map, managed to locate the proper subway station (amidst a sea of thirty-letter German words)...
...and set out on the bus for our journey.
We managed to get off at the right subway stop, but then had trouble finding the apartment. We wandered around for thirty minutes before finally managing to get a hold of Brandon and figuring out where we were. While we wandered around, we kept running into all sorts of "SM und fetisch" clubs - confirming all of our suspicions about Berlin. Jaaaaa, ist kinky!
We finally found Ferdie's house around 2am and met Brandon! The man who reached out and made this whole second leg of our trip possible! There was party going on at Ferdie's and by the time we finally managed to find it, Brandon, who'd been drinking for hours, was totally wasted.
The party in full effect in Ferdie's kitchen.
Ferdie spun some records for us, while we got our drink on and talked about different nightlife options.
Jake chatting up Ferdie's girlfriend.
Hahaha. This is pretty much the least incriminating photo I have of this guy. After we'd gotten our buzz on, we decided to go crosstown and check out a club called Watergate.
But not before we got our motherfucking Doner Kabob on. (Because girls love it when you have "spicy lamb burps.")
Look out ladies, here we come.
Subway ride number one.
While waiting for the second subway, Drunk Brandon was getting camera happy and kept INSISTING that Grant do one of his famous DRL kicks so Brandon could take a picture of it.
Grant hates when people try to goad him into "being an entertainer" and kept trying to politely refute Brandon. I on the other hand, was enjoying watching Grant get angry but be too polite to be a dick to Brandon, so I kept egging Brandon on being like "C'mon Brandon, don't give up so easy! I bet you can get him to jump if you keep asking!" Hahaha.
The best part was when Brandon was like "Oh, is it because your jacket's too tight? Hold on, I'll help you!" And then proceeded to undo the bottom button on Grant's jacket. Hahaha.
"There! The button's undone! Now jump! C'mon! JUMP!" Look at the "Oh no, we're going to have to spend the next 10 days with this guy" expression on Grant's face.
I think Jake was starting to get a little worried at this point too.
Despite how drunk he already was, that didn't stop Brandon from busting out a flask of whiskey and drinking continually for the rest of our forty minute ride there. But the nice thing was, even though he was lacking in sobriety, he was at least making up for it...
...with generosity. Hahahahah.
And he actually was pretty funny. (Or maybe I was just less worried because he had a ski jacket ugly enough to give my much beloved jacket "Big Blue, a run for its money)
After a thirty minute delay (caused by getting on a train going in the wrong direction) we finally got to the right subway stop.
Watergate looked exactly what I expected a Berlin nightclub to look like. See?
Despite playing mostly nothing but bad drum and bass music, the club was pretty rad. It was located on the Spree River practically underneath the Oberbaumbricke Bridge and had...
...breathtaking views through the windows all along one side.
Mit many, many people making party unter red lights.
Crowd shot. At around 5:30, we wanted to get going, but Brandon still wanted to stick around. When we realized he wanted to stick around because he thought that he had a shot at making out with his friend's girlfriend we made an executive decision to get his drunk ass out of there before we found ourselves all homeless in Berlin.
Aw, yeah.
Throwdown!
Cross-eyed Grant points out how stupid-late it is while we wait for the train back to Ferdie's place. Brandon was still trying to goad Grant into taking "funny pictures" and, because Grant was drunk at this point...
...finally managed to get him to participate in funny pics!
Like this "Guy that got punched in the stomach" photo! Nice!
Even I managed to get myself involved in a little Milli Vanilli running jump chest bump! Ta-dow!
Then we took a bunch of pictures of Brandon while we took turns making sneaky funny faces behind him. Hahaha. Sorry Brandon, it is a rite of passage you know (and it's way better than getting balls on you). Here's Grant's face.
Me? I got him not once...
...but twice! Hahaha.
Hahahah. Jake caught on quickly.
Double-teamed!
Riding the subway back to Ferdie's.
When we got back to Ferdie's, Brandon showed us to the room where we'd all be sleeping and then went off to his own room to pass out. At this point we weren't sure if Brandon was a total loon that we were going to have to ditch once we got to Budapest with him, or whether he'd just been totally shitfaced and he'd be normal the next morning. We were leaning towards giving him the benefit of the doubt, but at the same time we were starting to freak out because if we ended up having to ditch Brandon (and the free place to stay in Budapest that he'd so graciously offered), we'd have to figure out a way to redo our budget to pay for eight extra nights we'd hadn't planned on having to spend money on.
The more we thought about it, the more nervous we got. We decided that we needed to sit down, and formulate an alternate plan in the event that sober Brandon was pretty much the same as drunk Brandon. We sat down to have this serious chat, but it was derailed almost instantly when Jake stripped down to his underwear and we noticed...
...that he apparently has a leaky penis problem. I believe in this photo he was saying something like "What? What? What's the big deal? So my penis is a little bit leaky! Am I supposed to be ashamed?"
And if there's one thing that Jake doesn't have, it's shame. (Coincidentally, the other thing he doesn't have is a penis with continence .)
Before turning in for the night, we once more pondered the night's cliffhanger: Would Brandon be a normal person in the morning? Or had we accidentally aligned ourselves with a crazy person that we'd have to loose and figure out how to survive on the cheap in a foreign city? Tune in next week!