05.01.2012 Mayday Hayday

There are a lot of holidays in May. And this is really just the beginning --I heard there are a few more up her sleeve. Lately, when I find myself in a long weekend, I skip out of town and embed myself in another country (like in the Netherlands, twice). But for this First of May weekend, I had been forewarned: "The whole street is in festivities!" a friend noted, "There will be food and live music at every corner. You'll want to stay in the city for this one." Since I am so easily convinced, I stayed behind.

She wasn't lying when she said there would be a lot of people. The weather was perfect. The street was crowded and the edges were lined with vendors selling the same thing every few blocks. Corn on the cob grilling on the street, cold beer in everyone's hands, random people karoke-ing under an awning... every street you walked into was a little bit different.

There was live music at every turn, and if you didn't see it, you could definitely hear it as the crowds got denser closer to the stage. Sometimes you would come across two stages on opposite ends of a single street, and if you stood in the middle of the street, not closer to one end nor the other, you would totally hear both musicians mashing together. Other times you would come across bad music and you just couldn't get far away fast enough. The music varied from house to metal, although, I think most of it was punk metal-ish (kind of like Rammstein. How German!). I tried to take a picture of every stage, but it's not like you would be able to hear them, so I stopped.

 

These guys set up stage in a street corner gazebo

litter!

How convenient to live in that window

Streets are for people not cars.

Those cups of beer did not stay on that table for very long

occupy.

po-leezy

There is a tradition held on May 1st that sucks all the police from nearby cities into Berlin... riots! Today is the day the city folk can let out their frustrations and kick and scream and have a citywide tantrum so they can feel better afterwards. Tomorrow, everyone just goes back to work. It's kind of funny, because everyone knows that the demonstration will must end in a riot --that's just how it is, and this only happens here. The route is planned and the riot is organized in a way to happen at a certain location. Police line up the streets in full riot gear and marching teams wait at every corner of the protest. 

take me to the riot

The head count is probably up in the tens of thousands. Some are actually protesting, and others are just joining in for the fun, or for the fight. The general theme is anti-gentrification, but as my flatmate points out, these protests bring out so much publicity that it puts the area on the map, and then people move there, and then it becomes gentrified. oops. There's also some "Say no to communism" and  "We hate fascism" flags in the mix too.

Gotta blow something up ofcourse, or at least turn over a car. else all that protesting would be for nothing.

This fence was standing. Well, it stood for about five minutes before it turned parallel instead of perpendicular to the ground.

1. people sitting in the middle of intersections,                                                       2. Found a friend on a street sign.

watch out!