Someone wrote to me recently and asked me what Berlin is like. So I thought I would give a taste of me here. First off the weather is manic. It’s hot and summery one minute but yesterday, it was gray, chilly and humid, and I was sitting outside at a cafe wrapped in this cozy flannel blanket that most cafes and restaurants provide for customers who like to sit outside even in the coldest days. I was sipping tea, wearing socks with sandals and reading Eat, Pray, Love and laughing outloud, completely inside my head. When I looked up, I was surrounded by baby carraiges. Not one or two, five in total, limousine like, bugaboo type carraiges with new moms. That’s when I noticed that I was without my own child. Daniel is away in the moutains with grandparents. And I must have looked like the stereotype of an American Tourist. Reading a book about traveling solo after an emtional breakdown in search of something. I am staying in Prenzlauerberg, which is nicknamed Pregnant Hill. If you’re not pregnant, you will be, a woman warned. So be careful. Babies everywhere. It reminds me of Park Slope culture, with baby parks on every other corner and high chairs at every cafe and restaurant, and just about every other bike has a child seat attached, but it’s not so claustophobic as PS. The actual architecture, is more like Upper west side, NYC. Wide open streets, six story apartment buildings, streets lined with speciality shops and restaurants, most with outdoor seating. And a tad of West village too. During the week I often run into some kind of street fair filled with handmade things. In fact, there are a ton of stores with clothing reconstructed from older/used typed items. Very few people of color, (or they must all be working) but I’ve met so many mixed raced babies. And if I understood correctly, the women get ten months off to care for their babies before they have to go back to work. So that explains why there are so may mommies on the street and not nannies. In Italy, mother’s get 6 months, fully paid. Three months before conception. And you mostly see grandparents with the babies. Here you see mothers and some fathers. Maybe that’s why the mothers look less sleep deprived than moms I met in the States.
The thing to snack on here is the currywurst. Which as my ex-chef friend Ari words it, it’s a fried hotdog, drenched in cheap sweet ketchup with curry power sprinkled on top. Sounds awful, but people seem to love that. I’s ok. And just about every Italian restaurant, it doesn’t matter the region will serve up Vitello Tonnato because I’m told the Germans love it. It’s thin slices of boiled veal covered in a tuna mayo sauce. It’s actually one of my favorite things from the Piedmont region. Absolutely wonderful. Restaurants open late, serve up to 12 and much like New York it’s easy to find what you need if you could only decode all that German. The other day I asked for an English Menu and the German desciption was long and elaborate and the English version translated everything into simple basics: soup or pasta with vegetables. When I asked what kind of soup, what was in it, they said, oh many things. It’s good. One thing that I have learned is that just about every soup in Berlin, but lots of other plates as well, has tomato sauce.
I also stopped trying to understand the German language. Instead I feel what people are trying to say. And it’s been working for the most part. I have been communicating much better. Wasser is water. Except the W sounds like a V. And now the German is starting to sound more like English at least the music of it. Nuss is nuts. Glacier is ice cream.. but glacier is almost like gelato and glacier.. think eating a big white snow cone. What I came to realize is that German seemed more foreign even because for the last four or five weeks I have been speaking exclusively in either Spanish or Italian. Now that I turned my English brain on… it’s much better. Which explains how much easier it is to write since I arrived to Berlin, because without knowing it I was writing always in translation.
Prenzlauerber is very GREEN. Full of leafy trees, and untamed weed gardens. Lots of flowers blooming. And the streets, part cobblestone and alsphalt, are uneven and I am always tripping on them. People are always warning me about the bikers. There is always a story of some tragic biker and pedestrian crash. Most buildings have been painted in brights sunny colors, peach, yellows, white, which reminds me a little of the colors in the south of France, and then there are a few buildings that are still this moldy green or grey color a throwback to the commie days. But these are few and far in between because this area has been seriously gentrified.
As for the rest of Berlin… I will discover today. I have been too sick, or busy reading and writing to adventure far. But I did make a visit to Potsdamer Platz, where the Sony Center is. I wanted badly to see a movie in OME i.e in English. And when I arrived Potsdamer Platz looked like a replica of Columbus Circle. I was told this is no accident. Dunkin Donuts on one side, Sony theaters/ imax on the other. There was not a decent movie to watch in all the bunch, so I chucked the movie idea and went back to my hotel to read and write some more. The guys that work with my husband have tagged me as the “reading and writing girl.” Every time they see me , I’m doing one or the other. I could be called worse things.
Lisa
July 29, 2009
I remember being afraid of the bikers too when Harald and I were in Hamburg. Everytime I heard their little biker’s bell ringing I wanted to jump out of the way.