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.

Remember, remember…

(and this is the second one) 

…the 5th of November, that’s what I’m currently missing. Not the date itself, obviously (they have November here, and similar numbers of days in each month) but the fireworks, although it has occurred to me that I have only the weakest grasp of what it all commemorates. At a house party the other night I tried to emlighten a man from Munich (foreshortened in the following account to ‘MFM’, for your greater reading comfort).

Me: A man tried to blow up Parliament, using, er, fireworks.

MFM: Why was that?

Me: I don’t know, I think he was trying to overthrow the government, but it went wrong and he was caught.

MFM: So there were no fireworks.

Me: No.

MFM: So what does it celebrate?

Me: A man not blowing up Parliament.

I went on to explain that the English always love a heroic failure, until it occurred to me that I may have missed the point. Must do some British history cramming.

Apart from fireworks, it’s been a lovely crisp cold winter’s day here – we walked along the canal earlier, which is beautiful. The Wall used to run along a part of it near our flat, and, since its removal, an area has been colonised by the sort of makeshift arts-centre-come-squat which apparently used to typify East Berlin after 1990, but is becoming increasingly rare. There’s a block of flats where the canal turns which have also survived the surrounding gentrification; it still has a blank wall of corrugated sheeting and bricked up windows where it faced directly across the canal from East to West. Luxury apartments within a year I’ll be bound, ‘Wall Vista’, ‘Stasi Heights’ or somesuch.

Pause for Thought

A couple of brief blog posts which I’ve only just got around to posting, due to the usual tedious problems with the interweb, which I’ll probably rant about soon, but not today.  

Just prior to our trip to Poland (Wrocslav) the other week, our campervan broke down. When I say ‘just prior’, I mean that for a while it’s been making a sort of hot steamy smell. This was obviously caused by something important and technical, so I decided to ignore it.

And when I say ‘broke down’, I mean that steam started coming out of the front, at which point I thought it best to take it to a garage.

Small local garages, assuming that this one is typical, seem to be tidier than their UK equivalent; each of the four or five mechanics had their own rack of shiny equipment. Perhaps they polish and clean when there’s a free moment. Anyhoo, I arrived at about ten past one to find the garage locked, with a sign directing me to ‘der Pauseraum’ (restroom). I was surprised to discover that the room in question contained not a grubby sink, jar of Nescafe and a girly calender dating from before the fall of the Wall, but five people seated round a table, sharing a proper meal. With a tablecloth. And not even a telly on, showing motor sport.

They were very helpful, but it was clear that they’d be remaining in that room enjoying their lunch until 2pm, if I’d like to wait. It seems to me that this is on balance a good thing. If I ever have some sort of job again in the future (rather than sliding into an unemployable state, rising every afternoon to stagger to the nearest café to scrounge a roll-up) I have decided that I too will enjoy a proper lunch. With a tablecloth.

Back at the subject of technical campervan type things, all went swimmingly once everyone had finished lunch, the only exceptions being

1. my not knowing the word for steam (Dampf) and

2. having to mime steam coming out of a radiator, and

3. the fact that the replacement radiator needed to be sent from the UK*

*Where it had in turn been imported from Japan. If you add to this the fact that our camper is a 2.5litre 4WD turbodiesel, you’d be forgiven for thinking that we’re not a very green couple. However, our carbon footprint is vastly reduced by the fact that our campervan remains stationary in a garage for as much time as it’s on a road, while we cycle round Berlin like the pair of trendies we are.

All We Hear Is (Radio Da Da)****

 (Written sunday 14th, posted 15th)

This morning was such a beautiful autumnal day that we were up at the crack of 11 (ish) and foresook the never-ending decorating to go up to our local flohmarkt (flea market). Whereas UK fleamarkets can tend to be a bit small with a lot of tat, Berlin flohmarkts are often huge and colossally full of tat. But they also have some top bargains – today’s acquired items as follows:

1. Two chairs, 25 euros each, got both for 35. The man wanted forty but we used our bargaining tactic #2 (for tactic #1, see item 3, below), namely: asking whether there is a bank near (knowing there isn’t) and demonstrating that our wallets only contain 35 euros, plus some small change, which we offer him for the sake of realism, but which he politely declines. Still, he was a nice man, and probably it was all just a front for an art project (often the way in Berlin) as he took pictures first of the chairs, then of us sitting on the chairs, explaining that he made a similar photgraphic record of all such transactions.

2. The one Chemical Brothers album* which I didn’t have, 6 euros. Actually not that much of a bargain as all music now free over the world wide interweb, but that lady in America got fined umpty-tumpty thousand dollars the other day for file sharing didn’t she, and the music industry has probably been watching me for years since I used to make all those compilation cassettes for friends. Plus I like having CDs. 3. Glass fronted cabinet, would only be beaten down from 70 euros to 65, but worth a try. Not half as good a bargain as the oak framed mirror we bought last week, using bargaining tactic #1**, where I feign disinterest bordering on distaste, K gives in and we both start to wander off, hoping for a consequent drop in price. Works best at the end of the day when they’re packing up, and where the item isn’t part of their normal wares. Result, 15 euro mirror down to 10, which is about £6. Possibly.We’re now back at the flat with our trophies, it’s mid-afternoon and the weather still glorious, so am writing this on the balcony rather than getting on with the matter in hand, which is, and will remain for a while yet, decorating.

As we’re so often stuck inside painting, rather than conversing freely in German with the locals as you’re probably expecting by now, we’ve tried tuning in to german radio to pick up a complete working knowledge of the lingo. With limited success on the following stations:

Radio Eins Berlin, and radio 88.8 (achtundachtzig-acht as it’s catchily known). Linguistic success rating; a bit. The latter has advertising, where we can mainly work out what’s going on, with the exception of a bizarre Fast Show/Chanel 9 type ad where a man shouts a lot followed by the last couple of bars of ‘Old MacDonald’ – the bit that goes ‘Ee-Ey-Ee-Ey-Oh’. They also have an unfamiliar mix of BBC Radio 1 style music interspersed with impossibly in-depth sounding interviews about interest rates. The depth (or pomposity) continues into the musician interviews, where I swear to god an answer by local star Helen Scneider to what seemed to be the question ‘tell us about your influences’ met with her response “Elvis Presley, die Beatles, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Thomas Mann, Goethe, …”. She forgot to shoehorn in Shakespeare. And the Krankies.All other stations except the World Service, which is in English anyway. Mainly because without music and/or advertising to give us, we have not a clue what’s going on. (Radio DJs’ tone and pacing is the same the world over; you can tell who is the equivalent of Terry Wogan, and who’s the genetically-stunted-but-has-a-very-attractive-a-girlfriend-due-to-his-newfound-status-and-wealth equivalent of Chris Moyles/Evans).

(By-the-bye, is me writing with endless brackets and footnotes annoying, as I can try to stop if our reader would prefer. Please let us know!)

The sun’s now heading for the horizon, or at least the roofline of the buildings across the canal, so I shall say bye and go and paint some door frames.

Bye!

Jim (and Katie, who is here, but reading a book).

*As now seems traditional, I’m footnoting music info, as apparently*** this can be dull. As opposed to the stream of otherwise fascinating information that I’m otherwise imparting. The album in question was Dig Your Own Hole, the boys’ second Long Player, featuring the vocal talents of Beth Orton, as well as the irritating whine of Liam Gallagher. But you can’t have everything, I suppose.

**I didn’t admit this to our chum Rhonagh who was with us at the time, but this was a bargaining tactic which started as truth-based (I didn’t like the mirror at first glance) but then it grew on me as K was examining it, then I thought I’d try it as a tactic. Which worked. Rho seemed so impressed that I didn’t like to curb her enthusiasm by admitting it was only half a tactic. Sorry Rho.

***When I say ‘apparently’ I usually mean this is what I think Katie would say, if asked.

****This is the last footnote, but first one to come up, as I added it last, but couldn’t be arsed to go through and change the other ones. It’s an arcane pun referring obviously to the Queen hit but I’m guessing less obviously to a German band called Trio who had a UK hit donkey’s years ago with a record called ‘Da Da Da’.