My East Berlin Crow's Nest

Some early impressions of Berlin...

Berlin feels like a large shared apartment with both flatmates away; London can feel like a stag party in January, in a claustrophobic one-bed flat in Vauxhall.

It feels like a city waiting to be used, not a city that is manipulating you. It feels open and tangible, the fundamentals are in the correct places. Unlike London, which can sometimes feel like you've got the vision of a mole and turned off the light without leaving your spectacles on the bedside table.

The pace is slower, so much so, that in an attempt to tame the beeline movements that become instinctive in London throngs, I developed a stutter to my walk. Unable to quite standstill, to an onlooker this may well have looked like I was perpetually in search of somewhere to urinate.

There is no twilight hour in Hackney - never more than a minute passes without noise. The window rarely lasts beyond a drawn-out blood vesseled blink, thirty seconds at most. The last door shuts, the last fox emits, the last brown rat scuttles into the Thames, before the phlegm of the next day rises and splutters.

In Berlin it is silent, disregarding the occasional loose comment by the ancient water pipes in the corner. The city doesn’t feel empty or have the baying menace - the that bear could stand up any minute and then he’d be really fucking huge – that London can portray when it falls silent.

TBC...

Food in Berlin

Berlin's restaurants can occasionally deliver a delight, yet the city lacks the impetus and creativity of London's kitchens. I've had a few memorable experiences, but the variety, passion, expectation and interest in food, is not so apparent.

Let me start with the positives. The breads here are wonderful, notably, the infinite variety of rich rye breads . The street food is very good, everywhere and cheap. Highlights being of Turkish origin -who with their street markets and numbers, are often compared to the Indian influence in Britain.

Below, I've outlined a few reasons, which if an already disgruntled German Foodie or indeed anyone ever reads this blog, I do not adhere to be gospel.

Despite overflowing allotments suggesting otherwise, the soil that surrounds the city is apparently very poor. The couple of exceptions that thrive are conspicuous in their engulfing presence, the staples of a potatoes and sauerkraut.

The second reason is late immigration. In the 1950s and 1960s, London was blessed with the benefits of Indian, Pakistan and West Indian immigration, who brought with them a rich heritage of food. Berlin, at that time had many refugees who used the city as a base camp, before planning the expedition into western Europe. This quickly changed with the 'moving of the goal posts', well, actually that should read, the "obliteration of the goalposts, bringing with it utter disillusionment in humanity' - the building of the Berlin wall. The economic crisis that ensued meant that Berlin's biggest immigrant population, the Turkish, didn't arrive till the early seventies, when shortage of labour led to policies to integrate Greek, Yugoslavian and Turkish workers.

The third, fourth and fifth reason, is Currywurst. If smoking is detrimental to your palette, Currywurst must be like crude oil to the feathers of a seabird.

The sixth reason. the loosest of the half dozen arguments is Lidl. I haven’t got a problem with Lidl itself; it obviously has has its place in the market. My problem is that every Tom, Dick and Harry, or should I say, Klaus, Gunter and Dietmar of the German supermarket business, have opened supermarkets based on the notion Lidl is a universal brand of fod retailing excellence. Three examples being Netto, Aldi and PennyMarket, the latter being so horrendous, that in the throes of hunger I thought about smashing a glass jar containing grey Frankfurters and 'glassing' my own jugular.

Snippets from a trip back back home

Pleased to see my parent's Indian Bean tree has a) recovered b) not been nicked

A couple of amusing newspaper boards discovered on a mid-wedding walk in Ditchling. A wedding so perfect incidentally, that it should be the focus of this post and not the irrelevancies of these pics.

 

First night

Sat next to a German couple who were so round, when they ate they they almost looked as if they were swimming in their easyjet seats.  After making a dash from the long queue in WH Smith to a departure gate that deserved a passport stamp in itself- my only option left,  to endure a Gouda and salad, air-packed excuse of a cheesy bagel (the only offering  on the german easyjet route other that a vile looking pepperami panini). 

The highlight of an otherwise montonous flight was a scoff, that nearly became audible,  when I witnessed a german buying those £18 pair of easyjet plane minatures. This quickly turned into a few minutes soaked in guilt at my short sighted cruelty- it could have been the first time he'd been on a plane. Swiftly followed by the decision that I'd prefer to enjoy the scoff and reverted back to my original outlook - loco!

Got the bus into Berlin and found the apartment easily. Greeted by a grinning Petra complete with pink mohawk, dangly earring, leather trousers and illuminous green string vest. He's lovely though, originally from Sicily (told you all squatters, or in this case ex-squatters are Italian), but moved to Berlin when he was ten with his parents. He showed me to my room - Alan Partridge "You could swing a tiger in here, not that I would mind"

It's HUGE.  Complete with 4/5m high ceilings, leather sofa, a long rail of Prince looking clothes that are hard to determine the gender of the wearer, a manaquin in the corner wearing a patchwork dress.  In the opposite corner a watery grey/green tiled coal heater, a small wrought iron balcony complete with a lost hairdresser's swivelchair (although when I sit on it I quickly feel like i must look like a rent boy from the pavement below and cower back inside) On the far wall, a vast record collection, neatly stacked under photocopies of  thumbprints that form a square on the wall. 

I then met the other flatmate, Michelle. She's tiny, dutch and has a peroxide mohawky hair cut, grade zero shaved across the front. A bit of an uber cool haircut that looks a little like the top of a pineapple, and also like it might suddenly start rotating and take off.  She used to work at Toni and Guy in Amsterdam, but moved to Berlin so she could work for a small salon here and do more painting. She's got a similar room to the one I'm in but looks completely different as she has painted all her walls black and covered the stripped floorboards in black cellophane type stuff. I remember glimpsing a hula ring (?),  and a little table roofed den under which an ibook sat on a tiny bed. 

I unpacked and then went and got us each a beer, which we had in a very messy, partly finished kitchen, that certainly doesn't accomodate cooking. They both seemed very easy to talk to and I learnt more about Petra, who told me lots about Sicily and his family. I then commented on a tattoo on his arm that from a distance looked good, but when he showed me up close it was like when Frodo puts on the  the ring. He explained, while i tried to disguise the horror becoming pandemic in my pupils,  that it was of a post-op tranny with horns.

I then got settled into my room while Petra went off to 'perform'. He was 'performing' at a bar, which from what I could understand,  pay him to dress in drag and wear long dangling sleeves which he thrashes around pretending to have escaped from a Psychiatric ward. As his stage is a shop window type thing, I guess the "millions of tourists that watch" see it in mime? Very odd. 

I went for a late night walk for food, thus triggering my usual first night in a new place penchant of looking round too many corners. Before floundering on the borderline of the twin evils of desperation and starvation. I walked many indecisive miles,  and when I did decide, I backtracked to discover every first, second and third choice was closed. In the end, I had ad to resort to a chicken kebab that failed the gristle test, the second time fatally- left half eaten in an overflowing bin (everywhere in Berlin - stupidly small, like those little sacks of firewood that now compliment charcoal at garages in the UK) 

I got back to the apartment late, and felt a bit weird, wobbly and suddenly daunted by the whole thing. Haven't really had that feeling before, comparable only to a don't-look-down moment... but weirdly looking up. I managed to calm myself down by reassuring myself I'd feel better in the morning.

I indeed did,  I got up early and walked to local Cafe. Had a good coffee, served by a large German who did nothing to conceal his amusement at my lack of german language skills. His fat tache twitching into a smile as he let me struggle through a terrible first attempt at explaining i couldn't speak German and was ashamed at my English ignorance....