The Life and Times of Mr Haytch: Mauerfalls and Morons

Last week was the 20th anniversary of the Berlin wall coming down (for those that are culturally inept and didn't know), and I thought, what with it being such a big event I would go down and have a little gander at the celebrations being held. First off were some weird monolith structures, noticed around potsdammer platz a couple of days earlier :

I'll get into how lame these were later, but at the time, my interest was peaked. So, on Monday 9th November, despite the rain and cold, I jumped onto a train and made the long way down to pariser platz. My thinking being that, as this was where the classical concert was going to be held, plus its where all the embassies are and its where the seats for all the various big wigs were, that this would be the place to see the main attractions. So, after gulping down some currywurst (way over rated, sausage and chips with tomato sauce and curry powder) we made our way to pretty much the front of the crowd, right next to the brandenburg gate :

Lights!

Spirits were still high, we'd got there early enough (5pm) to guarantee a good position for when the festivities started (7.25pm). Had the stage to our right :

and a gazillion people behind us :

Now, early on it wasn't raining too hard, but it didn't take too long for that to change. So pretty much, it was 2 hours of getting wet, standing around in the cold getting bored. Add to this the fact that most morons brough umbrellas, this happened :

So for pretty much the rest of the night, the only views of things were through the cracks inbetween idiots umbrellas. Have these people not heard of water proof coats with hoods? They were also nice little collectors of water, so every so often you'd get a little concentrated piddle of water in your face as someone tipped their umbrella. Bunch of mother fucking bastards.

Most of this run up was punctuated with little bursts of shit from the large screen infront of us

I don't know if this guy is famous here in Berlin, but he seemed like the level of quality you'd get from a radio Norwich late night DJ. ie. beyond crap. All in all then, the first two hours were pretty much torture, and I don't think there was a single person there even remotely enjoying themselves. I think a hive mindset of "I'm fucking here now, I don't care what its like, I'm staying" took over, resulting in a lot of misserable bored people :

Spot the smile

So, after all this, I was quite excited when the whole thing kicked off. This was soon revealed to be overly optimistic on my part. The classical concert was probably good, but they forgot to turn on the speaker next to us, so all we could hear was the odd drum being hit. Nothing better than spending 45 minutes watching a more or less silent concert on a big screen in the rain.

This was followed by all the various leaders that had shown up (Brown, Sarkozy, Merkel, Medvedev etc) making a symbolic walk from where they were stood (in the east) through the Brandeburg gate to the west side. "Oooh" I thought, "I'll get to see quite a few important people in the flesh and get a picture!". At which point, a bunch of crusty smelly hippy twats decided it was time to make their Greenpeace protest, which consisted of them getting out lots of teeny little yellow squares of fabric with pointless gibberings written on them. None of the leaders would of been able to see them, nevermind read them. The only effect that they had was to block the view of the crowd behind them, fuckers. But, I did manage to angle one slightly blurred shot of an indistinct group of people :

It was at this point that I realised that the majority of the event was going to take place on the western side of the gate, resulting in me seeing the back of peoples heads as they gave speeches and such, excellent. Another couple of hours of tedium then ensued, interviews with a few important people and interviews with irritating teenagers and such. The 'big event' of the dominoes being knocked over was stretched out beyond breaking point into three separate splutterings, each one taking way too long and basically consisting of a very slow repetitive dribble of shite filmed from multiple angles to make it seem exciting.

Then, they brought out a special guest (not The Hoff as one would hope), but bon jovi.

Quite why he was there I don't know (although I suspect he has a new album out and was using the event to promote it, classy), he looked quite bemused himself as to why he was part of this big celebration. Needless to say, he sucked. Then there were some lame fireworks.

Lame

Now. You may be thinking "If it was so bad, why didn't you just go home?" or "Surely it couldn't of been that bad, there must of been some good points". And to be honest, there were, I actually quite enjoyed the night as a whole. Mostly for the being there part of it, that and it was so bad it was fun to see, wondering if it could get any worse. Would I go again, knowing what it would be like? Most definitely, it was rather entertaining (who'd of thought if you lumped a load of little turds together and polished them they'd come out quite pleasing).

Wet Smiles

A week later there was a large protest organised (I think a few all over the city) with the theme of "Save Berlin". From what I can gather it seems to be a lot of people complaining because prices go up and things change, mostly crusty types by the looks of it. One of these took a route down Kastanienalle, which gave me ample opportunity to grab some snapshots of it and some morons :

It seems that this protest was organised against a planned redevelopment of the Mauerpark, supposedly they're going to build a load of shitty cheap flats on there. Not a good idea in my opinion, it should stay as a park free for people to use, theres not enough open spaces in the city as it is. But what bothers me are morons like this :

Idiot

What exactly is he protesting? Money? The Euro? (as he's a few years too late on that one) Obviously he's just tagged onto the protest to show his dislike of capitalism or some other such thing, like getting rid of money or free markets would magically remove greed from human beings and we'd all live in a happy utopia. But then, any protest these days is going to attract fringe nutballs and idiots who have a somewhat warped view of reality. The problem with that being that if you get enough of them, the whole protest appears incoherently crazy and distracts from the point trying to be made.

But most people seemed to just be out for the fun of it, I mean, would you see this anywhere else?