One More Day

Aw. This morning between doing a million and one other things, I zipped over to the nearest pharmacy to get more Dramamine (motion sickness medication is an essential travel item, obviously, if you get motion sick on every single kind of thing that moves) and the woman working there actually remembered me from the last time I was in, also for trip-related things (insect repellent, water purification tablets). This time too, she was warm and conversational and wished me a good trip.

I love when those rare bits of personal connection manage to break through the veneer of disdainful anonymity (I'll pretend you don't exist if you'll please pretend I don't exist) that often marks public life in Berlin. Especially in winter. Especially on the subway. But anyway...


Departure for India: T minus one day and a very small handful of hours!

Right now I'm flattened by a nasty cold, somehow managed to end up with even more work than I expected in these final pre-trip days and haven't had a chance to finish packing. So far, successfully not panicking! And in just over a day I'll be determinedly leaving behind work and anything that in any way resembles it and, for the next three weeks, turning myself over to just experiencing and exploring and being - NOT organizing and stressing and just generally making myself crazy like I do in normal life.

I consider this extremely important.

The Next Big Adventure

This is so crazy: I'm going on a trip to India in less than two weeks, and I haven't even mentioned that here yet.

Folks, I'm going to India!!!

I'm excited, nervous, terrified, overwhelmed, all of that. I'm not even sure if I can handle India. Which is exactly why I feel like I need to try.

I've been spinning my wheels here for a while, feeling a need to do something big and exciting and really alive, but not having the energy to get it together. Feeling a desire to travel again, but not sure quite how to start. So I'm just simply making myself do it. (It did help to have a friend currently living in India for four months, making it a now-or-never sort of opportunity.)

I'll be in India for about three weeks; first I'll be visiting my friend, who's doing a medical internship in Vellore, Tamil Nadu. Then we (possibly with her boyfriend too) will travel somewhere together for a couple days. After that... it's wide open. And I'll be on my own completely - no friends, no group, no travel partner. I'm planning to stay in the south (not to rush around the country trying to see "everything") but beyond that I don't even have much of a plan - and I think I like it that way. I'm just going to arrive and see where things take me.

I'm going to India!

Bike Tour in the Wendland

Friends from New York, Anna and Ian, came and visited me in Berlin a few weeks ago.

This provided several benefits, namely 1) it was lovely to hang out with them, 2) it's always fun discovering my city through visitors' eyes and 3) we went on a terrific four-day bike tour!

The Wendland is a region of farms, woods and river landscapes about halfway between Berlin and Hamburg. Throughout the Cold War, it was a little pocket of West Germany tucked in amid three sides of East Germany. This small map gives you a bit of a sense: the dot is, roughly, the Wendland, at that point where the state of Lower Saxony (former West) meets three states of the former East.

For West Germans, it was a far-flung corner that seemed removed form everything – and thus a reasonable place to stick a nuclear storage facility. For West Berliners, it was the closest place they could get to actual nature, since the Berlin Wall kept them trapped within their part of the city, not allowed to access the East German countryside that surrounded them.

Since much of the Wendland was essentially the border and the no man's land along it, it accidentally ended up as a good preserve for wildlife and, as we discovered, the Elbe River is a major migratory stopping point for Siberia geese heading toward North Africa or the Iberian Peninsula.

Now that Germany is reunited, of course, the Wendland is no longer a far-flung corner but in fact right in the middle of things and a strong protest movement has sprung up around the nuclear storage facility in Gorleben. Artists and alternative-minded folks who have moved to the area to be part of that movement lend the region a very different culture from your usual rural landscape - and best of all, the farmers and artists seem to get along well, united in their opposition to the nuclear waste transports that come in by train more or less once a year. (The next one, in fact, is this weekend. For a few images of past protests, look here, here, here and here.)

It's a fascinating place on all fronts - nature, history and culture - and I've attempted to capture a tiny bit of it in a pictures. Click on this image to go to the photo album:

Wendland Bike Tour

The Chimney Sweep

The chimney sweep, playing out his chimney-cleaning line on the roof of a building (six stories up) across the way. I love these little anachronistic moments in Germany.

A Picture

Here's a picture I really need to express in words, since I unfortunately didn't capture it on camera:

At H&M, waiting on line for the changing rooms, which were a row of eight or so black doors all in a row off a narrow hall. In that hall, two youngish guys who were quite clearly each the boyfriend of someone currently trying on clothes, both sitting separately on seats a bit apart, but so similar in their dark winter jackets, both slouched identically, hunched over and symmetrical absorbed with the cell phones held on their laps.

Two Things Unrelated except that They're Vaguely about Cultural Identity

I recently hung out with a lovely cohort of fellow Berlin transplants, all young women, all native English speakers, but having followed varied trajectories before landing here - one from Ohio but via many years in California, one English but raised in France, one part British/part French Canadian and raised in both those places.

As such collections of people sometimes will, we got to talking about things like where we feel at home and whether we think we'll stay here long term and how our own native language has morphed slightly through living abroad - for the Americans, for example, it becomes more "international," which means flavored by British phrasings that are often more readily understood in other parts of the world. And for the British, apparently, it means growing confusion about whether something is wrong, or just spelled American style.

Then the British/Canadian turned to me and said, You know, you're the person here who feels the most automatically familiar to me, because Upstate New York and Montreal are the most similar, they're the same region. Fascinating - even though she's kind of more British (you hear it in her accent, at least) and her Canadian culture is the French one, not English-speaking, still geography exerts that strong a pull on us, that just being from the same part of the world can provide us with an immediate sense of familiarity, certain things that don't require any explanation. (We'd also been talking about - are you sensing a theme here? - fall on the east coast of North America and how far, far superior it is to fall here in northern/central Europe.)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

And unrelatedly, except perhaps for being tied together by the tenuous thread of being somehow "about culture":

English students of mine, a middle-aged German couple, recently spent a week in Istanbul and came back gushing, as I knew they would, about the warmth and beauty of that city. (Cue nostalgic bout of gazing into the distance and thinking about Istanbul...)

Coming back to Berlin after that was something of a shock, the husband of the couple told me. All those long faces on the city trains in the mornings!

I have to admit, when I think about those sides of Berlin - how cold and unfriendly public life here often is, how strangers brush past each other at best, or even actively treat one another as obstacles to get past as quickly as possible - I have to hurry to find some aspect of Berlin to think about that do I like, because otherwise it spirals into, "Wait a minute, why would anyone in their right mind ever want to live here?"

Dumplings for Birds

This year I bought fat balls for the first time, in the hope of tempting interesting birds to come hang around in front of the window where I work at the computer all day.

What I'm talking about is those balls of bird feed you can hang up outside; I didn't even know until now that they were called fat balls - having just heard of them recently from a British friend - and I still have a sneaking suspicion they're possibly only called that if you're a speaker of British English. Jury is still out on what we Americans would call them. Suet cakes??

In German, they're "Meisenknödel," from "Meise" for titmouse (the type of bird) and "Knödel" literally meaning dumpling. Dumplings for titmice!

So far, only one feathered visitor, but hopefully he'll tell his friends.

Language Lesson

On a bus downtown, I was drawn out of the usual retreat into my own earphones (a necessary defense mechanism, I've finally learned, against too much noise and city crowds) by the sound of two young tourists of indeterminate origin chatting with two older Germans.

One young man started telling the German couple that his language teacher showed him how German verbs are built out of prefixes and roots, and if you know the constituent parts, you can often figure out the meaning of the whole - his example was "ausstellen," which is "to exhibit" and comes from "aus" (out) and "stellen" (to put, place, set). So you put something out, you exhibit it. Then he grinned and said to the native speakers, You never thought of that, did you!

The other tourist guy mentioned the weirdness of French numbers (where 80 is "four twenties" and 90 is "four twenties and ten") and how he'd once pointed that out to a French person who similarly realized they'd never really thought about it that way.

Then everybody was trying out different ways of pronouncing the word "ich," the German couple coaching them, and somebody in the tourist crowd laughed and called out, "German lesson!" Someone else suggested, "Deutsch one-oh-one!"

Turning toward Winter

Winter's coming.

You can tell because the days are getting rather shockingly short (it's well dark by 6 p.m., sunsets are before 6:00), the grocery stores are selling Christmas cookies (though I'm not sure that counts, since they roll those out at the beginning of September...) and they're already setting up that big artificial toboggan run thing that's part of the "Christmas market" (read: thin excuse for a highly commercialized fun fair) at Potsdamer Platz.

Also, I finally caved in and turned on the heating, though I'm sort of inanely proud to have stuck it out two thirds of the way through October. But the morning I woke up and the temperature inside read 14° C (57° F), I figured the time had come.

At least the weekend farmers' market promises to keep me stocked with strange, wonderful vegetables (salsify, anybody? Jerusalem artichoke?) through sometime into December.

It's been a time, well, mostly a time of head down, nose to the grindstone repetition, but with occasional lucid interludes of bizarre, half-improvised theater performances in the back room of a bar that looks more like an abandoned house (but they make interesting cocktails that include cucumber), where the bathroom doesn't have a sink and the girls at the ticket counter (dressed as siamese twins) don't have coins on hand, so they give me my change in gingerbread cookies. Or a free basement concert by some slightly odd Americans, where the "special guest" trumpet player turns out to be a rather famous German author and frontman of a popular band.

Between such things and the way all the windows of streets lined with shops glow warm against the early-falling dark and the fact that it's not yet too cold for a little bicycle jaunt out to the countryside to catch the moon just rising, enormous and pink above a field, I've almost reconciled myself with the changing seasons.

But I notice I'm feeling singularly grateful to have friends who live nearby and interesting things going on right here in the neighborhood, because I can tell pretty soon we're going to want to hunker down and not go far at all.

In Honor of Reunification

Biking through Pankow (a northeastern part of Berlin, where I used to live), saw this display at one of those stores that sells novelty t-shirts - in this case, mostly East-German-nostalgia-themed t-shirts - and it made me laugh, so I thought I'd share.

That one that looks like Russian? It's actually just German written in Cyrillic letters, and it says "Wenn du das lesen kannst, bist du kein Wessi!" - "If you can read this, you're not a 'Wessi'," ie from West Germany, where people were not obligated to learn Russian in school (East Germans were).

It made me laugh all the more because, in fact, I could read it - and you probably can't get much further "Wessi" than being American.