Them German folks

BERLIN, Germany — I suppose they were due for a day of painful reversals; a day where all the fun they had sowed and reaped came back with a vengeance in a whirlwind of misery. It’s only normal. It’s the universe’s way of balancing things out.

That day was a Tuesday in Berlin. Why a Tuesday and why in Berlin, no one knows. After all, Monday had been as epic as any day on their journey. Futbol and Chotchsky had taken a walking tour of the city, indulging in homemade German chocolate and tap-dancing over the bunker where Hitler breathed his very last anti-Semitic breath.

They had laughed at the walk/don’t walk man on traffic lights, which sports a hat in the formerly Soviet-controlled East but is hatless in the West. They had posed at the famous Checkpoint Charlie and snacked at Snackpoint Charlie. And they had listened to their hipster tour guide as he spouted gems like these:

“Historians debate whether Frederick the Great was gay. I think the evidence is pretty clear. He was never seen in public with his wife. He didn’t have any children. And he liked having sex with men.”

They also confirmed that David Hasselhoff is indeed huge in Germany, with several Hasselhoff tidbits on the tour and a ridiculous Hasselhoff shrine at the hostel bar. And, oh, there was a good amount of drinking involved, too. Chotchsky downed a 2-liter glass boot. They all went out on another pub crawl.

The cast of characters continued to grow, too. There was Classic Scott, so nicknamed because everything he did and said was so in-character that the only thing you could say about him was “yep, that’s classic Scott.” There was Ben, who became Classic Ben after Scott left town, and eventually ended up known as Classic Dingus, which is not quite as pleasant. (Classic Dingus would later resurface in Barcelona, a few weeks later, and it was nice to have someone not disappear completely out of their lives, if only temporarily.)

Other characters of note included the Brothers Puberty, so nicknamed by Futbol. The Brothers Puberty, two kids whose voice hadn’t changed yet, barged into the hostel room one day with their iPods and their speakers and behaved like teens who had run away from home, drinking like animals and puking out the room window. Their high-register, piercing voices made everyone feel like there were girls in the room.

There was a computer-science dweeb named Jordan, from America, who started talking about Linux and how he had disabled Javascript in order to use Facebook on his old laptop, and then followed it up with how he was planning to visit Dresden, but he tried to pronounce it the German way and it came out sounding like Dreez-din.

And the British karaoke wonder who belted out “My Humps” along with a female partner and had the whole bar in stitches with his moronic sounding “She’s got me speeen-ding.”

Last, but not least, the German laundry elf, a short man in a hat whose lips were smeared with either detergent or cocaine and who overenthusiastically helped Chotchsky, Futbol and Classic Dingus to navigate the German-language-only laundromat.

The food, thankfully, was cheap. Chotchsky became a regular at the kebab place across the road, with their 4 euro pizza and 2.50 kebab, which was essentially a handful of sliced meat buried under a mountain of cabbage and sauce and wrapped in thick pita bread. He also discovered some sort of Turkish potato dish around the block and went back so many times and received so many freebies that it seemed the owner was just about ready to give him his wife as a sign of appreciation. He topped his culinary adventure off with a large pig knuckle at a microbrewery, which may or may not be related to the uptick in swine flu in Europe.

With all that eating, there was obviously a need for defecation, and it hit Chotchsky at the worse moment, right outside the Brandenburg Gate.

“I’m going to try and see if they let me in the American Embassy,” he said to Futbol. “I need to take a dump.”

[Chotchsky walks over. The guards tell him to get lost.]

“They said it was closed.”

“But what if it’s an emergency?” Futbol wondered. “And it IS an emergency!”

“I’ll just go take a dump at Starbucks.”

Meanwhile, Chotchsky continued investing his free time in postcard-related activities.

“Stop talking about postcards,” Futbol told him as they walked down the sidewalk. “If we tallied up the time you spent on this trip talking about postcards, buying postcards, writing postcards and sending postcards, I bet it’d add up to a good 50 percent.”

“And that’s not counting the time you spent complaining about postcards,” Chotchsky said.

“Another, what, 10 percent?”

“Sounds about right.”

Futbol finds it oddly satisfying to provide completely wrong tourist information to Chotchsky. On the front of the Reichstag, the words “Dem Deutschen Volke” are engraved on stone. (That translates to “To the German people.”)

“What does that mean?” Chotchsky asks.

“It means ‘them German folks’,” Futbol replies. (He considers going with “them crazy German folks,” but that would be pushing it.)

By the time they leave the building, Chotchsky has become suspicious enough that he asks again, and Futbol comes out with the truth.

They traipse through museums and historic streets all over Berlin. And after making it through a harrowing exhibit on eugenics during the Nazi era, and walking past a whole museum dedicated to Hitler’s plans of world domination, Futbol reaches the following conclusion:

“You gotta give it to the Germans,” he says. “For a violent and warmongering country, they really have no problem airing out their dirty laundry.”

But back to the misery. Tuesday came hung over and bleary eyed. Overcast sky, bursts of rainfall, chilly. Breakfast was good, with two ocean-eyed Swedish girls who the pair promises to look up in Prague, their next stop, but everyone involved knows it won’t happen.

And after breakfast Futbol goes back to his room to find his iPod gone. Lifted from his bag. As the anger and frustration wash away, he considers the bright side: now he’ll get a forced vacation from the Internet.

They head out to the laundromat, having run out of clean clothes, and are assisted by the Laundry Elf. As they wait for the dryers to finish, Futbol heads out to buy another falafel sandwich. Like his sister Foolia, who once sampled and rated spaghetti with tomato sauce at a dozen restaurants during a coastal vacation, Futbol is moving through Europe one fried chickpea at a time.

As he’s eating at a sidewalk table outside the laundromat (Chotchsky enjoying one of his trademark Turkish potatoes), they hear a loud metallic crash. Futbol sees a hand go up into the air.

It was a woman on a bicycle, the bicycle now twisted on the pavement, the offending car speeding away. They run to her, and a small crowd of people gets the woman and the bike off the road. She was fine after she regained her bearings.

One of those days. Even Classic Dingus says he feels tired and doesn’t know why. And a zit on Futbol’s forehead has evolved into something akin to Balthazar Getty’s carbuncle on Lynch’s “Lost Highway”. Everything’s going south.

All you can do is grab a hot shower and hope that the universe has been satiated.