Quiet Riot

Our Tony came to visit on Thursday and it's been thoroughly fucking good fun so far. So long as we've been awake we've been drinking. Drinking and eating fast food. On the first night we started by watching the Liverpool game in a bar called FC Magnet and we ate a bratwurst. A couple of hours later en route to another bar, a bar that we've been visiting alot called Scwauerz Sauer (I think. I should know really given the amount of time we've spent in there) we stopped off for some more meat at a fancy burger bar. When the burger arrived though it was anything but meaty...we'd ordered some absolutely un-meaty burger which was basically a bread burger so far as we could see. Then, a few more hours later (it was possibly 7am so it could count as breakfast) we stopped off again and ate a chicken kebab. That's really disgusting isn't it? 3 different types of junk food in one evening. Shit. We've curbed that now though to just the one a day.

Yesterday was the 1st May and so we went into Kreuzberg to take part in the May Day celebrations. I'd heard alot about this from loads of different people and they all said the same thing - throughout the day it's a really nice atmosphere, bands playing in the streets and parties all over, but after dark it can turn quite nasty with police clashing with demonstrators and protesters. This was absolutely something that I wanted to maybe not be directly involved with but certainly see first hand. We were told of two golden rules which just made both me and Tony really, really quite frightened. 1) Never run. 2) If it kicks off stand against the wall but remember to look up as sometimes people drop things like molotov cocktails off the roof. That's right, molotov cocktails from the roof. It was a really strange atmosphere because the police presence was just enormous and every single one of them was in full riot gear but at the same time there would be really young kids just walking round eating ice-creams and stuff. We heard there was 7000 armoured police here and around 30,000 people so the police looked just as nervous as anybody else there.

As it happened, not a great deal happened, there was a couple of police charges through the crowds which were quite aggressive but that aside it was a largely peaceful event as far as I could tell.

Right now Tony and I are in a cafe after eating tons of scrambled egg downed with banana and cherry juice.

Jules and Keef Curtis are coming tomorrow and then Geoff on Thursday, which is the day that little Edda get's back from her work away so it's gonna be a busy old week. Busy and full to the brim of booze and fun probably.