I Love Rosa (Luxemburg)

New favorite graffiti!

There's a stupid advertising campaign that just went up all around on billboards, for a new kind of Kinder egg (the chocolates with the toys inside) that's "just for girls" and thus everything is pink ("rosa") – "Ei" actually means "egg," but is meant to sound like "I" in English. (So the ad reads "I love pink!")

But on a street near me (Danziger Str. near Winsstr., to be specific) some awesome and anonymous person added paper printouts and transformed the ad into a declaration of love for Rosa Luxemburg, German pre-war Socialist:

Berlinniversary, Picnic Style

Celebrated my five-year Berlinniversary in style – with nearly thirty friends and perfect weather in the park. Thanks everyone!

Photo is thanks to Jörn:

Incidentally, I think I'm slowly introducing the invented word "Berlinniversary" into the general vocabulary... (Remember: It's not just the name of this blog, it's also a word that means "the anniversary of one's arrival in Berlin"!) A friend told me the other day, with a completely straight face, that he shares almost the exact same Berlinniversary with another mutual acquaintance.

One Day Baby We'll Be Old, Oh Baby We'll Be Old and Think of All the Stories That We Could Have Told

America, have you heard this song yet?

It seems to me it's everywhere here, but maybe that's just from hanging out with French people (did I only image I read somewhere that it was big there first?) or because there's this weird dance music remix of it going on in Germany...

Anyway, this is what's in my head all the time right now. "The Reckoning Song" by Asaf Avidan & the Mojos:

Liebe Dich More

Two teenaged girls, parting ways on Immanuelkirchstrasse in Prenzlauer Berg last night. They gave each other a casual hug. As they started off in opposite directions, one called back, "Ich liebe dich." ["I love you."]

The other: "Dich auch." ["You too."] Then she paused, and added: "Ich liebe dich more." [with the one word in English]

The first girl laughed: "I love you more!" [in English now]

The second girl: "I love you moooore!"

Happy Berlinniversary

Happy Berlinniversary to me!

Yup, I arrived in Berlin precisely five years ago today, with no idea where I would be living after the first couple days, no job, no connections beyond two or three tenuously linked acquaintances. (Still grateful to Rebecca, who'd been traveling around Europe with me for a month that summer, for staying on with me those first few days in Berlin!)

Lately I've been having those small "what am I doing with my life??" crises; sometimes I feel like I'm spinning my wheels. But when I look at where I was five years ago and where I am now, you know, actually it doesn't look that bad.

So, happy fifth anniversary to me and Berlin!

All Hail the Hail

It's so rare we get really good, dramatic weather in Berlin (I love dramatic weather! thunderstorms!) so I get excited when we do. Here's a brief story of today's weather in pictures.

Today, I worked part of the day in the sun on the balcony. In the evening, I went and sat outside for a bit again. It looked like this:

Pretty suddenly, the wind started to whip up and the clouds rolled in. My laptop and I kept inching further into the apartment from the balcony by degrees as the sky started to look like this – possibly you can even see the streaks of rain coming down:

Then with no warming at all, hail! Really violent, big balls of ice, whipping up and down and all over the place. The white streaks in this picture are all hail:

 

 

 It hailed so emphatically, the ice scattered all the way across the kitchen floor:

  

 Here's a piece of hail with some large-ish cherry tomatoes for comparison. It had already been sitting there melting for a while by the time I thought to photograph it, so it was definitely bigger when it first came down:

And here's the sky afterward, gone back to being hail-less but pleasantly dramatic:

Things I Learned at Work Today

One of the things I love about my translation work in journalism (and the bulk of my translation work is in journalism) is that I learn something new with each article – each day I have to become a mini-expert on whatever it is I'm translating about, so I can convey the subject accurately in English.

Sometimes these subjects are weighty and political; sometimes they're cultural and fun. (Sometimes they're finance-related and almost incomprehensible.) Sometimes they're painful things to have to spend my whole day with, like killings in Syria or abandoned babies in Germany.

And sometimes, like today, they're raccoons and rhinoceroses.


I learn something new from my work every day, and here's what today's two translations taught me:


-- The raccoon translation taught me that Britain's tabloids, so famously ridiculous, are even more ridiculous than I realized: This article from the Sun compares Germany's raccoon problem to, what else, Nazis. My favorite head-scratcher quote is, "They are invading new territory — just like the Nazis did." (Feels like it should be followed by a few "!!!" for good measure.)

-- And the rhinoceros translation taught me that there is such an organization as the Private Rhino Owners Association. It's in South Africa and it's, well, an organization for people who own rhinoceroses.

Germany's America

Germany: Yup, still obsessed with the idea of America.

(Flyer for a strange German-American festival that showed up in my mailbox. The flyer showed up, I mean, not the festival...)

Cash

Proof that Germany is still very much a cash-carrying society...

(Unlike the US, where apparently credit cards are now so widely used that some people don't even carry cash anymore? That kind of blows my mind.)

I was at Media Markt today; I was only buying a 20 euro computer keyboard, but the guy ahead of me in line was making some sort of massive appliance purchase, because I heard the clerk tell him, "That's 1,499 euros."

...Which the customer proceeded to pay by counting out 50 euro bills.

Pretty Pretty, Dirty Pretty

Back at my favorite café to sit and work in (yes it's Sunday evening, yes I agreed to work a weekend yet again, hush...) and behind me is a group of cheerful older women who sound British and are clearly here on holiday.

When the waitress came over to bring their order, they asked if she could recommend anywhere they could go tomorrow on a day trip from Berlin. "Have you been to Potsdam?" the waitress asked. "It's really nice. It's pretty pretty... Like here, you get a bit of dirty pretty."

Which is so true, Potsdam (a much smaller city just outside Berlin) is a popular day trip because it's picturesque with a lot of palaces and gardens and such, whereas Berlin is more about edginess and graffiti and art (with a few palaces and gardens thrown in as well).