My street in Berlin, Fehrbelliner Straße, runs for the best part of a kilometer between Anklamer Straße at the top and Schönhauser Allee at the bottom. It is pronounced Fairbulleener Straw-suh, as if it was the street of fair Berliners, but alas this is not an accurate literal translation. There are some fine buildings, their windows adorned with columns and the various plaster accoutrements of old Europe — curlicues, bearded or wreathed heads, flowers — but there are more plain facades, although often in cheery sherbert shades. A few of the dun-colored, pebble dash boxes that scream East Berlin also remain, as does graffiti. I love the doors the most, especially the enormous double ones that open onto interior courtyards and close with a solid thunk.
Every weekday I walk the length of it twice, from home on one end to work on the other and back again. I also eat, drink, and shop on it. It is a far cry from the Cotswolds, but Fehrbelliner Straße is a village in its own way.
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At the top end, half a block from our apartment and the on part of the street we frequent least, there is always an armed policeman standing guard outside one of the buildings. When we first moved in I approached him and asked in my most polite inquisitive voice if this was a police station.
“No,” the policeman answered and looked away, making it clear that no explanation for his presence would be offered.
Later at work a German colleague who lives nearby explained to me that the building was a Jewish school. I was taken aback that a school would have an armed police presence, but he explained that this was standard practice for Jewish schools and synagogues. I asked if there were specific threats, to which he replied, “No, but given our history it would just be really bad if something happened.”
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As far away from our flat as the Jewish school but in the opposite direction is Remshardt. It is the atelier of a wedding dressmaker, a man who sometimes sits at his desk drawing with his African Grey parrot perched on his shoulder. Each week he changes the dress featured in the window, lately favoring flowing Grecian things that remind me of Grace Kelly’s poolside cover-up in High Society. My favorite, though, was a bulbous heap of ivory taffeta adorned with an outsize beetle brooch.
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On the corner, at the busy intersection with Veteranstraße, is Weinerei Forum, known around my house simply as Corner Wine Bar. (Due to husband’s limited memory, most things around our house have a different, generic sounding shorthand, like “Frenchie” for Café Fleury.) I’ve written about Corner Wine Bar before here; suffice to say it continues to be an extension of our living room, as does the pizzeria, La Foccaceria, across the street.
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A little further down is ZweiTrad, a trio of bicycling boutiques that dominate the block. Berlin is a bicycle-crazy city, and this place is often as busy as a bustling bistro on a Saturday. This is where I bought my beloved Pashley from the elegant owner. He wears wire-rimmed specs and always has a scarf knotted around his throat, a Frenchman trapped in a German’s body. There is some small irony in my acquisition of the Pashley in Berlin given it was made in Stratford-upon-Avon, about forty miles north of our Cotswold town. But the Germans favor Dutch bikes with annoying pedal brakes, and so I reckon I had no choice but to go for the British-built beauty.
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Just beyond the cycle shop is Schwarze Pumpe (the black pump). It is one of the first places we ate dinner in our neighborhood and we continue to be regular guests for the käsespätzle and lack of pretension.~
This is our grocery store, Kaiser’s. I imagine I will leave Berlin without ever understanding why their logo looks like a genie’s lantern.
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Beyond the playground, two of the best coffee shops in Berlin have clustered together. Kristiania Espressobar, owned by a Norwegian, and Antipodes, owned by a couple from Wellington. The inside of Kristiania looks a little like a mid-century doctor’s waiting room, but on balance I favor Antipodes because of the passion fruit yo yos, an Oreo for grown-ups.
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Almost opposite the coffee cluster is the site of a former Jewish school. I’ve written about it before too, a reminder of a very sad chapter in Germany’s history. It is marked out by a subtle plexiglass plaque rather than a policeman; the only thing left to guard is the memory of the children and their teachers.
That’s right, I’ve just coined a new term: rarking, as in rural parking. I thought it was in the British spirit of things, like the way they call walking in the countryside “rambling.” I noticed this British phenomenon — rarking, not giving things that already have names new special names — again today when we were out riding our bikes around the ‘Wolds. On a little country lane near Yanworth we passed a couple staring into the middle distance from inside their parked car. I like to think they were faking this zen poise having been wildly necking moments before they noticed someone was coming, but somehow I doubt it.
Such rarking seems to be a bona fide hobby of a certain demographic of Brits, mostly nearly-but-not-quite-elderly drivers of Ford Mondeos. Sometimes the rarkers are eating a sandwich or even an ice cream, but mostly they just sit. They could easily leave the car and go for a walk or even, gasp, lay a blanket outside and enjoy the fresh air. But no, they prefer sitting in the car, as if the steel is some sort of protective shield between them and the possibility of a little too much stimulation brought on by the sheer beauty of the countryside. I want to stop and tell them that stiff upper lip works best when tolerating pain rather than experiencing pleasure, but I just ride on by.
Golden Lizzie. She overlooks a roundabout in the Tiergarten in Berlin and is possibly the only thing husband loves about this city. She also features in the opening scene of Wings of Desire, an angel resting on her shoulder eavesdropping on the humans below.
Yesterday I was minding my own business, reading the paper and eating a chicken schwarma at a falafel joint on Torstraße when in walked an angel of sorts. He was young and looked tired, like an overworked angel might. He was dressed in a leopard print Addidas jacket with what appeared to be three carefully hand-cut vertical vents in the back, a pair of gray, abstract patterned, mock-camoflauge trousers, and white leather high tops…with wings: big, chunky, leather wings protruding off his ankles. I had just worked up the courage to ask him if I could take his photo when he slipped out the door, presumably to attend to his angelic duties.
Say cheese! This cheery Checkpoint Charlie family portrait was the crowning glory of my entry—a slideshow on the Berlin Wall—in the 1982 Lee County Media Show. Despite the unfair advantage of my on-location shots of the Wall, some kid who was actually talented and had created a claymation Super 8 film won.
The Checkpoint Charlie snap comes courtesy of a disk of images my dad just mailed me. They are all from our Berlin trip in the summer of ’82, and there are some interesting comparisons with how things look now. The Wall is of course gone—in fact it’s pretty hard to find any sign of it except for a few pieces still on display at Potsdamer Platz and the double-row of cobblestones that traces its route in some parts of the city (Berliners, understandably, wanted it this way).
The Reichstag looks shockingly drab pre-Norman Foster’s glass dome.
And the Wall and watchtower-lined Spree gives new meaning to Berliners’ current fondness for pop-up riverside beach clubs. Then…
and now…
But if I’m honest, my favorite part of looking at these pictures is admiring the fashions my family was wearing at the time. My mom is rocking a pair of oversized transluscent-framed sunglasses, my dad has a whiff of Burt Reynolds about him, and my sister and I are perpetually dressed in Izod shirts with high-waisted jeans. My sister also favors a lavender satin bomber jacket with ice cream cone pin that I remember coveting. It was much cooler than the stupid cardigans my mother bought for me. Here are the best of those pics.
The Summer 2011 issue of ExBerliner features “Berlin’s most original tours.” While the Trabi Safari sounds fun—an hour behind the wheel of a Trabant, East Germany’s very inadequate answer to the Volkswagen—I’m pretty sure husband and I have this tour guide thing down pat after two consecutive weekends of hosting guests here in Berlin. The weather was abominable for the first—coldest day in July on record and wet to boot—and blazing sunshine for the second. Neither stopped us from dragging our visitors out on bicycles, the transportation method of choice here in Berlin. By now my Pashley has traversed every square inch of path in the Tiergarten and can practically lock itself up outside Der Schleusenkrug biergarten (also, coincidentally, a stop on the Fat Tire Bike Tour). It also knows to slow down when it passes a spot favored by Berlin’s band of nude sunbathers. My prudish gawking over the weekend prompted one FKKer—yep, they have an acronym which comes from a name that translates into Free Body Culture—to wave at my guests and me from his spot on the lawn. I wish I would have waved back, but instead I just bashfully pedaled away.
I have also been hungover in the Bauhaus Archive (not, as one guest pointed out with some disappointment, the Bauhaus, which is in nearby Dessau), climbed the Norman Foster dome atop the Reichstag, cruised the Spree, forced currywurst on our unsuspecting guests, and visited the DDR Museum and inhaled its whiff of Ostalgia, i.e., snapped a tasteless picture of husband posing in situ on the loo in the authentic recreation of a DDR-era flat. For eating and drinking we mostly stuck to our little enclave on the border of Mitte and Prenzlauerberg, but there was one new discovery along the way. Clärchens Ballhaus is on Auguststraße, a street filled with art galleries, which along with its squatter-chic looking courtyard is why I assumed it was some sort of epicenter of boho. As the name would imply it turned out to be a ballroom, dating all the way back to 1913 and hosting a tea dance that very afternoon. We watched the dancers for awhile and admired the lost-in-time interior, which looked something like the lovechild of the Kibbitz Room and the Derby, then enjoyed a drink in the garden.
In the end we deposited our guests into the charmless arms of Schönefeld Airport in various states—suffering from a cold, hungover, saddle sore, and/or satiated. At least we can say none left Berlin unchanged.
…By which I mean John Lydon and not some euphemism for my ill-tempered husband. It started more than ten years ago in Santa Monica when I unwittingly bummed a cigarette off of him outside a now defunct record shop on Main Street. Husband put me up to it— I don’t even smoke. We were in the early days of our courtship and, despite the fact that I had no idea who I was asking for a cigarette, husband was mightily impressed with my chutzpah. And Mr. Lydon did in fact oblige me with a cigarette.
Now news has arrived through the Twittersphere that Mr. Rotten has returned, this time to a room in the inn just up the road from our cottage in the Cotswolds. It seems he is recording at the studio of our local rock star and will be in residence for the next two weeks. We are scheduled for a return visit at the tail end of his stay, and no doubt husband will be busy cultivating opportunities for another chance encounter. Guess I better take up smoking in preparation.
For several years now I have held the view that London is only for the very young or the very rich, and that therefore Samuel Johnson of the “…when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life” quip was full of crap. One place I never expected to tire of, however, was Paris. Thanks to the largess of a friend of my sister’s with digs on the Île Saint Louis and the ease of traveling by Eurostar, Paris has been a favorite weekend destination for husband and me since we moved to England. And we could think of no better place to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary last week.
But things did not begin well. We had flown to England for a few nights in the Cotswolds before heading to Paris, and on that first Saturday we drank too much wine at a sardine BBQ at the wine bar. I awoke on Sunday to find ten strips of raffle tickets in my purse that I only dimly remembered purchasing and had no idea in aid of what (this being the season of village fêtes, the possibilities were endless). Unfortunately this was not the worst after-effect of such indulgence; that was left for Monday when the two-day-deferred-morosity that is the mark of such excess set in on our train ride to Paris.
Upon our arrival the first thing we noticed was the traffic. The midday taxi ride from Gare du Nord to the center of Paris was painstaking, with every hundred-meter progression feeling like a major victory. Once on the the Île Saint Louis we observed the crush of humanity outside Notre Dame and remembered it was June and American kids were out of school. We pressed on, literally, stretching our legs on a jog to the Tuilieries and back. In the early evening we headed to our favorite café in the Marais for a glass of wine. The people watching from a pavement table was still the best in the world, but the man hawking jasmine garlands was more aggressive than usual. This was nothing compared to the affront I felt when we sat down for dinner at the bistro next door and discovered our waiter was Irish. Was it too much to ask to be treated rudely by an old French waiter for your anniversary?
The week continued and so did the list of irritations. The workers at the Musee d’Orsay went on strike closing the museum for the day. There was a hair in my turkey club at our favorite lunch spot on the Rue Cler. It rained. I got bit by mosquitoes. The stench of urine on the cobbled banks of the Seine marred our morning jogs. Of course there were pleasures—aside from the turkey club we ate and drank very well—but even those were suspicious given my ill-timed decision to pick up my reading of Down and Out in Paris and London on our last day. In it Orwell expounds on his life as a plongeur in the bowels of a Paris hotel kitchen; I can only the hope the filth has subsided since he worked in the city in 1928. By the time we boarded Eurostar back to London, the mutual feeling was of relief.
Yesterday the Cotswolds had its first true summer day, and we were there. We rode our bikes out through Hampnett and Turkedean, then Notgrove and Guiting Power, stopping for lunch at the Black Horse in Naunton, weaving through the day trippers in Lower Slaughter and Bourton-on-the-Water before heading back through Farmington and home. Poppies rouged the apple-green cheeks of the hills, and fields of linseed blooms in a sheer lavender hue provided the dose of Impressionism we had failed to get from the Orsay. It was by far the best day of the vacation.
Reading back over this I am aware I sound like a spoiled brat complaining about getting to spend a week in Paris. On the contrary, I count my lucky stars every day that I have the kind of life right now that affords me such whims. I know that one day before long we will be back in the U.S. where if we are lucky we will be employed, and such employment will be rewarded with a paltry ten days vacation in a currency that doesn’t go far in Europe. When we decided to go to Paris for our anniversary it was precisely because we were thinking we won’t always have Paris. What I forgot is that, God willing, we’ll always have the Cotswolds.
When we first moved to Berlin I remember another ex-pat telling us he liked living here because it was “living history.” He was referring to the relatively recent history of the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, and indeed in our former East Berlin neighborhood there is plenty of interest. Mauerpark, a public park that is formerly part of the Berlin Wall and its Death Strip, is only a kilometer away. But even closer there are reminders of an earlier tragic chapter in Germany’s history.
Today I noticed the sign in the top picture on the outside of the building shown in the bottom picture. It is at the south end of my street, about three blocks from where I live, and I walk by it every day on my way to work. Roughly translated it says that between 1910-42 this building housed a Jewish nursery, kindergarten and children’s home. And between 1941-44, at least forty-nine of those children and staff were killed in concentration camps. That led me to this website, which tells the story: http://www.inge-franken.de/fehrbelliner92/introduction. The author, Inge Franken, is indeed ensuring all parts of this neighborhood’s history stay alive.
So we finally took our first roadtrip. Considering the Mercedes that husband deemed to be so essential to our German experience wasn’t driven for the entire month of May, it was about time. We chose Hamburg, only about two-hundred and fifty kilometers from Berlin and more or less a straight shot along the autobahn. It’s also a place we know well; husband used to take frequent work trips there and we’ve been there for the Christmas markets the last three years in a row. This includes last December when it was a tack-on to our Berlin “decision trip” and therefore the site of much agonizing, prolonged unexpectedly for three days while Heathrow tried to figure out how to clear six inches of snow from its runways. In other words, we needed to redeem Hamburg.
The journey there was a snap: all blue skies and clear roads along a mostly flat expanse of agricultural land. (The only industry I saw was a Dr. Oetker factory, a company that makes things like frozen pizzas and cake mix. It reminded me of another German brand named after a doctor, Dr. Loosen Riesling. I like how having “Dr.” in the label somehow makes eating pizza and drinking wine seem marginally healthy, like how the British call some cookies “digestives.”) We soon arrived at the Nippon hotel, our normal crash pad and only a few blocks away from the lake, the Aussenalster. We continued as creatures of habit, making our way to our first lakeside beer stop on hotel-lent beach cruiser Schwinns. For our next beer stop we broke ways with the past and explored the River Elbe-adjacent neighborhood of Altona. There’s an historic fish market here, but that starts to wind down at around 7AM so we had to settle for an Irish bar. Doubling back on ourselves we turned into what seemed like a parking lot along the river to investigate the thatched roofs we could see peaking out from behind concrete buildings. Jackpot: StrandPauli beach club, complete with sand, lounge chairs, and piña coladas. It was a little bit of Key West on the docks.
So far this roadtrip thing was working out. I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening dropping suggestions for future outings on the autobahn — Saxony Switzerland, Dresden, Prague, Copehagen via Rostock, Bavaria! — into casual conversation without so much as a hint of pushback from husband. Maybe it was just the loveliness of our waterside dinner at Harms & Schacht, a favorite of ours and, I am glad to say, successfully “redeemed” with new good memories after being the official agonizing site over Berlin back in December.
The next morning we took a jog around the Aussenlaster followed by bagels and orange juice at elbgold (home of the best veggie cream cheese ever, E. coli be damned), then headed back to Berlin. Traffic was, well, as you would expect for a Sunday afternoon on the last day of a long holiday weekend. What took us two and a half hours on the way out took four on the way back. Somewhere on a self-styled detour around Neuruppin husband snapped and insisted Germany was “one of the worst countries on the planet.” When I suggested this may be veering towards hyperbole and that I could think of a few other war-torn examples that may give Germany a run for its money in achieving this title, husband accused me of unreasonably defending Germany, like I was “born here or something.” Back in Berlin he blew off steam yelling at Roger Federer in the French Open final and posting things on Facebook about the “lie” of German efficiency. So much for my dreams of a life auf der Autobahn.
I am just back after a week’s vacation in the Cotswolds. If it seems to you like I am always on vacation, well, it seems that way to me too. I am now living in the most generous of European countries when it comes to vacation days and get a whopping thirty per year. (Note to US companies: neither your company nor the economy will collapse if you let people off for more than ten days every year.) It’s a good thing too because most my vacations in recent memory have been anything but relaxing.
Last week’s started with a funeral. Admittedly it was a funeral that was followed by a rather expectional party of a wake, but still a funeral. And up until the minute we walked through the doors of the church in Bibury, husband was furiously tapping away at his BlackBerry in negotiations over two potential job offers, tense negotiations that would stretch well into the week.
There was a lot at stake. After three months in Berlin husband had exhausted his interest in the Betty Draper life of leisure or, as he had taken to describing it, being a work-shy fop. (Mastering the art of frittata making had been gratifying at first, but failed to sustain him.) He decided he would have to get a job and spent the month of May in the Cotswolds doing interviews in the UK while simultaneously turning up the heat on a potential job in Berlin that had been hanging around without a formal offer for far too long. Neither of us was particularly thrilled about the idea of commuting back and forth between Berlin and the Cotwolds each weekend to be together, and the propsect hung over us like a dark cloud all week.
We have a habit of timing career crises to coincide with our vacations. A few years ago we spent a weekend in Venice intended to celebrate our wedding anniversary but instead spent it agonizing over whether or not husband should change jobs, agony tempered somewhat by prosecco and cicchetti consumption. A year or so later there was angst in Breisach am Rhein over the decision to take that job, then more of the same last Christmas in L.A. over the decision to move to Berlin for my job. At the end of this vacation, though, there was good news. The Berlin job offer came through and husband started today. Next month we go to Paris to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. Let’s hope it’s angst and crisis-free.