Dolphin Address 5
February 13th 2005
With a merry melody in my head I descend the stairwell. I’m going to town and sometimes I like that a lot, like now. Practiced I rattle the right key out of my bunch and stick it right in the silent lock. It’s raining, how it rains a lot, but my hood works like a mobile home. In here I live and do that anywhere. Elastically I grind the winter grit under my soles. So much to see.
A lady almost trips over the leash of her imperturbable young dog and snaps: ‘Du bist auch so bloede, heute!’ (‘You are so silly, today’). A very low car hums by on very high wheels. A playground lies childless in the rain. A Turkish woman in a tent coat shuffles by in a homey pace carrying an enormous sack of oranges.
I wonder if Karl Marx is not frequently turned around by the street that is named after him. Capital capital: a furniture store with a corner seat and a rifle shop with sportive clothing, a modern Indian warehouse and an Epicure for Turkish pickles, an Imbiss, where for 99 cents you can bite into a Polette, that is a flattened meatball and a telecafe and another one, to ring Turkey cheap.
Old hippies you see here regularly and they fall into two categories: fat with greasy long hair in a pony tail and vulgar clothes, and rather thin with loose washed hairs, ascetic faces with a lot of nose and corduroy.
It’s wet in the streets in various ways. Sunshades water down in torrential curtains, the points of umbrella baleens are targeting your eyes and on every street corner a sole deep flush of rainwater collects.
It’s pretty crowded in sheltered places. Particularly the ‘Neukoellner Arkaden’ mal is brimming over. You can eat the world there, like a Turkish eat corner is only separated by a one and a half meter wall from her Asian colleague. A woman is eating Falafel with across one shoulder one strap and two across the other. A simple mystery. Still there is space for traditional snacks. The amount of tomato ketchup that is put on Currywurst is unreal but just to my taste as they have even less flavor than factory bread. Also a canyon experience. The escalator takes you high up in this steel tent and gives you the shivers glancing down.
In the street again everybody looks hasty and irritated. When I cross a zebra path a car is revving and roaring and pulling it’s back up against the break. I cast a slashing eye through the windscreen and see that my light has switched to red. In sprint I save the wet skin of my teeth. And now to home and dry by fry.
Jan Ploeg, Berlin, February 13th 2005
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