First Dispatch from Berlin

12/30/07

Here we are at the end of another year. I’ve been in Germany for three weeks already and most of you have not yet heard from me. I am sure you are wondering what exciting and amazing things I’ve been doing here. The answer: not so much – yet.

I arrived in Berlin on Dec 10 after a very stressful trip. I had four flights on three different airlines, and three of the four were very, very late. My bags had been checked in via some antique system with very sketchy-looking handwritten tags, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever see them again. Then there was the notorious Chicago connection: yes, it was snowing; yes, it was icy; yes, the flights were four hours late. In three airports I found myself running through several terminals dragging my heavy carry-ons behind, sweating in my down coat. Somehow, I made all the connections and got to Berlin on time (but only because I had a long layover in Dublin to begin with). My bags did not.

Maurice was not concerned – we were happy just to see each other – and it turned out he was right anyway; my luggage showed up intact two days later. In the meantime, I bought a few things to wear at H&M and settled into the new apartment. Maurice just moved a few days before my arrival to a larger place. It is conveniently located next to two subway (U-bahn) lines and one S-bahn (above-ground train), as well as a big shopping center. We have a balcony and a wall full of windows in our living room. From there we can see a small park, the trains pass by behind it, and beyond those, the huge TV tower in the center of former East Berlin.

The weather was very Decemberish – cold, dim, a creepy kind of mist at night, sun down at 4 PM. In such conditions I found it impossible to recover from jet lag and spent the first few days sleeping away most of the scanty daylight hours. I did pull myself away from the pillow on the evening of my first full day to join Maurice and his mother Susanne in a jaunt to the movie theater at Potsdamer Platz to see The Golden Compass. On the way we passed the Brandenburg Gate, imposing under its bright lights; the tree-lined boulevard Unter den Linden; a Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) complete with a svelte-looking St. Nicholas and ice skating; and an ornate and gilded old café where we had some dinner. Then there was Potsdamer Platz, an area that had been empty and deserted during the time of the wall, as it passed right througt, but which has since been subject to some urban revitalization planning. The big new Sony Center fills up the space with a movie theater and restaurants around a dome-topped courtyard, bringing life back to what is once again the center of the city.

We still don’t have internet at the new apartment so we spent the next day – well, afternoon really – searching out internet cafes and brunch along the Kastanien Allee, an area full of hip youngsters. I made my first acquaintance of Ampelmann, the hat-wearing green crosswalk signal guy who is a symbol of old East Berlin. No one knows why in the East he was dressed so conservatively, but there is a movement to bring back the Ampelmann. He is certainly more stylish than the hatless, international-style green man of West Berlin. Along this street we saw Ampelmann painted on the side of a building in such a way that he appeared to be walking along the fire escape. After brunch, it was practically time for dinner already and to meet my friend Juniper, who is in town studying German as a post-doc. We ate at a Mexican restaurant with a German waitress who had clearly studied English in Ireland. The salsa was surprisingly good but because it is hard to get pinto beans over here they had used kidneys instead, thereby creating a new dish that might be termed Chili Tacos.

Once Maurice went back to work, I was left to explore our neighborhood on my own. I mostly just had to figure out how to go grocery shopping and use the internet shop. This was challenging in German. Most of the neighborhood here is Turkish, but since I don’t speak Turkish either this is not very helpful to me. Grocery shopping took about twice as long as usual because I didn’t understand the words on the packages and had to poke and shake them instead to guess their contents when the picture alone didn’t help. Then apparently I did not deal correctly with the produce. At least I managed to find some beans at the health food store, and to explore Prenslauer Berg a bit – the next neighborhood over from ours, where Maurice used to live, and a happening kind of an area for young Berliners.

One day I went in to work with Maurice to check out the Ethnographic Museum where the Berlin Phonogram Archive (his place of employment) is located. It’s a big place and I’ll have to go again to see all of it, but in the first visit I managed to take in the Mesoamerican collection as well as a new temporary exhibit on Peruvian mummies.

Then I got sick. This was expected, but still sucked. My sightseeing activities were at a temporary end, and I spent a few more days in bed. I emerged in time to attend part of an ethnomusicology conference on music notation, hearing the sole paper in English and one in German, in which I only understood the Hindi words used. In the evening, an Italian woman gave a lecture-demonstration on north Indian dhrupad singing. I found her ungrammatical German – apparently a combination of German vocabulary and Italian syntax – to be strangely intelligible and quite enjoyed it, except for my copiously running nose. Afterwards Juniper joined us again for dinner, this time some really excellent Thai. I saw many of the same people again the next day back at the museum for the Archive’s Christmas party. Aside from my nose, again, it was enjoyable, featuring German bread and cookies, champagne, and a funny movie about African anthropologists studying the strange Austrian customs of drinking beer, polka dancing, beer drinking, yodeling, and beer.

Time for the holidays at last! I, Maurice, and a heap of Kleenex hopped on a train heading west on the 21st, going to his hometown of Recklinghausen. Located in far western Germany, approaching the Netherlands border, it is in an industrial area formerly known for coal mining, although the mines closed down a few years ago.