England Part I: Very Liverpudlian

Okay, taking a (brief) interlude here from my rhapsodizing over how much I love Berlin's cultural life (though there's sure to be more of that soon!) to take you back to...

England!

On my way to and from hiking in England's Lake District this May, I passed through Liverpool. This was exciting – well, admittedly, all travel is exciting to me, but specifically this was exciting because I'd been to London before and several parts of southern England, but never to the north.

Plus it seems like Liverpool is one of those places you always hear about, right? Even if only because of the Beatles?

I was basically only in the city a few hours of one afternoon, before catching a train up to the Lake District, then again for an evening before flying back out, but I think I managed to capture a bit of it nonetheless.

Here's the album:

Very Liverpudlian

New Yorker Finds New Yorker

As I was walking past the Wasserturm this evening, on my way from one part of Prenzlauer Berg to another, a middle-aged woman with an unmistakably New York Jewish accent stopped me and asked, Do you know where the synagogue is?

It happens I knew exactly which synagogue she meant, since we were about half a block from it, so I pointed it out through the trees and the construction site that was obstructing the view.

She'd asked in English, without even any sorry-but-do-you-speak-English type preamble, so I thought it was rather good luck for her that the person she asked just happened to be American as well.

Then I had to smirk and think, Well, what's the chance of one New York Jew running across another New York Jew in this expat-y part of Berlin? Oh yeah: Really high!

Berlin, Late Night

Berlin. Late night parties where Swiss flamenco guitarists and Canadian violinists and French Brassens fans (and Iranian academics and Syrian guitarists and some Germans and Americans who just really like this sort of thing) in a living room rock out to the pop songs we all grew up with and sing along on each other's musical styles and improvise the blues. Oh, and Metallica.

(Then, later, they started inventing deliberately awkward, literal German translations of popular song lyrics, like "Schlag mich Baby noch einmal" for Britney Spears' "Hit me baby one more time" and "Ich kann dein Held sein, Baby" for "I can be your hero, baby" from that Enrique Iglesias song.)

I admit, I started losing interest around the point the party devolved into an apparent attempt to cover every Pink Floyd song ever – but by then anyway it was after 3 a.m. and the mid-summer sky was already almost tinged with blue.

But it was cool to hear the friend from Iran say, "This is how I grew up. We would sit around in Tehran, singing every Pink Floyd song we could."

There's something so astoundingly universal about music, sometimes.

Berlin Nights

Speaking of rainstorms.

The other night my friend John, who I sometimes play music with, suggested we bring a guitar and meet up in the Mauerpark to play some songs.

(The Mauerpark is a park created from a stretch of the former Berlin Wall. It's not a pretty or very green space, but it's always got something vibrant going on. On the weekends, for example, there's this enormous outdoor karaoke party that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people attend...)

Before we hit the park, though, we stopped for a drink at the Weinerei. (Or one of their locations, at least; it's a Berlin institution, and I can never keep the whole thing straight.)

Weinerei is literally "winery," I guess, though it's not the word usually used in German for a winery. The place works as follows: You go up to the counter and pay a euro "membership" in exchange for an empty glass. A wide array of wines – reds and whites and rosés – is set out on the counter; you take whatever you want, and at the end of the night you pay what you think it was worth. They also offer a buffet dinner under a similar system: The food all comes out of the kitchen at once, you eat what you want, then pay what you think you ate.

When John and I went, around 11 p.m. on a weekend night, the place was beyond packed, with a young and international-looking crowd spilling out onto the sidewalk and well along the street. As we got our first glass of wine and found ourselves a patch of sidewalk to sit on, John declared, "This is the most Berlin place I've ever been."

Which, well, I was skeptical about that, because what about the ping pong bar, and  the concerts that happen in basements and back rooms, and all those bars that look like someone just found an abandoned building and threw some broken furniture in it and set up a countertop and started mixing drinks?

"Well, it's my new favorite bar, at least," John said, and I admit, I started thinking I should add the place into the rotation of places good for impressing out-of-town guests...

Then we walked over the Mauerpark. The air had been heavy all day with the humid feeling of imminent rain. There was more and more heat lightning, but amazingly it didn't rain, and still didn't rain.

We found a patch of grass; a larger group nearby sang drunken, louder renditions of Wonderwall and Wish You Were Here, while we more quietly revisited our favorite Leonard Cohen songs, and the sky put on an incredible show, lightning bolts that stabbed all the way across the sky and sheet lightning that lit up everything.

The rain finally started in great, fat drops as I was biking home, and I spent a while longer with my balcony door open, watching rain wash in sheets along the street below and lightning so bright I don't even know how to describe it, followed almost instantaneously by thunder so loud and close, it sounded as if the building next door were being demolished.

What a perfect night in Berlin.

Bring on the Rainstorm!

We've been getting real, true rainstorms this summer. And I don't say that lightly – coming from North America (and having lived in the Midwest for four years), good thunderstorms are one of the things I really miss here. Berlin is heavy on the gray, dreary winter rain, light on the dramatic summer storms.

But THIS summer, this summer, we've already had more thunderstorms, and most of them far more dramatic, than anything I've seen in Germany before. Tonight I was in another part of town – at a swanky art book opening, actually, and then meeting friends for dinner – and when we walked back out of the restaurant, it was bucketing down like you almost never see here.

I biked home, immediately drenched to the skin and singing at the top of my voice, because it was all drowned out by the rain anyway. Then for a while I made funny noises, BRRR at the cold of the rain and WHOOO when lightning split the sky.

I arrived back to the intersection near my house to the sight of two young guys, totally naked and camped out on top of a Litfaß advertising column (visual explanation of that for non-European readers here) with a few bottles of beer, apparently enjoying the rain as well. You can maybe kind of see them in the bottom left of this poor-quality, low-light picture taken from my balcony:

You really gotta love Berlin!

The Party Tram, Reprise

Ha! I've always referred to the M10 tram, which runs right past my building, as the "party tram." (See this previous post, which for reasons I can't begin to fathom seems to be one of the all-time most-viewed posts here. Some combination in there of words that people google a lot...?)

So I was tickled to see that even Der Spiegel thinks the same: in this article about a push to ban drinking on trains in Germany (yes, in this country it's quite normal to board the train with a beer in hand, continuing the festivities before or after a party) the author uses the M10 tram in Berlin in the lead paragraph, as his example of a place where partying goes down on weekend nights.

Bert and Ernie ...and Lena

How did I never know about this?

In the grand tradition of musicians making cameos on Sesame Street (Norah Jones singing "I Don't Know Why 'Y' Didn't Come" as a serenade to the letter of the day, Y, comes to mind) I just discovered a series of German "Sesamstrasse" clips in which favorite German singers of various genres make cameos with Bert and Ernie.

First I stumbled across pop singer Lena, Germany's beloved Eurovision Song Contest winner from a couple years ago, singing a version of her song "Satellite," but reworked to be about how Ernie was supposed to meet Bert but can't find him:

But it turns out there are others too...

German soul singer (I know, it's a strange concept!) Xavier Naidoo joins Bert and Ernie in baking a pie, and very sweetly sings them his song about how we can achieve more if we work together.

Influential German hip hopper (I know, it's also a strange concept!) Jan Delay appears in a burst of smoke and raps with Bert and Ernie, while helping them build a garden shed.

And just to mix it up even more genre-wise, 1920s-style crooner Max Raabe comes by to sing Ernie a lullaby when he can't fall asleep.

Saying "Uh..."

Aw! Sorry, but I have to update again.

I'm still here, still trying to get some work done despite this Euro Cup quarter-final game playing next to my head.

It's half-time now, which means they're showing the news – as I mentioned in this post, I'm still floored to be living in a country where it's considered completely normal that this prime-time slot between games should be devoted to the evening news.

And just as cool: Everyone in the café is still paying attention, watching the news and commenting on it. And making fun of some politician (I'm sitting behind the screen, so I can't see who it is) who says "uh..." too much when he talks.

Every time I get really fed up with Germans as a whole, they go and do something awesome like actually care about the news. Or sing adorable German children's songs with their kid in the seat on the back of their bicycle, while waiting at a red light (seen yesterday).

Read Those (Foul-Mouthed) Lips

Heh. Heh heh heh.

Well, it's the evening of the Germany-Greece quarter-final Euro Cup game and once again, due to the increasingly weird work hours I keep, the rest of Germany is watching the game but I'm working.

Sometimes I vaguely keep track of the games by occasionally checking the official website's live feed to confirm what I already know based on when and where fireworks go off in the street. (One evening last week, with two games were going on at the same time, I quickly realized that hearing shouting and firecrackers from every direction meant Germany had scored in their game, while more localized cheering from one group of fans down the street meant Portugal had scored in their own game.)

This time, though, I've accidentally gone one better, and am working from a table in a café that's showing the game. (I actually thought they weren't showing it, but I was already sitting here when they pulled down the big projection screen next to my head, so I just stayed.)

A few minutes into the current game, Germany narrowly missed getting a goal, and I looked up at the screen to see one of the players clearly mouthing, uh, let's say a rather bad word.

That reminded me of a fun article Spiegel Online International (that's their English section) recently ran about a Deaf woman who reads the lips of the players and coaches on the field – the stuff the rest of us can't hear, because it's drowned out by all the cheering in the stadium – and posts what she sees on Twitter, here. (She posts in German, but says she'll offer an English translation after the game.)

Apparently, the German team has gotten wise to her, and coach Joachim Löw now covers his mouth when he yells at his players!

The Book!

 The book is launched!