Day 19

Monday December 20

Mark:

We wake to a whole new Berlin. It’s over. All done. We’ve finished.

Maja:

All done. Yes. Amazing to prove that we can do this. Amazing to know it can be done. Amazing to have this experience.

We have done Berlin. Incredible.

Mark:

No more gigs to play, no more hustling to be done, no more rehearsing. It’s day off today and then we’re off tomorrow to go chill in Malmö, Sweden over Christmas and New Year during which time we plan to consolidate our sound and set and decide and plan where to go next. Prague has the nod right now, but we’re well aware Covid Europe could yet close in around us. Let’s see how it goes. For now, we’re just going to make the most of our last day in Berlin, which means going full tourist.

We get on a train and head out towards the Brandenburg Gate. 

Maja:

I just stand there, at where the wall once was in front of the mighty Brandenburg Gate. To think that this very spot once upon a time was impassable. I look over west Berlin all the way to the victory monument seeing the tank road that Hitler built. I have my back towards east Berlin thinking of the times where west was the ultimate unattainable free country for the easterners. It feels immense to think that it was impossible to pass through this very place that I’m standing on right now. Here people walk through east to west and from west to east all the time right next to me. If you didn’t know about this place, there’s no way you would know the importance of this very spot I am standing on. So I walk back and forth on the line where I imagine that the wall stood. I don’t feel like I can cross to the other side just yet. I want to think about it a bit more. Breathe in the feelings of the place. It’s almost like I can taste the importance of this very spot. And I breathe in, look at the monument and then I decide. It’s time for me to go to the other side. And I walk into east Berlin.

Mark:

As well as a walk through the gate, we decide we might have a look at the Checkpoint Charlie museum. But we haven’t done our Corona tests for the day. No problem, there’s a mobile test centre right there. With that, we go and do what will from now on forever be known as the Charlie Swab. Negatives produced and we head into the museum where we discover entry is just short of 15 euro. Not gonna happen. No worries. This whole place is a living, breathing museum so we go check that out instead, including a large outdoor space full of stories of escapes from east to west in the days before it all came down in 1989. The stand out for me is the story of an unnamed 20 year old who totally seized the day and the moment in a way few people could ever imagine and I think he’s instantly become my new hero. Almost a posterboy for The Diaries. Just jump. Just do it. Sometimes the window of opportunity opens and closes so quickly that by the time you’ve decided to climb through it, it’s already gone. Things really can happen in the splittest of split seconds, and then disappear as though they were never there and that’s that. Well, this guy was just going about his daily business and walking past the checkpoint when he noticed a bus was slowly going through and all the guards were on the other side of it. There may have been some hesitation and deliberation but if there was, it clearly couldn’t have been much. With zero planning and nothing on him but the clothes on his back and whatever may or may not have been in his pockets, he fell into step beside the bus and simply walked into the west, hidden from sight as the bus slowly made its way through the checkpoint. The ultimate lesson in opportunism and willingness to take whatever’s on the other side when you get there. Sometimes it’s enough just to get there and take care of everything else later. We’ve been walking around Berlin for the past few weeks and of course, like everywhere else, it’s full of people of all ages. Whenever I meet someone of a certain age, I wonder what life was like for them in the days before, during and after. And I also wonder if any of them have their own stories of escape. And while I’m here, it’s worth wondering if this guy still lives in Berlin and if we’ve been in his presence, if only for a fleeting instant while crossing each others’ paths in the street. This is exactly what I mean. Surrounded by history.

Mark:

It’s almost time to go home, but there’s just one more thing left to do. Go swing by Fargo, see Lenny, fill him in on what we’ve done and tell him our plans. When we arrive he’s busy catching up on admin but he’s enthusiastic and we say a quick hello and tell him that we wanted to stop and say hi and bye before leaving tomorrow. But we also wanted to say that we will be back sometime in the next few months, and back with more experience. He’s delighted to hear it and we leave him to get on with his bits and pieces while we go and hang out a little deeper in the bar. While it’s only a Monday night, the place is still busy with enough of a buzz to keep things going. Me and Maja take our time to warm up, realising only now just how cold we’ve been pretty much all day. Strange how you can feel perfectly comfortable with all this sometimes and then feel it so intensely as soon as you stop. We were only planning on having the one and saying hello but it soon becomes clear that we really don’t feel like braving the outside world again anytime soon. Jackets come off and we settle into the evening, which includes reliving some of our favourite parts of our time in Berlin and reflecting on what we’ve achieved in the two and so weeks we’ve been fully active here. This includes four full shows, two hostel shows and four open mics. And that’s before you consider the whole load of hustling we’ve done which has opened up venues for us to return to on the other side. And we haven’t even begun to explore the Irish bar route I so carefully put together on the night I was alone here before Maja arrived. So we have that to explore as well. We’ve not done too badly on the tourist stuff either. Yep. I think you can say we’ve done Berlin as much as we could have hoped to have done it. And we’ve done all this during a Corona time when many people were doubting our wisdom to even come.

After a while, Lenny closes his admin bits and pieces and signals us to come over and join him. We do, and now we make a cosy little threesome right at the corner of the bar which we now see has a sign: ‘Fargo ultras only.’ Wow. Welcomed to the inner sanctum. We sit there and chat with Lenny, who regales us with his Berlin bar stories and his own musical adventures – he’s a guitar player, so we were right that he had a good feeling for this stuff. As we wander deeper into the evening and he also hears more about us, our short and intense history and our plans, every now and then a Fargo regular stops by to have a hello with him, and then says hello to us and we end up in conversation there as well. This is how it works. Once you’re in a bar and chatting to known people, everyone else around will start to give you the time of day and more as well. And when you’re hanging with the boss, well the kudos and instant acceptance are only that much stronger. This is only the first time we’ve ever really sat down and spoken to Lenny but it feels like we’ve done it loads of times. The vibe is so comfortable. After a while longer, he says, ‘You guys are going to go out and get a lot more experience I can see. You’re going to come back to Berlin stronger and better for it. Call me when you’re back. I think we’ll be able to work something out.’ With that we suddenly feel a far deeper connection to Berlin and to Fargo. We also feel that we could really do something here and that it really could be a very cool musical home for us. To have this kind of welcome now is remarkable and beyond what we could have hoped for when we set out. For us, the coolest bar in Friedrichshain, which is the most happening area of Berlin. And here we are, deep in it. If we thought we might have created a Berlin to come back to before, we truly know that we have now.