[The motto of this is you
should never give up. Or 5 out of 6, then you can give up]
You know we all belong
to various email updates that send you constant suggestions for things to do
in Berlin, and while I’ll read them and think “Oh that sounds so cool!” often
attending some cutting edge art show and seeing groundbreaking performance art
will get superseded by watching Flight of the Conchords and drinking beer in
flip flops. So when both Bronwen and I hear about the Sounds of the Forest put
on by rreeaallllyy records, we were both “keen” (see future blog post: North
Americans unnecessarily adopting British slang.) The premise: a new album is released track by track at
various spots in the forest, you plug in your USB receptive device and copy the
song onto it. The label has provided a not so detailed map with photos and
descriptions of where the upload points are, but basically you are walking in
the woods looking for USB cables (note: some were black and some were gray, I
kept looking for white apple cables which betrays my over dependence on THAT
brand).
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| [affect Aussie accent] "Those are definitely dingo tracks" |
We started at Grunewald
S-Bahn and began our quest armed with a smart phone, laptop, and a printed out
clues (which, halfway through, we realized we were looking for 6 spots and had
only 5 clues, and also that the clues were NOT IN THE ORDER YOU WOULD FIND
THEM.) I’m not sure what this says about our amazing detective skills, but
throughout the walk I kept referencing the Internet generation and how we
lacked the ability to creatively solve problems. More on this theme later.
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| a big sand dune in the Grunewald |
We couldn’t find the
first spot, so we went on to the second, which turned out to be in this magical
part of the Grunewald, by a huge sand dune. Before descending into what is
essentially a sand pit in the forest, let me note my enthusiasm: “I ain’t
walking down no f**king stairs” but then with some coaxing I did (“Where would
Lewis & Clark have gone if they refused to walk down stairs?”). We didn’t
find any tree stumps with USB cables down there, although we saw lots of families
and one guy taking a piss. I begin to lose faith and compare the reedy pond to the Dead Marshes in Lord of the Rings, and started to feel a bit like Frodo. Then Bronwen asks if that makes her Samwise Gamgee, and I said she could be Frodo if she wanted to. "I don't want to be Frodo because he's a pussy." Dork fantasy movie references dealt with, we have a
brief rest and philosophical discussion over the whole likeliness of this needle in a haystack musical scavenger hunt even working ( “To be honest, I
didn’t think it would be this hard”) we hiked out of the sand pit choosing a
steep, tree root strewn trail, during which my co-searcher made a Romancing the Stone sliding-down-a-muddy-hill-and-taking-someone-else-with-you-reference,
which just goes to show that all really great movies have alligators. Strangely, sandy trails are easier to climb up than to climb down.
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romancing the sand
|
As we emerge onto another trail, we saw some people with laptops crowded around a fallen tree, so
yay, track one, by Duererstuben, called “Verspaetete Errinerung.” At this
point, I’m sensing Bronwen is not “keen” on sharing the whole discovering spots
with others, especially when a friendly (American) comes over to look at our
printed out map and clues.
So we soldier on looking
for the next track, and for the first time in our walk the picture matches
reality and we find the hunters hut. Let’s just say someone had a bit of that
childlike Christmas morning glee as she scrambled over brush and pine needles
toward the elevated hut. We clamber up the ladder, search around inside, but no
USB cable, and the cryptic clue tells us something about looking for a neon
yellow square, and the track is called Tree of Life. Which proceeds me to
declare a specific tree in the vicinity a crucial tree (“That’s the most tree
of life looking tree I’ve ever seen”) which is what happens when you see with
your heart not your GPS.
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| Tree of Life |
As we
search an ever widening radius of the hunters hut and my Tree of Life, Bronwen
dejectedly mentions “I just don’t know what else to do” and I again flog the
topic of the internet generation and poor attention spans and how hopeless we are, like after we asked
the internet and tried a smartphone app what else can you do? Really?
Maybe there’s a wikipedia page we can reference?
We realize the Others
(Lost reference!) are closing in on us, so we start walking south and again
Bronwen has a moment of eagle eyed clarity and sees the stupid neon yellow
square that is supposed to demarcate a loaded trunk. We successfully acquire
track 2, Re-Drum “Tree of Life” at
this location (and also track 3, Josh Winiberg “Tweety”, which was the one we
were hopelessly looking for in the sand pit was combined for some reason). Now
using our ever sharper skills of orientation, we keep walking and our looking
for five logs next to a path. You know it’s a good walk, when, mid-sentence, someone
grabs your arm and says “Look! Five logs!”.
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| (Sixth & seventh logs not pictured) |
Happy to report I spotted this one, and we acquired Track 4,
“Night Owl” by Trigoney. At this
spot we meet a helpful British girl who explains that by the first stump there
is another station literally two meters from the first, so we walk back there to
acquire Track 5 (“Wildwald” by Afromatik). At this point your loyal searcher
realizes she has lost her sunglasses and has to race back to the hunters hut,
where the same helpful British chick is puzzling about the tree of life and
thankfully hasn’t taken my shades. I hustle back to the first stump and help
some people with laptop incompatibility get the tracks and we share tips of
whether or not the location by the pond exists. Bronwen and I are happy with 5 of
6 songs, we walk back to our start point and try once more to find the last
one, with no luck, so we still don't know what Dogboy's track sounds like.. A group of German guys is also searching, we found a bag of
books (one Dostoyoevsky) hidden in a tree trunk, and one fellow looked in the
inside covers to see if they were part of the unofficial Berlin street library (kind like http://www.bookcrossing.com/),
where people inscribe paper backs and leave them for others to read, with the
only request being that the book keeps getting passed on. So I guess that
scavenger hunt will have to be for a later weekend. Reviews of the record to
come soon.
