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.

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.