Demographic
Aug. 5th, 2018 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fjSo I worte on an entry about liking the sidwalk culture of Berlin, sitting down, eating, drinking, slowing down. What was noticeable in that culture, after having lived in LA and central London, was the lack of homeless people asking for money during my sidewalk moments. Wherever I sit outside, in Mitte, Kreuzberg, PLB, nothing. I thought there were fewer or something. I was wrong.
I now live in Neukölln, and I believe pretty south, close to the S-Bahn ring. I take the S-Bahn every day to work and back. It is currently a little stuffy, but it is never crowded like London public transport is, and most times I can even get a seat. It is there and the U-Bahn where the panhandling happens, and often. And the stations between home and work, which include Sonnenallee and Hermanplatz, always have many people in and around it who are indigent if not homeless, sitting around, drinking on a bench together listlessly while always one of them talks in a wailing manner about something, sometimes lying on the station floor out cold on something.
They can be young, young adults, and always obviously tripping on substance abuse, almost never looking like healthy cheeky drop-outs who might be vagabonding.And then older, who have been doing this for too long, weathered, abused. And white. In a city that's about 20% from a POC background, with Arab and Turkish backgrounds being 9% alone.
They are all out now, in this hot summer, which nobody looks good in--Berlin does not do airco, they consider recycled air unhealthy. But yeah, around my stations, the look is not good. Not good at all. Security cleans up the big stations like Südkreuz, but the small ones... This one dude keeps being out cold, lying flat on the floor, every time I arrive to walk home. Sometimes he is awake, seated, and panhandles. Once I saw EMTs around him, checking his pulse. He was back the next day, equally out cold. Maybe I live in some nexus of it, but I just notice a lot of it.
I now live in Neukölln, and I believe pretty south, close to the S-Bahn ring. I take the S-Bahn every day to work and back. It is currently a little stuffy, but it is never crowded like London public transport is, and most times I can even get a seat. It is there and the U-Bahn where the panhandling happens, and often. And the stations between home and work, which include Sonnenallee and Hermanplatz, always have many people in and around it who are indigent if not homeless, sitting around, drinking on a bench together listlessly while always one of them talks in a wailing manner about something, sometimes lying on the station floor out cold on something.
They can be young, young adults, and always obviously tripping on substance abuse, almost never looking like healthy cheeky drop-outs who might be vagabonding.And then older, who have been doing this for too long, weathered, abused. And white. In a city that's about 20% from a POC background, with Arab and Turkish backgrounds being 9% alone.
They are all out now, in this hot summer, which nobody looks good in--Berlin does not do airco, they consider recycled air unhealthy. But yeah, around my stations, the look is not good. Not good at all. Security cleans up the big stations like Südkreuz, but the small ones... This one dude keeps being out cold, lying flat on the floor, every time I arrive to walk home. Sometimes he is awake, seated, and panhandles. Once I saw EMTs around him, checking his pulse. He was back the next day, equally out cold. Maybe I live in some nexus of it, but I just notice a lot of it.
