It’s been a while…

You’ll have to excuse our apparent disappearance over the last few weeks, the key reasons being:

1. A trip back to the UK via an unfortunate visit to Belgium (ask me about this when I’m next in a good ranting mood) and a spot of camping in northern France, none of which involved having internet access.

2. Returning to Berlin last weekend and still having no internet access, so having to go to our local cafe to get online, which involves drinking coffee and eating.  Imagine.

 3. Returning to Berlin last weekend and starting work on decorating our new flat.  In fact why don’t I tell you about the flat:

The thing is, when we first viewed it, it was full of the outgoing tenant’s stuff (a family of four).  Which is quite a lot of stuff.  So we didn’t realise that OUR FLAT IS ENORMOUS.

A brief tour.  It’s 2nd floor, with a bedroom and a large living room at the front, both looking onto the canal.  The living room has a balcony – already our favorite spot; you get to watch all the tourist boats coming past.

There’s a small rear bedroom, then an art gallery sized central room called a ‘Berliner’ apparently, which leads to kitchen, bathroom and a store room which used to the maid’s quarters.  Our current budget precludes a maid, unfortunately, although if anyone’s looking for free board and somrthing tofill their empty days…

We were only vaguely aware that when moving out of rented accommodation in Belin you traditionally take everything with you.  Literally. The kitchen. The kitchen sink.  Lights. By which I don’t mean lampshades; when we arrived on saturday night there were wires hanging out of the walls and ceilings. Thank god for our neighbours’ torch.

Our furniture doesn’t arrive till next week, so at the moment it feels like we’re squatting – both on our slowly deflatingair mattress, with clothes in bags strewn around the room.  Even when our furniture does arrive, it will look miniature in rooms this size (every room has 14ft ceilings). 

After a week of solid decorating, we begin to realise that the ‘1 month’s free rent in return for us decorating’ deal was not such a bad one for the landlord.  Have now done three trips to Bauhaus (the Deutsche equivalent of B&Q) for paint, and are still on our first two rooms.  Current plan: and increasngly slapdash approach, petering out altogether in the rooms least likely to be seen by visitors.

 So, as before, everyone very welcome to come and visit, but please do remember to bring with you a large item of period furniture.

Tschuss!

Jim & Katie

Random thoughts on a sunny day in Görlitzer Park

Due to the absence of major events in our lives at this time, I thought I’d relate thoughts that came to me in the park yesterday afternoon.  If this is of no interest whatsoever, there’s a bit at the end about the park itself, involving the Second World War and ruins. 

1. I really must do something about the lettering on my bike.  It used to read ‘SPRICK’, but on the left hand side the ‘S’ has partly worn away.  Katie thinks this is very amusing, and wants to scratch off the S on other parts of the bike (for consistency, she claims).

2. Kids in Berlin.  Not that we’ve been hanging around a lot of playgrounds (that might arouse suspicion, even among relaxed Berliners), but we can’t help noticing that kids go out and play in the streets/public playgrounds without their parents, from quite a young age.  It’s like the UK around twenty years ago, before the Daily Mail explained to us that children die if they go outside without the protection of an off-road vehicle.

3. We must stop laughing and nodding politely when strangers engage us in passing converstaion.  We should admit we don’t understand what they’re saying.  Otherwise, before we know it, we’ll be happily agreeing to statements along the lines of “some of his methods may have been questionable, but actually the Führer had some good ideas…”

4. Talking of Nazis, a German military helicopter has just flown low overhead, sporting the word ‘Luftwaffe’.  I have to remind myself that this just means ‘Airforce’ in German.  Similarly, ‘U-Boot’ just means submarine.  Although we haven’t seen any of those.

5.  Poo. There’s a popular phrase here used to describe ‘a lot of anything’, which we’ve awkwardly translated.  It goes “there’s as much… (insert something of which there’s a lot) …as there is dog poo on the pavements of Friedrichshain”.  Which is near where we live.  And it’s true – there is a lot of poo on the streets, mainly due* to the large number of dogs in Berlin.  We assume they all live in flats, because that’s where all their owners live. The ‘pooper-scoper’ is clearly an invention yet to catch on in Berlin.

*On reflection , it’s entirely due to dogs.  Unless people are pooing in the streets.  This seems unlikely, even in Berlin.

And as promised at the top, here’s something about the park, including a couple of these newfangled hyperlinks that young people prefer instead of going away and looking things up properly.

The park itself used to be a major railway station (Görlitzer Bahnhof), but was reduced to ruins by WWII bombing and has been recently converted Berlin-style into public space.  ‘Berlin-style’ means removing the most potentially fatal pieces of industrial machinery, and adding some grass.  In my opinion this approach is great, and reminds me of when I was young; you could go and play on old traction engines which had just been set in concrete and painted blue.  In the UK, these are now all long gone, as otherwise they’d fall foul of those daytime TV ads that begin “had an accident that wasn’t your fault?”.  In Berlin, they don’t care about this sort of thing.

We’re told on good authority that it’s Monday

Hi again from Berlin. (I’m going to drop the affected ’Guten Tag’ greetings etc from now on – too cheesy.)

The problem with having no jobs or structured time of any sort is that the days just fly by without really achieving anything.  Since we arrived here it’s been a point of pride for us to have no idea what day of the week it is, but I suspect it’s a short saunter from here to complete hippydom, using the word ‘man’ a lot (as in “look, just chill, man”), and not knowing what year it is.

K and me have therefore decided that being a Monday (yes, we looked at a calender) we should get up this morning, as opposed to this afternoon, and do stuff.  Even if the stuff is writing blogs and making elaborate breakfasts. 

One unexpected side effect of having unlimited free time and no real worldly concerns, is that it’s very unsettling.  We admitted to each other recently that we were both vaguely nervous – the kind of nagging worry that you might have on a sunday when thinking about the week of work ahead.  Except that we don’t have a week of work ahead, of course.  I think that for me in particular, a general sense of unease might be hard wired – anyone who knows me well will be familiar with my tendency to fret over really quite trivial stuff.  On the plus side, I’ve finally stopped worrying about work, although I did finish with it about a month and a half ago.

‘Oh yes’ I can hear you saying. ‘I have such sympathy for Jim and Katie, sitting about having late breakfasts, trying to deal with the stress of, er, having nothing to worry about’. Point taken, I’ll move on to…

Bikes.  As some readers* will know, I somehow managed to avoid learning to ride a bike until my mid twenties, and have been a bit uncertain in the saddle ever since.  So there was some trepidation on my part at the idea of living in a bike orientated city, where cycling is the only realistic (and cheap) way to get around.  Actually, I needn’t have worried, since:

1. Bikes have priority everywhere, with loads of cycle lanes.  Proper cycle lanes as well, not those London ones that are about three metres long and are only positioned where they won’t be in the way of any 4×4’s on school runs.

2. Berlin is almost completely flat.

3. Where hills do occur, you can break the journey at regular intervals by stopping for coffee and cake. 

This degree of optimism is of course tempting fate.  Katie has in the past witnessed at least one incident of my ’sudden emergency dismounting’ from my cycle, and will sometimes happily point out to complete strangers bits of me which still contain impacted gravel.  Anyhoo, it’s raining today, so will stay in, probably.

 Jim’s thought for the day:

It may be raining outside, but not in my heart.  That would be ridiculous; my heart is a major organ, used for pumping blood around my body.

Today Jim is mainly listening** to:

Stan Getz’ Bossanova classics.  The Girl from Ipenima, it just never ages, does it?

*Assumed to be plural

** and therefore so is Katie, as she’s also in the flat, with no choice in the matter***

*** although Katie’s just pointed out that I could use headphones, so that she can play the Pixies really loudly

Jim & Katie’s first Berlin curry: A Special Report

With apologies, this post is mainly for the curry minded among you, and in particular for our Curry Club chums.

Three weeks into our Berlin lives and until now no curry.  Not a sausage. (In fact, not even a sausage; see comment on currywurst, later.)

So off to one of our local establishments to sample what the locals know as curry.  Let me start by staying that the whole experience was not a bad one; the restaurant was pleasant, the staff helpful, the food hot (in the sense of temperature).  But compared with the English/Bangladeshi hybrid which is the curry experience we cherish, something was missing.

Kingfisher/Cobra freely available? Check.

Dodgy sitar music? Check. 

But where was the flock wallpaper, the dark swirly carpets?  Why had the tables not been crammed in to seat 30% more people than space would normally allow?  Why did the food not arrive on a trolley?  Where were the strained but patient expressions on the staff’s faces each time a large group arrived?

Undaunted, we pressed on.

Katie had: a dahl ghosht

Jim had: the ‘chicken in special sauce’.

We both shared: a garlic nan

Katie’s dish was basically a bit like a lamb dhansak. “It’s a bit like a lamb dhansak” she reported, “but it lacks spice, and it’s not sweet and sour like a dhansak should be“.  Mine was essentially a chicken tikka masala with some nuts on top.  Being the big girl’s blouse that I am, I had avoided ordering anything marked as ’scharf’ (hot), but quickly wished I hadn’t.  This dish was lightly spiced, but as far as I could tell contained no chillies.

The garlic nan was closer to garlic bread.

So perhaps it’s time to cancel my idea for ‘Curry Club 07: Mission to Berlin’, as frankly, the food might be disappointing.  Obviously you’re all still very welcome to come and stay though, either individually, or as a big group wearing silly hats.

Tschuss!

J&K

A footnote on currywurst

Of course Berliners have their own asian/western hybrid food that they can claim their own: currywurst* – basically a hotdog with curry sauce on, served at roughly the time and from the sort of places we’d get kebabs in the UK.  The idea always appealed to me, involving as it does two of my favourite things, namely sausage and curry.  But thus far our experience has not been promising.  The last one I had, on a previous trip, was presented with the curry sauce in a semi-powdered state, and tasted of the sort of curry your mum made when you were a kid and hadn’t yet been for a ‘proper’ curry.  So I hereby vow to go on a Berlin-wide currywurst tasting mission – perhaps if the results are unsatisfactory, there’s a gap in the market for a new type of currywurst, with a choice of sauces from korma to vindaloo?

*Actually, Hamburg also lays claim to inventing the currywurst.  Obviously not content with having the hamburger already under their belts, so to speak.