A Heart of Gold

I’m at the Heart of Gold, a Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy themed hostel in the centre of Berlin. There is Vogon poetry on the walls and the wireless password is, charmingly, “Don’t Panic!”

I’ve dragged myself out of bed early today, fighting a pounding headache to slouch against the wall of the shower and pass out for a while. I gingerly make my way downstairs, grab a seat at the bar, and supplement my hangover with strong black coffee. I watch people walk to work through the huge double-glazed windows. Fuck, I feel terrible. Two equally bedraggled Eastern Europeans sit one table down from me, looking for all the world like escapees from the Lone Gunmen, but both tapping away on tiny iridescent-shelled Sony laptops. I would imagine that each is worth more than the entire contents of my pack, and probably my ticket over here on top of that.

The latest travel accessory amidst the backpacker set appears to be these ultra-portable laptops, to take advantage of the free wireless internet available at most of the bigger hostels. I can’t imagine lugging a laptop around for months and the thought of two thousand dollars of rigid, non-waterproof fragility in my pack doesn’t set my heart on fire. Then again, I tend to pack lighter than most.

The purple haired girl minding reception has given up watching the bar and has ducked outside for a fag, steam mingling with smoke as she exhales. It’s got to be below zero out there, judging by the scarves and jackets of the office set as they tromp past my window in charcoal-hued lines. No one glances up as they scurry along and I sit and watch, savouring my coffee. I think the panadol is kicking in, or whatever it was, in familiar red and green packaging covered in dense German compound-words. The blonde woman on the box sure seemed happy, and it appears to be doing the trick.

In the bar they’ve got the central cranked up and I’m comfortable in a tee-shirt, an old one from the threadless heydays, with a monkey pitching a Molotov at the viewer. Our lady of the bar blows on her hands, then flicks her cigarette against the wall and shoulders the door open and grins at me as she wanders back behind the bar. “Cold?” I ask, as I reach for one of the perfect, identical bread rolls heaped in a messy pyramid on the counter. “It’s not bad. For January. Usually much colder. You know, snow.” I grunt sagely, as she grabs herself a coffee, and focus on my roll. I’ve stuffed it with cheese and it’s perfect.

“The shirt, what does it mean? Is it supposed to be funny?” I don’t think it’s supposed to be funny, just irreverent, one of those stupid visual puns that makes you do a double take. I take it with me whenever I go overseas, a stupid custom I’ve picked up over the years and one I’m not sure Glebe realised she was buying into when she stole it from my apartment and took it to Korea. She sent me a photo of herself, with it pulled up over her monkey ears, ninja style, as she flashed peace signs in a generic hostel dorm room. I hadn’t even noticed it was missing, and spent the day at work wondering who’d taken the photo. I pause for rather too long, “No, not funny, just strange. Like, a joke because it’s unexpected.” She nods, and heads back to reception to help someone struggling with a bundle of dirty sheets.

You can grasp very little of the character of a city in a few short days.

Posted in Travel on Friday June 20, 2008.