The Cool Guy and the Fosters Guy

I heard about the abandoned theme park from a couple of Australian ‘dudes’. At first glance they seemed like carbon copies of the guys from the Fosters adverts, but on closer inspection it became clear that only one of them deserved that pejorative judgment. Ignoring the ‘LAD’ as he repeatedly tried to flick a card down an Austrian girl’s top, I spoke with the cool guy about the Nazi’s. I had just got back from the Topography of Terror, which as the name suggests is a visual and textual exhibition mapping Hitler’s rise through 1930-1945. He had visited a real life concentration camp that day so, although we were in sync, he was very much ‘winning’.

Amid a backdrop of: impromptu fridge art, shisha pipes, people using beer bottles as water pistols, accusations of false identity, oversized foam dice games, constant camera flashing, potatoes being thrown at people on the street, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, prescription pills, and good old Aussie lechery, the cool guy told me about his visit – harrowing, mind-blowing, “must-see” etc. – and I told him about mine – disturbing, interesting, “worth a visit” etc.

Keen to avoid his pal – who at the time was scrunching his face up like a bulldog to pose for a photo with two blonde girls – the cool guy mentioned some other places that he thought were worth checking out. The TV tower is the tallest building in Berlin and it affords you a panoramic view of the insomniac city with characteristically affordable beer. The Brandenburg Gate is a big sightseeing place that didn’t excite me that much. And the abandoned theme park sounded lush.

He described a ghost town, but unlike the conventional image of cowboy saloons and empty bars, he painted me a picture of humungous ferris wheels, dodgem cars and rollercoasters, guarded by German gypsies, hidden within one of Berlin’s city parks. “The best thing about the place is the way its just been left there to rot. If there wasn’t so much birdshit about the place, you could probably get the rides going; everything’s in the right place still.”

I had read about somewhere like this in North Korea and was just about to tell the cool guy when the lairy fella stumbled over and started barking loudly in my ear about how many beers he downed through a funnel when he was at the theme park. He rolled his jeans up and showed me a graze on his left shin from where he had tripped over a piece of rusty train track. I wondered if his wound was capable of becoming infected as he rambled on at me. Later that night he got kicked out of a nightclub for throwing up on a DJ. The bouncers are built like oxes, but they are not used to that kind of thing and it was pretty funny to see them attempt to drag the drunkard outside. They tried their best not to scrape him against the floor, but for some reason he went limp and allowed his, already-damaged, leg to trail behind him; an act of defiance that with any luck could have led to an amputation.

I never saw him or his cool mate again.

The next day I set out for the abandoned theme park with a half-Russian/half-Algerian blonde gay stripper, a short Hispanic football-fanatic American, and two miscellaneous mute Turks.