Movie fame, recycling and a mini trip to Africa

There’s a chance — just a chance — that John and I will be the innocent bystanders in an action movie being filmed in Berlin. What movie you ask? We don’t know.

We walked to the Kaiser Supermarket this morning to return a bag of bottles for recycling and saw what appeared to be a car–bus accident on the intersection of Bülowstraße and Maaßenstraße in Nollendorfplatz (by the way, I can pronounce all these names now).

A lot of people were milling around. It was raining lightly. Passengers on the bus were snapping pics with their mobile phones and a plastic-wrapped camera rigged on a car seemed to be taking pictures of the scene. Poor John reckoned it was a police camera or a breathalyser. I wasn’t so sure.

Nothing seemed to be happening so we popped into the supermarket and ‘fed’ the bottles into a soft-drink-sized recycling machine. You feed them in one at a time, bottom first. The machine gives the bottle a roll and then calculates the value. A large plastic bottle is worth 25 cents, while a beer bottle is only worth 8 cents. We collected a grand total of 1.59 euros, or enough to buy two large beers, which we didn’t because the bottles didn’t belong to us. We’ll hand over the refund docket to our hosts tonight.

Next we popped over to the Wednesday street market and bought two West African curries for lunch — one was with a green sauce and the other with an lemon–olive sauce. They could be served over couscous (mine) or rice (Poor John’s). We had a nice chat with the shopkeeper, who is from Senegal, and enjoyed listening to some authentic Senegalese music. There was a real cloudburst while we were there, so we ate standing and sheltered under the awning of his food van.

But back to the movie. We went for a walk after lunch. More cars were scattered along the middle lane of Bülowstraße — all parked — and there were people everywhere with walkie-talkies. Two were going from car to car, chatting to the drivers. John speculated that a dignitary was about to show up, but I figured the cars were too tatty and dirty for that. He is usually the better detective, but this time it dawned on me first that we were standing in the middle of a movie set. This was confirmed when we saw a sign posted on a doorway, stating that the street would be closed from 9:00 to 20:00 both today and tomorrow for filming.

We walked on a bit and suddenly the motorbike–car chase began. Surprising how they managed it in such a short stretch. Only about two blocks of road were cordoned off. The motorbike rider, kitted out in the to-be-expected sinister black, slalomed his way through 12 or 15 cars, and then it was over. All the cars pulled forward to the barriers blocking the road, and one-by-one did a U-turn and went back to their positions for, no doubt, another take.

Were we caught on film? Will we ever see this film? Probably no and no, but it made for an interesting day.

Sorry about the lack of photos. Wouldn’t you know, it’s the one time I didn’t take my camera.