Can anyone tell me exactly what they were protesting, anyway?

(Left: the only sane person I saw all day.)

I still don't know what the hell Mayday is, but evidently it is a big deal in Europe. Walpurgisnacht is the night of April 30th and it's a pagan holiday in which people are supposed to dance in the new spring season (obviously they are not working on a Gregorian calendar). Traditions range from burning effigies of witches to burning actual automobiles.

Why these crazy Krauts and Frenchies lose their minds over the coming of spring is beyond me.

Berlin is a fairly peaceful town--violent crime is relatively uncommon among innocents--i.e. people who are neither engaging in nor soliciting illegal behavior--but a couple of times a year a large percentage of Berliners transform into man-eating werewolves. At least once a year they will lose their shit over some soccer game or another (last year's Turkey vs Germany game in the quarterfinals of the Eurocup was a good example of otherwise perfectly normal people transforming into hideous monsters seemingly overnight), and they are guaranteed, year after year, to lose their shit over this pagan holiday.

This year's Walpurgisnacht wasn't that bad while I was there. The police had blocked off the streets surrounding the concert and demonstration and collected glass bottles and other projectiles before allowing party-goers into the area. They even provided plastic cups for people wishing to pour their beers into receptacles which cannot be used as weapons in the event of a riot. Drinking on the streets here is as illegal as it is anywhere else, but the cops in general have bigger fish to fry. I've never heard of anyone being ticketed for walking down the street with a beer, people drink everywhere, on the train, in McDonald's, at church, etcetera. There is also a drinking age, but do you think the police asked for ID before they handed a 15-year-old a cup to but his Bierchen in? No they did not. The cops made a very big show of their enormous presence, with paddywagons and officers standing at attention rank-and-file style for several blocks around, but IMO they were being super. fucking. cool. about thousands of drunk punk-rockers partying on the street all night, drinking and drugging and cursing the police to their faces. The cops' cool composures went unappreciated, but everything I saw was relatively peaceful.

After I took a picture of some kid's tiny speed-dick while he was pissing (afterward he attempted to get the photo back from me, nice try buddy, all you're going to get from me is a knuckle sammich, I said, DON'T FUCKING TOUCH ME) Laura and I were outro and off to the next event, several blocks away. When we walked back through the area a few hours later all was quiet and peaceful, the police presence greatly diminished.

Next day however we read that there were 30 cops injured and 49 arrests made, presumably after we'd gone to the other party around 10 o'clock.

Because we're geniuses, we decided to go to the Actual Event, MayDay, which took place the next afternoon and evening. It was just a normal street festival, except that it's well, in Berlin, which means lots of people walking around in tacky outfits and dyed hair, drinking beer, smoking reefer, and dancing to electro in broad daylight. As evening started to fall, the cops got into formation, and the good-natured cop-taunting began.

(Adalbertstraße, Berlin, 1 May 2009)

Backstory: In my homeland of Seattle, PNW, I have attended more demonstrations than you have had hot dinners, and I know the routine, and all the variations thereof. In the First World there are best case scenarios and worst-case scenarios. Best case: a group applies through all the legal channels for a permit to demonstrate, all of its attendees proceed peacefully, stay within the bounds marked off for their rally, wave signs and play crappy jam band music, talk all revolutionary-like, and pretend the police are not even there. Worst case: some fucking moron decides that the police, who are just as much there to protect innocent shopkeepers and tax-paying citizens from said moron's collosal stupidity as they are to haul him off when he does something dumb, are the enemy, and starts taunting them. As we all know people are even stupider in large groups, so a gaggle of his fellow geniuses will join him. Then King Intellect will climb up the side of a building and set an American flag on fire, thus providing legal grounds for breaking up the demo, causing the police to push a crowd of thousands through an area which can only accomodate hundreds, fire off rubber bullets and tear gas cannisters and beat up anyone who looks them in the eye. One thing I have learned is: you are not bigger and badder than the police. If you fuck with them you will pay. It is unlikely that you will get away without paying, but consider this; if you do somehow escape retribution there is a 100% chance that someone else will have to pay for your stupidity.

(This guy is a drug-enforcement officer, who, like many of his fellow policemen, was walking around with a video-camera to catch your dumbass in the act.)

In the Second World however, there appears to be only one kind of demo: People getting wasted all day, then rowdy and violent at night. At MayDay itself it was impossible to prevent glass bottles from making it into the festival, and when the sun went down the partiers taunted the police, hurled glass bottles and rocks through the air (not one or two or a couple. We are talking a fucking mob of idiots throwing shit at the mob of police), attempted to bring down a street light, and set fire to a car.

(the red light had a cover just like the green and yellow ones, but this dude broke it off and kept going. A couple minutes later he and two other people attempted to rock the pole out of its foundation.)

Either I am getting too old for this shit, or maybe just less convinced of my invincibility. As I cowered next to a building, praying I would not be hit by a flying bottle or paving stone or the first to inhale the tear gas, I thought to myself, "Why on earth did I wear flip flops today?"

Laura was close to tears, so we waited until a lull in the violence and very carefully, very slowly, picked our way through the mounds of broken glass and past the hordes of crazed protesters back to our bikes and cycled home.


(I dunno why this video is so dark, but the important image is there, the one of the ambulance trying to get through the crowd and people riding the back of it as if it were an ice cream truck.)