Trolley Jammin’

Let’s be honest then. My New Year resolution to blog regularly hasn’t really worked, has it?

The usual range of excuses, although a brand new one is that I’ve started another blog. It’s all about architecture in Berlin, and in a moment of genius, I’ve called it ‘Architecture in Berlin’. If you’re really bored, and have an interest in concrete, you can find it at:

architectureinberlin.wordpress.com

So what’s new with us?

Went to see Roisin Murphy last night (the ex-singer of Moloko) who was fantastic. She was due to play in Berlin in november but fell over on stage in a previous show and hurt herself quite badly (the YouTube footage of this has been withdrawn, so you’ll have to make do with the video I’ve linked, but it’s very good). As an added bonus, she ended the show* with a fake fight with her two very slinky backing singers, which ended with them all writhing about on the floor.

*The show we saw last night, not the one where she hit her head, obviously. That show ended with her being flown home for hospital treatment, which was not an added bonus, unless you like that sort of thing. If you do, you probably like that film/MTV series where that idiot nails his nadgers to the back of a car and stuff.

Anyway, what else? Oh yes, the saga of Bessie (our campervan) continues. She’s been in and out of the garage since I last mentioned this (you remember – the garage where they spend a long time having lunch) with the same problem. But what we didn’t know until just before Christmas was that Berlin has introduced a new rule, coming into full force on 1st Feb, known as the Umwelt zone, which restricts older vehicles with higher emissions from coming into the centre. Every vehicle has to be tested, but generally speaking you have a problem if your vehicle is:

• over ten years old (oh dear)
• diesel (oh bugger)
• large (damn – ours is 2.5 litres)
• has a fridge on board (oh no)

I made the last one up, but the first three caused the man at the garage to look very sombre and shake his head in that way that means “I’d like to bend the rules, particularly as your camper is clearly going to bring me so much work in the future, but I can’t”. Well that’s how I read it anyway.

So our plan now is to take her (I should say ‘it’ – we’re clearly too fond of this troublesome vehicle) outside the zonal limit, then decide what to do at a later date. Our landlord here has offered their summerhouse as a temporary location, which is very generous, and a good excuse to be nosey, as they’ve often mentioned the place.

On a sort-of-but-not-really-related subject, the smoking ban is now in full force here in Berlin, amazingly. Most bars and venues now have a separate smoking room, or you have to go outside. It seems to be working, although fines for non-compliance don’t begin until next month. The downside, as with the ban in the UK, is that you are now aware what everyone smells like. Particularly in sweaty clubs, where the aroma is… interesting.

Though not a smoker myself, I felt a need for one a couple of days ago, to recover from an incident during a trip to Bauhaus (our equivalent of B&Q). I’ll relate it to you, but apologies if it’s overly technical. Perhaps I’ll break it down into numbered points, like a report.  In fact, yes, I will, so here goes:
1.  I intended to buy some large sheets of board, so I needed one of those ‘flat bed’ type trolleys.
2.  To get one of these required a 20 Euro deposit.
3.  I needed to get to the upper floor of the store, which is accessed via a long moving ramp escalator, which you can take your trolley up.
4.  The ‘up’ ramp was closed for maintenance, and they had stopped the ‘down’ ramp, so people could use it to walk up as well as down.
5.  I therefore needed to push the trolley up the ramp, requiring a long run up, and a lot of force.
6.  I successfully got to the top, but then encountered a restriction, a bit like the frame things either side of store entrances which trigger an alarm when you’ve nicked something. (For the record, I don’t often, if ever, steal stuff from stores. But the alarm sensors sometimes go off because the tag remover thingy at cash desk has failed to work. I have other stories about this – remind me to tell you at some point.)
7.  Normal trollies would have fitted through. It later turned out that I should have taken my trolley in the lift, if I had bothered, or been able, to read the sign. (The restrictor for the ‘up’ ramp is at the bottom, so normally I wouldn’t have got onto the ramp in the first place.)
8.  My trolley was of a type which widens towards the back, so although I got the front end through, it wedged solid.
9.  There were by now several people queuing behind me, with normal trollies. The ‘normal’ trollies have devices on the wheels which lock on a slope, which people had managed to overcome by sheer force and momentum, which they had now lost, by having to stop, and were now all jammed.
10.  I would have simply climbed over the trolley this point, and run away, but it still had my 20 euros in it.
11.  The three guys repairing the ‘up’ ramp, who had been laughing at me up until this point, grudgingly decided to come to my aid, but were unable to shift my trolley – I had managed to ‘lock’ it into place with two protruding side bars, which then prevented it reversing.
12.  They finally concluded that the only way to free it was to dismantle the restriction mechanism either side, which was bolted to the floor.
13.  I slunk off, hoping to sneak back once the angry queue had dispersed (which they could only do by dragging their trolleys backwards down the ramp) and retrieve my twenty euros.

Needless to say, once I had been given back my now battered trolley, they didn’t have the type of board I needed.

I’m now exhausted just thinking about the whole experience, so am off for a nice cup of tea, and possibly a biscuit.

Happy New Silvester

Happy New Year!

Or ‘Silvester’ as it’s inexplicably known here.  Except when it isn’t.  It’s often more explicably known as Neues Jahre, which means New Year (d’uh, like obviously).  God knows where Silvester came from.  I didn’t make it up; it’s written all on posters and stuff.

Am quite excited at the moment as my sister Trish has just had a baby girl (Dec 31st) – no name yet, but 8lbs, and all are well.  Which is not much to do with Berlin, but felt I should put it in anyway.

Where did the last four months go?  In particular, where did the seven weeks go since my last blog?  My New Year resolution is to structure my days better, as when you have nothing that you have to do, the one thing you’re guaranteed to do is nothing.  Yesterday, being the first day of the New Year, I decided to do a blog.  I failed (today is the 2nd Jan) but I did come up with a list of excuses for not writing one for so long:

1.  We’ve had lots of guests.

2. We had a language course to do. (In German, obviously.  Spanish or somesuch Latin tongue would be of little use here in Berlin.  Although strictly speaking, English is proving disappointingly adequate.)

3. Writing a list of Important Things Which Must Be Done Before Christmas (ITWMBDBC for short).

4. Thinking about doing items from 3. above.

5. Thinking about doing alternative things in order to avoid doing anything from the ITWMBDBC list.

6. Thinking of snappier alternative name for the ITWMBDBC.

7. Realising that it’s now after Christmas, and that virtually none of the ITWMBDBC list is done, and worse still that it needs to be renamed as the ITWHTBDBCBHSHNPIADHTTWTI list (Important Things Which Had To Be Done Before Christmas But Haven’t So Have Now Put In A Draw Hoping That They Weren’t That Important).

8. Katie made a Christmas cake, which was very nice.

I digress – on to this blogging thingy.

During the weeks leading up to New Year, several people had told us they were leaving Berlin for the celebratory period because of all fireworks. 

“Fireworks?” I said,  “I love fireworks, they’re great”. 

“Oh no” they replied knowingly, “these fireworks are let off in the streets, and are very dangerous.  I have a friend who is now permanently deaf in one ear… etc, etc ” at which point I would tune out, assuming that this was just a circuitous conversational route leading to their unnacceptably racist views on the presence of so many Turks in the neighbourhood.

Cycling to a New Year’s Eve party across Berlin was a mistake, it turned out, as people have a tendency to throw live fireworks at your wheels.  Which is better than at your head.  It quickly emerged that the Silvester firework tradition is this:

1. Buy all the fireworks available in the city.  This is quite a lot, as Berlin’s ‘Disorganised Firework Display’ receives the full support of all shops selling fireworks.  Which seems to be all shops.  You can buy them with your kebab if you have loose change.

2. From about 10pm, find a space in the street (not so easy bearing in mind everyone else is doing the same thing across the city) and start letting them off.  Have enough to last three to four hours.  Don’t worry that some of them are really quite explosively big, or indeed that they’re not pointing upwards when they go off.  The walls of the surrounding blocks of flats tend to ‘duct’ most of them upwards eventually, and only a small proportion get snagged on windows and balconies causing them to enter buildings.

Having sounded terribly negative and Health’n'Safety about all of this, it was definitely a sight worth seeing.  People were letting off really substantial fireworks every few metres (with shops and restaurants joining in with their own street level displays) until within a few minutes there was a thick smog of gunpowder smoke filling the streets.  Apart from the odd moment of genuine fear when a firework bouncd off the balcony where we were standing, it was all quite exhilarating.  The mystery is why you don’t see more Berliners with the odd eye or ear missing.  I’ll look more closely the next time I’m out in daylight.

The only slight downside was that cycling home, the streets were a sea of (hopefully) spent fireworks and broken glass (Berliners rarely use plastic bottles, as you get money back on the glass ones, which get cleaned and reused, just like they used to with fizzy pop back home.  And milk bottles, come to think of it).  I consequently punctured my back tyre, and won’t be cycling for the next few days, as it began snowing early on yesterday, which is covering up all the broken glass.  Having said this, the forthcoming glass-filled-snowball fights will be no more dangerous than the firework display that preceded them.

A brief update for the curry minded amongst you, who may recall our initial disappointment at the curry situation.  We’ve so far found an OK curry takeaway, although still nothing like the UK (they can do hot, although not very hot, but somehow they don’t do spicy – the curries are a bit bland).  But what about Currywurst, that unique German culinary fusion of curry and sausage? 

The first couple were made along the following lines:

- deep fry a hot dog sausage

- slice it into bits and smother it, really absolutely swamp it, with almost-like-ketchup sauce

- liberally sprinkle curry powder over

- add chips to taste

The result, of course, is revolting.  But since those early experiences, they’ve been…  exactly the same.  We were kind of thinking that there was an ‘authentic’ currywurst out there – something with a subtle mix of quality wurst and aromatically spiced sauces. But no, the first one we had was as authentic. 

The problem is, we now love them.  We lust after them in much the same way as those ads pretended you should feel about Pot Noodle. They’re just dirty, and you want them.