First Day: 4.30 til 5.30pm

I change places and sit down on a beer bench from where I can see the whole place. Inkasso Henry and his group of tourists are still standing at the statue. The cowboy is walking by again and a tourist is asking him something. A man is walking his dog. A curious thing that makes me laugh is the fact that the dog is carrying the plastic bag with his excrements himself. I hear the wind rushing through the leaves of the tree and I realize for the first time really that the tree is the only piece of nature in this place...just the one, standing tall, apart from it there are no other plants here. Church bells coming from somewhere and I ask myself where the nearest church might be.

After a while, a couple is sitting down on the bench opposite me. It's a quite interesting-looking couple. They look like two bikers, him being bald and with tattoos all over his arms wearing a leather vest and her with curly hair and tattoos as well. They are talking about going some place, but she doesn't want to and wants no discussion about it. They appear to be making a deal about going to this place today and going to another the next week. A couple of men appear to be collecting bottles (explanation: in Germany, if you return certain kinds of bottles or cans, you get up to 25 cents per bottle, so people sometimes collect these and return them at the super market. Don't know if that exists in England, also!?). They remind of a woman I once saw on the subway or wore a pink track suit and had a moustache (!!!). She came down the escalator with an empty shopping cart and got on the same train as I did. About three hours later, I was returning from a concert at the local university, I saw the woman again. Again, she boarded the same train as I did, but now the shopping cart was filled to the top with bottles and cans and on top of that, she had two waste bags filled up to the top hanging at the cart as well. She had trouble getting on the train, so a teenager offered to help her...how the hell did she collect so many bottles in just three hours? She must be a pro at doing this!!! ... but back to Hans Albers Place now!

The biker couple observed Inkasso Henry and the tourist group as well just as I did. We got into talking and they told me a bit more about Henry. When I told them about the exercise, they quite liked what I was doing and responded that that is what they like doing on the Reeperbahn as well. Just sitting there, having a coffee and observing people. It's amazing what kinds of people you encounter in this place. Then they left to have a cup of coffee somewhere...


I saw a man who with his beard and his hat reminded me a bit of Pippi Longstocking's dad - only that he had trouble walking by himself and needed a wheeled walker to support him. His legs were bandaged as well. He walked towards the Reeperbahn and stopped at the advertising column there and looked around for a while. His friend, who left him after a couple of minutes, immediately had a look into the nearby waste bin. I guess, he was looking for bottles or cans as well. But the man with the walker stayed there for a while and I began to think that he might be living around here somewhere and that he might have felt a little cooped up at home and needed some fresh air and see people. He left once down the Reeperbahn and came back again...

After I saw a couple of tourists taking photos of the clothes displayed in the windows of the Sexy Angel, a sex shop and cinema athe courner of Reeperbahn and Hans Albers Platz, I decided that I also felt that I needed a coffee and that I need to get to know the place from all angles. So, I had a bit of a break in the Hans Albers Klause...which ended up not being a break at all, but probably the most interesting experience of the day.