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.)

It’s Snowing!

Just a short post to say

IT’S SNOWING!

And not in a terribly English way either.  It started with a thunderstorm with rain, which then turned to sleet, which has now turned to proper snow.  Great big white flakes - it’s definitely, verifiably snow.   We’ve just cycled back in it, from a local cafe.  We’d popped out to do some shopping and it was a lovely sunny morning, but then it went a bit rainy and we agreed on the need for a second breakfast.  We often have this need.

You might be thinking “yes, but Jim and Katie didn’t grow up in Australia or wherever.  They’ve seen snow plenty of times.”  True, but…

a) unlike globally warming London, where it hasn’t snowed ‘properly’ for ages, this snow is quite early in the winter and looks like it means business.  Berliners have recently delighted in telling us how cold it might get, and that the other year the snow hung around till April

b) because we’re not working, life has become real again.  All the stuff that just used to be peripheral to work is now noticeable.  If it snowed in London, I used to think “pooh, I’ve got to go to work in this.”  Here, I’m thinking “hoorah, I can go and play in this!” Although obviously both of us will be wrapping up warmly in sensible clothing and drinking lots of warm drinks*.

Plus the fact that it’s saturday afternoon, and seems just the right moment for such a thing to happen.  We’ve just finished the first week of a three week intensive German course (as in the language, not a course for becoming an intensive German, although we’ve met some) which made today feel like a proper weekend for the first time in ages.

The course, by the way, is quite good, although everyone on it is considerably younger than us.  Not quite as young as teenage, but still of an age where thay sit and giggle and flirt together, and mainly want to know every possible German swearword.  Actually, I want to know this too, but as an adult (or at least as a person disguised as a 37 year old) it seems inapropriate to ask this of our new friends here.  Don’t worry, I will ask in due course, then publish a table of filth here on the blog.

*Well, Gluhwein at least.  This is German mulled wine, for those not in the know. 

Cigarettes & Alcohol. And washing machines.

Another much delayed blog, in large part due to the combination of much serious decorating and internet access continuing to be only available to me via the purchase of coffee and cake in the café next door. (Oh alright, I don’t actually have to buy the cake, but I see it as supporting the local economy, providing much needed employment for cake workers).Interestingly, while seated with laptop in the aforementioned bar recently, we were surprised to learn that smoking in enclosed public space is due to be banned from January. It would be equally believable if you heard that smoking was to be made compulsory in public places, in order to support the general Berlin bar ambience. The bar owner went on to tell us, through the ever-present cigarette fug, that she’d prefer us not to use the laptop so close to the bar, as the staff were worried about the risk of electro-smog. Cough.

Anyhoo, the trance-like state induced by ten days of decorating and trips to Ikea was thankfully interrupted by the arrival of our chum Rhonagh, our first visitor from the Blighty. Rho has more energy than both of us combined, resulting in much less decorating and much more dancing till 5am, which is nice. For those who don’t know her, she’s the only person I can think of who can describe herself (as we headed off for a big night out*) as “demented with excitement”, and be convincing. If I described myself as “demented with excitement“, people would respond by saying “oh well if you don’t want to go out, just fuck off then”.

Prior to her arrival, we had admittedly been going a bit stir crazy, with our days comprising entirely:

1. Decorating

2. Visits to IKEA, and to Bauhaus (a bit like B&Q, not the Bauhaus, unfortunately)

3. Visits to the middle of nowhere, to buy second hand items for our flat, particularly important as this is the same flat in which we still have no furniture.  Our own furniture is in a warehouse somewhere in the UK, from where the company that’s failing to deliver it gives us regular updates. “Hello, Mr Hudson? I can confirm that your furniture has not moved an inch today.”

Would we perceive Berlin as being that different from London if we had similar jobs and spending power here? Is London ringed by places unknown to us, beyond the ‘burbs, where shell suited men store and repair ziggurat towers of washing machines, stacked high and dust-laden in the gloom of vast derelict industrial buildings? I’m guessing not, but there certainly is around Berlin.

We know about the existence of such places because in our new Berlin lives, John Lewis and its German KaDaWe equivalent are no longer a financial option for our domestic appliance needs, so we’ve taken to the secret world of Berlin’s small ads with a vengeance.

So far, we’ve successfully bought a wardrobe (in pieces), from a shed in the middle of nowhere, and a washing machine, from a shed about twenty km beyond the middle of nowhere.  I was surprised to discover that beyond the middle of nowhere is not somewhere, but more nowhere.

Anyway, enough of my wittering.  Not missing much about London, because autumn here by our tree lined canal is beautiful, and cycling about (even to Bauhaus) makes us feel like we’re living some fantasy life.  Which we are.  But I am missing all our friends back home, so come and visit soon – we do good scrambled eggs.

*The big night out in question was 2ManyDJs/Soulwax, in case you’re of a dance music persuasion, at a club which occupies the tail end of the last major remaining bit of the Berlin wall. They were jolly good, and I believe are highly thought of by young folk, producing as they do some storming indie-electro-clash moments of the highest order.

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.

Guten Tag aus Berlin!

Welcome to Jim and Katie’s Blog thingy; part of that fine tradition of online vanity publishing-come-round robins, to be read by a steadily decreasing number of friends, who will eventually only pretend to have read it.

Predictably enough, the text herein will be written mainly by me (Jim) with Katie taking a sort of editorial role, adding corrections or denunciations when my description of events departs entirely from reality. Pictures and stuff to come shortly, in the meantime you’ll have to make do with the rather sombre backdrop we’ve selected. On the plus side, it uses less energy on your screen than a white one, apparently.

Why the obscure Blog title, you wonder? It’s a literal translation of Kreuzburg (the area of Berlin we’re living in) – the sort of literal translation you have to put up with when you can barely string a sentence together in German and have to rely on babelfish.altavista.com.

By way of example, it translates the instructions from my newly aquired German SIM card thus:

“Secure yourselves together can when loading bonus minutes! A friend to a friend can, even then Germany, for a loading of 15C or more can receive you additionally bonus minute that, which can you telephone it freely of charge of friends and too other friends Germany far within 30 days then.”

For the avoidance of doubt, our blog has no connection with the (slightly) similarly named Brokeback Mountain Chronicle, the weekly publication serving the married gay cowboy community.

So what news from Berlin? The first couple of weeks have flown by, mainly because we’ve been flat hunting – our current lodgings are temporary till the 8th September. Not quite as easy as we’d thought, but we’ve bagged a good one we think; an old fashioned second floor flat overlooking the river, with easy access to local cake shops, ice cream parlours, bars, cafés and other essential local amenities. We (hopefully) move in on the 20th September – the gap in between will be filled with a spot of camping action and a quick trip home to blighty for supplies of Marmite.

We had our first ‘big’ night out last night – a literally underground club with a ‘variable’ music policy ranging from quite cool hip hop to, er, what sounded like Russian folk music. Anyhoo, we’re currently recovering from an early morning return (I know, it’s a wednesday night, but we’re on holiday) – Katie is lying in a foetal position demanding paracetamol and a fry up.

Finally, some FAQ’s:

You both headed off weeks ago. Have you only just got there?

We spent quite a lot of time cruising around the UK, and since finally arriving in Berlin about two weeks ago, have not been arsed to do much, not even write a blog.

How’s your German coming along?

Our German remains largely nonexistent. As suspected, so many people speak English, and speak it so well, that’s it’s difficult to get any practice. It’s become an unexpected thrill when someone answers “nein” in response to my hopeful sounding “er, sprechen Sie English?” one liner. Also see comments on translation, above.

Are you eating properly?

On Sundays, breakfast begins at 11am (earliest) through to 5pm-ish. These hours are also observed Monday to Saturday. How then can you tell it’s Sunday? Because everything is shut. Except anywhere serving breakfast, obviously.

Weather?

The weather so far has been patchy but generally good. What’s most important however is that it’s been better than the UK, and furthermore you’ve probably been at work during any sunny spells you have had. Come to think of it, shouldn’t you be at work now, rather than reading this?

I probably won’t bother, but if I did decide to contact you?

We’ve got ourselves one of these new-fangled Skype phones (telephony over internet) so you can call us when we’re on line, or leave a message when we’re not, on the following number:

020 8123 8341

We’ve chosen a London code, so call costs will be as if you were calling us in London. If, like us, you live at the cutting edge and have Skype, just ‘Skype’ us at jimnkatie, which is absolutely free. Whatever will they think of next?

K will keep her 0794 116 9017 number when in the UK, but we’ve both now got German mobiles:

Jim – 00 49 1577 682 7829
Katie – 00 49 1577 681 0739

Best not to ring these mobiles unless it’s urgent, and you are able to extend your mortgage easily. Also, make sure you get the permission of the person who pays the phone bill, unless you’re calling on your employer’s phone, obviously.

Email still jimnkatie@gmail.com

Tschuss!

Jim & Katie

PS this post written on 29th August, but moved to a new website on 31st.