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Berlin

Berlin

Mercedes and Me

Posted on February 25, 2011

Yesterday was my thirty-ninth birthday, and I gave myself a Mercedes.

Not really.  I mean, I did get a Mercedes yesterday, but the fact that it arrived on my birthday was pure coincidence, as is the fact that the license plate bears both my initials and those for body odor.  A company car is a perq of the job and while I would have been happy to take the cash allowance (seeing as I live a ten-minute walk from the office and Berlin has some of the best public transport in the world), a large German automotive experience on which to traverse the autobahns was part of the Faustian bargain I made with husband in order to persuade him to move to Berlin. And thus a large, charcoal grey, slightly menacing-looking station wagon is now parked on the cobbled street in front of our apartment.

But my relationship with Mercedes Benz begins way before yesterday.  It goes back as far as I can remember to the almost mythical status it held in my childhood household thanks to my mother’s coveting of a two-seater, red Mercedes convertible.  It was an impossibly glamorous object of desire, made even more so against the backdrop of our staid suburban track-house neighborhood.  She and my father upgraded out of that neighborhood to one with, well, bigger track houses shortly after my sister and I left home, but it took her until just a few years ago to finally get that little red convertible.  Perplexingly, she chose a Lexus.  It reminded me of how growing up I wanted more than anything to pierce my ears.  My parents’ rule, though, was that I was not allowed until I was sixteen.  Then when I finally did turn sixteen, I decided not to pierce them.  I guess it was my way of pretending I had been in control all along.  To this day, they’re still not pierced.

My second run in with a Mercedes came when I was first living in Los Angeles.  I had lent money to my then boyfriend, who was having trouble paying me back.  He offered to give me his 1960s Mercedes convertible to pay off the loan. It was Grace Kelly incarnate in a car: navy blue with tan leather interior and round headlights. The catch was that it didn’t start. And I was so mad at him for being irresponsible with money that at the time it just seemed like he was trying to pawn me off with a broke-down car.  I insisted he pay me back in cash. Penny wise and pound foolish is a phrase that comes to mind.

It only took me about fifteen more years to finally get my own Mercedes.  If my mother ever comes to visit in Berlin I’ll have to let her drive it.  Maybe she can take me to get my ears pierced.

Berlin

The Corner Bar

Posted on February 18, 2011

We have a corner wine bar in Berlin.  It has a name on a little sign outside, but I don’t know what it is because the moniker “boho wine bar” has stuck in my household.  It is as much a coffee shop as a wine bar, but we drink wine there more than coffee, usually Sylvaner or Riesling.  It also sells soup, which you serve yourself from two urns that are either opposite the bar or on the enormous curvy dark-wood buffet in the back room.  Next to the cash register — a porcelain bowl filled with coins pinning down a stack of bills —  there is a plate of sandwiches on little round rolls and sesame-seed sprinkled croissants.  An enormous cherry clafoutis reliably spills out over a piece of parchment next to the sandwiches.  So far nothing I’ve tried has cost more than €2.50.

Whether your glass of wine costs €2.00 or €2.50 seems to depend on who is working, who is ordering, and how many glasses that person has ordered.  The bartender/barista with the long curly locks pulled back into a ponytail who plays bad South American music, for example, is more generous with husband than me.

The interior of boho wine bar is lined with a wall of settees in alternating shades of wine-colored and seafoam green velvet, interspersed with mid-century armchairs, and lit from beneath mustard-yellow floral lampshades.  In other words, it’s a study in DDR vintage.  Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, out she came through the swinging, graffiti-covered kitchen door.  She was middle-aged, blonde, compact and wearing a shiny gold bomber jacket, black pleather mini skirt, green tights, leg warmers and faux running shoes — a Berlin-punked Sandy Duncan à la Peter Pan.  She is, I can only reason, responsible for that cherry clafoutis.

Over the weekend we finally ventured a little further afield than our corner bar, into Prenzlauer Berg proper where the Kollwitzplatz farmers’ market was in full swing.  It’s the kind of market where you can get a currywurst with pomme frittes and truffle mayo accompanied by a glass of pink prosecco along with your fruit and veg, and we did.  It was a freezing day with a searing wintry sun in a blue sky, and as we wandered along the gentrified, cobbled streets it was hard to avoid comparisons to Paris.

At Café Anna Blum the waitress look confused when we tried to order a mimosa, then a buck’s fizz, and finally champagne and orange juice.  But she obliged, serving it in two tall glasses with bendy pink straws.  I believe it was there on the heated patio with café-provided red fleece lap blankets that we committed the blasphemy of saying that this was better than the Rue Cler and the Rue Vieille du Temple combined.  In his predictable grass-is-always-greener way, husband then began to lament that we didn’t get an apartment in this neighborhood.  In my predictable rationalizing-optimist way I emphasized we were only a ten-minute walk away.  Even he couldn’t argue when I made the point that for all its yummy mummies and tapas bars, there are no DDR Peter Pans in this neighborhood.

Random

Adventures in Showering

Posted on February 5, 2011

In our first week in Berlin we have discovered many of the wonders of the city. There is the impaled UFO of a television tower in Alexanderplatz, the classical buildings of the museum quarter, the majestic Brandenburg Gate, the glass dome of the Bundestag, and the Central Park-like expanse of the Tiergarten, not to mention the basement food hall of the Galeries Lafayette (a surprise find by husband). But the thing I’ve been most fascinated by is much more local, inside our apartment as a matter of fact: our shower.

Like the television tower, our shower manages to look retro and futuristic at the same time. It could easily pass for a prop on Star Trek, especially when the miniature recessed ceiling lights are on (also convenient for use as a bathroom night light). Inside there are three knobs that seem to control from which direction the water shoots at you. My favorite is a combination of the removable shower head and ankle-height jets. Husband prefers the overhead experience, which is a bit too waterboardy for me. There are also two digital control panels with fourteen buttons each, most of which I am too scared to press despite the illustrations attempting to communicate what each is for. My favorite shows an adult stick figure standing next to a child. Bathing with your child is undoubtedly very continental, but the American prude in me refers to this as the pedophile setting. While we’re on disturbing subjects I’ll mention the coiled up length of blue rubber hose.  The accompanying illustrated warning looks like Loony Tunes’ language for speed: horizontal lines with a poof at the end that appear as the Roadrunner leaves Wile E. Coyote in the dust.

Husband did figure out what to press to make the jets undulate up and down your body in succession — an unsettling but not unpleasant experience — but so far neither of us have figured out how to work the high tap that pours into a shallow u-shaped shelf. There’s a bench underneath where apparently you sit until the shelf is filled and then tips over your head. Never mind exploring Berlin, there’s something to look forward to without leaving the house.

Berlin

Wanting to Want to Go

Posted on January 30, 2011

I had envisioned spending January posting wistful entries about the Cotswolds before my attention turns to Berlin on these pages, but I haven’t posted anything in over a month.  This is partly because it doesn’t really feel like we are leaving and so I am not in the frame of mind to wax lyrical.  We are, after all, moving into a furnished apartment in Berlin, and our cottage will remain largely intact except for our clothes.

The main reason for my lapse is that it has been an unpleasant few weeks.  Not that I haven’t written about unpleasant things before — sickness, death, and fighting come to mind — but until now there hasn’t been enough distance from the drama for me to construct anything palatable enough for publishing.  Husband is not happy about moving to Berlin, no matter how much contextualizing and box ticking and meeting of assorted terms and conditions is done.  And a lot of box ticking has been done: beautiful flat, beautiful car, walking distance commute, and at least monthly return visits to the Cotswolds to name a few.  He wants to want to go; the problem is he doesn’t want to go.

What he really wants is what isn’t on offer right now: to move back to Los Angeles.  We are, in fact, in agreement on the merits of Los Angeles, which boil down to sun, the Pacific, Mexican food and Peet’s coffee.  But I have now made enough moves initiated either entirely or partially in search of greener grass for husband — including London and the Cotswolds — to know there is limited mileage in relocation as an elixir for happiness.  As husband himself has been known to say, wherever you go, there you are.

But the truth is as much as husband doesn’t want to go, I do.  And so tomorrow night we will go, as planned, to Berlin.  Under the circumstances it won’t be easy, but then again, what is?

Christmas Letters

Christmas Letter 2010: I am a Jelly Donut

Posted on December 23, 2010

When Kennedy gave his famous speech declaring, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” some pesky linguists claimed he had mistakenly called himself a jelly donut. It turns out his grammar was correct since President Kennedy was speaking figuratively rather than literally. It also turns out that either interpretation now applies to me. After a couple of sunless months and a week of German food– flammenkuchen, wiener schnitzel, kartoffelpuffer, spaetzle, rotwein, weißwein, glühwein– my flesh now bears a striking resemblance to a powdered sugar-covered, Mr. Donut raspberry-filled. I’ve also decided, largely on the basis of a pastrami sandwich (step aside, Canter’s), to accept a job in Berlin in the new year.

If only the decision was that easy. The truth is that husband and I flip-flopped as many times as John Kerry during our four-day “decision visit” to Berlin. There was, of course, trepidation about turning husband into a trailing spouse, which I recently learned is the official diplomatic term for those in his situation. It also didn’t help that there was so much snow on the ground that my lingering impression of the city is of an upturned cola slurpee. But it did help that we found a great neighborhood with a great apartment in former East Berlin, five minutes away from the office and the purveyor of that pastrami sandwich. And so, shortly into the new year, the strapline for this blog will get an additional clause: “One woman’s journey from burritos and margaritas to tea and scones” will become “One woman’s journey from burritos and margaritas to tea and scones to bratwurst and bier.”

Our year has ended with a bang after eleven months of mostly blips. Perhaps the most important thing in the year was what didn’t happen at all: any further recurrence of the neurological symptoms I experienced last year that put me at risk for multiple sclerosis. The only thing related to multiple sclerosis that did happen this year was our London to Paris charity bike ride which so many of you graciously supported and for which we are grateful. We also made a return visit to France in the autumn to cycle through Provence, which husband now refers to as the broke-down seventies holiday thanks to the general state of modernity of the hotels we patronized. But the important things — wine and food — were good. Back at home we enjoyed showing off the Cotswolds to friends and family on a couple of weekends. We will miss it but we plan to visit once a month, and we hope to welcome you in both places.

Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you!