↵A Taste of Hell in Berlin: The Spray Man
2024-09-08It was in the end of May 2022. The Spring was nice and Berlin was beautiful. My buddies Frank and Taiane were taking a couple of friend of theirs for a sightseeing walk around the city and invited me and my wife to go along. That was our first Spring in Berlin and we really could use that, it would be fun, and it was even though we met The Spray Man.
We had just had a great lunch at the Restauration 1840. Great food, took too long to serve us, and I'd rate it a solid 8 out of 10 in this first visit. Another day I'll tell you about the second visit, which lowers the rate to a ceiling of 0 out of 10. Yes, stay away from there.
After lunch we headed towards the Berlin TV Tower at Alexsanderplatz. Alexsanderplatz is an interesting place, overrated, and full of tourist traps. On that particular day it also had The Spray Man. He looked like somebody who had been sleeping rough, from the dirt in his clothes, and the apparent health of his skin and teeth. He seemed happy, though. His friends and him were under the shade of a tree listening to music, drinking beer, and smiling; they seemed like an average group of happy berliners.
They started giggling and some of them started saying things particularly loud, which caught our attention. As we turned our heads right towards the noise, still talking about whatever we were talking about, we saw The Spray Man with a big smile on his face walking towards a tree, turning his back against it, about 1 meter away from the target, lowering his pants, and spraying the most unbelievable spray of yellowish shit on the tree. No tree has ever been painted so thoroughly in such a fraction of second before.
We were horrified. Not only us. The crowd of tourists going through that place at that time, experiencing the same chain of events we did, were in shock. The Spray Man couldn't have been laughing harder as he pulled his pants up and walked back towards his group. His friends seemed to be at risk of fainting from lack of oxigen, given how much of it they were dedicating to laughing instead of breathing.
I hope The Spray Man is enjoying better health nowadays, though I never recovered the piece of my soul that was taken from me on that day.