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.)

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.