Summer’s Here!

… or at least it is in Berliners’ minds.

Yesterday (sunday) the sun made a lengthy appearance, and by way of response, the temperature hauled itself grudgingly into the teens.  In other northern european cities this might result in you leaving your scarf and gloves at home, or perhaps a cheery exchange with a neighbour, along the lines that “spring is be just around the corner”.  Even in London, I imagine that everyone would be looking slightly less pissed off than is the norm.

Not so in Berlin. 

Pavement cafe tables (an all-year-round feature of most establishments) were packed.  The sort of people who own dogs kept on pieces of string were out in force in the park, without their shirts. (The people that is, not the dogs. Dogs don’t have shirts, especially in Berlin, where they definitely wouldn’t be seen dead in those tartan doggy coats that doggy people buy their beloved pets). 

And of course there’s the ice cream.

Berlin appears to be sort of powered by ice cream.  It’s not just a summer thing – I’ve seen people getting stuck into their favorite flavour in a snow storm.  Queues yesterday ran out of shops and down the streets, yet none of the vendors seemed to be running out.  They’d probably stocked up specially – it is late February after all.  Almost time to turn off the pavement heaters, and for annoying musicians to start playing panpipe and/or accordian based music at you in the street.

In short, it seems that Berlin’s population either believes itself erroneously to be a city on the mediteranean, or is simply wildly optimistic about the weather.  Perhaps it’s because in reality the summer is so short here, getting started twards the end of May, and usually gone by mid September.  The rest of the year is often characterised by a kind of ‘grey sky blanket’ which just lies on top of the city like, well, an enormous grey blanket.  In the sky.  So I can’t blame everyone for making the most of it when the sun decides to make a guest appearance.

Can’t stay, as I need to go and fix my bike.  I’m not entirely sure whether the rear tyre has a very slow puncture, or whether I’ve been gradually gaining weight since Christmas (I have a medical condition which requires that I take cheese cake orally three times a day).  So either it’s an inner tube repair, or I need to buy a heavier duty bike to support my increasing spread.

In partial response to the latter, we both got new trainers today (as in ’training shoes’ rather than ’personal trainers’ – it would be excessive to have two of those, or even one come to think of it).  Katie’s gone off to a yoga class tonight, and intends to start running this week.  I’ll join her soon, just as soon as, er, I’ve got rid of this cough that’s been troubling me. 

The Cold War returns

I’d recently come to assume that colds were something linked to being at work – they stopped when we stopped.  Until now that is.  I’ve got a horrible chesty cough with hot & cold running nose and am feeling very sorry for myself.  Doubly so because, well, we’re on holiday and it’s really annoying when you’re ill on holiday, albeit one of this extended length.

‘Enough, already!’ choruses everyone who has to go to work with a cold, or stay at home worrying about all the work they’re not doing.  I remember that.  Fair point.  So on to other things.

The 58th Berlinale ends this weekend, Berlin’s bewildering large film festival.  As we invariably miss everything at the London film festival, we thought we’d make the effort this time.

So we thought we’d avoid credit card charges by going along to our nearest kino and selecting tickets from the hundreds of films on offer.  But we hadn’t reckoned with the worst co-ordinated film catalogue known to man. 

The film ‘themes’ (documentary, shorts, etc) each had a separate colour coded part section in the catalogue, with film programme boards up in the cinema foyer showing what was still available.  This was also colour coded.  But not in the same colours.

Within the themes, the films were listed in a secret order; neither alphabetically, chronologically, or even by country.

So it was near impossible to pick something on the boards which hadn’t been crossed off, and cross reference it with the catalogue. Particularly as each time we did manage to pick a film, a lady came out and crossed it off.

After a while, we began to realise that nearly every film seemed to be about an abused peasant girl in 17th century China.  Or something similar.  Worthy themes all, but I’m fast becoming like my granny – always wondering why there wasn’t something ‘a bit more cheerful’ on.  And it wasn’t just us.  I watched as several people, exasperated, sat down on the floor to try and unlock the cryptic secrets of the film catalogue, chainsmoking as they did so*.

 *Which, as in the UK, is now banned in Berlin.  But Berliners seem to be taking a ‘flexible’ approach.

By the way, I’ve had a complaint about my other (architecture) blog, claiming that it needs ‘more pictures’.  Maybe so, but this blog has no pictures, and is still marvellous.  To head off the obvious response, I would point at that I don’t put pictures on here partly because 

a) it would interrupt the flow of the prose, preventing your imagination from going to work on my luminous word-pictures,

but mainly because

b) I cannot be arsed.  It’s really fiddly.

But to satiate this lunatic modern craze for looking at things, here’s a photo of the cinema in which the film confusion mentioned earlier took place (there’s an external view on my apparently less entertaining blog, at architectureinberlin.wordpress.com).  You can’t see the programme board, or the catalogue, so you’ll still have to use your celebrity-media-stunted imaginations. Enjoy.

What else?  Oh yes – part two of our Umwelt/campervan saga.  Just after I last posted, we were giving a friend a lift home, when we got flagged down at a police road block.  “HAVEN’T YOU GOT EYES?!?  DIDN’T YOU SEE THE SIGNS SAYING ‘UMWELT’, FOR WHICH YOUR VEHICLE HAS NO PERMIT STICKER??!!” the poilceman shouted at me. (He shouted in german, but his manner, gesticulations and my still very limited german meant that I understood).  I pretended to be an English tourist idiot (a role I’ve been working on for many months – I virtually live the character) and we sort of got away with it.

I say sort of, because we didn’t get fined or imprisoned, but we were forced to drive out of Berlin at that moment.  Meaning that we had to sneak back in via another route, fearful that we’d meet the same policeman, and the trick wouldn’t work twice.  I’m not yet comfortable with uniformed germans shouting at me.  Or indeed anyone shouting at me (in case the pevious statement offends any Prussian militarists).

Bye for now.

Jim.  (And Katie, who’s sitting on the sofa doing the Puzzler magazine. She sends hugs.)