Life with stairs

Getting comfortable

So it is almost 2 months since I left home and started this little adventure. My green climbing plants purchased a week ago have doubled in size. The record player is set up with the solo LP in place. My walls are covered with pieces of torn packing paper and double tape stuck German verbs and nouns. I have three new pairs of shoes and I have stopped eat out every night. I’ve started to plan trips away from the city instead of it being my next destination. 

Last night Amin asked me why? Why I had come to Berlin? A question I have answered so many times. Why are you leaving? What bought you here? It was the topic of my 30th birthday piece. It was the needed justification for a move to a new country when I could sit in my own kitchen and talk to my many great friends and know the corners of the city and dine with my family during the week after working a job that I enjoyed. It did need justification and I had a list that was so practised by the end that I bored myself to death when I tried to convey the excitement that Berlin offered me. Last night I was about to launch into my monologue when I realised that I wasn’t so sure any more about the reasons. Wasn’t sure if I knew. Or cared. Lying on my stomach chin on my folded arms staring tiredly into the floorboards I felt like it had just happened, that it had to happen and here I was. I gave a few more considered answers, alone being a reassuring motif that surprised me a little. Yet the main feeling was one of “not that question any more.” I am here and everyday I feel more comfortable in the streets and cafes and lounge rooms. The food and drink sit better in my stomach and I meet people if I need to. I talk about things in life that interest me and I hear new stories almost daily. My language skills are far away but the few words I’ve learnt I cling to and laugh at and mispronounce and asks again and again for the same phrase. 

The Turkish bakery across the street and the constant yelling between construction workers who sit out the front drinking coffee and beer and waiting for the rain to stop again is becoming part of my aural landscape, slipping in and out of the cars and my house mate’s singing. I wake in the morning and immediately recognise the walls and my plants and low daylight through the long windows. Walking to corner in my comfortable clothes and thongs, recognising the pink haired multi-facial pierced checkout girl who hands me the bread and lactose free yoghurt, for a while this is just where I am. I’m not that interested in why any more, just how I move forward from here to the job, friends and communication skills, that are too come.

Hot, dying summer night, the long ride across town with the slight breeze blowing through my hair, cooling the strands wet with sweat on the back of my neck. Inside the bar service is on a door lying on it’s side, the musician on stage in the shadow of the fallen spotlight, the air so still, muggy and crossing legs is impossible as they slide off each other within moments. Books, paper and determination fanning glistening faces, drunken women at the bar shouting over the music to her drinking partner sitting beside her, their beers almost side on and only just keeping to the bottles neck edge. The afterglow of the gig, momentary dj and dancing, then campfire like acoustic performance for the crowd now all elbows on chair backs and drowsy in the heat. I get on my bike and find the way through shabby chic chaotic streets to a dorm spewing Spaniards, Italians, Americans onto the pavement, sitting in circles, staggering and standing and yelling clutching beer, discussing flights from economic battlegrounds, to hopeful safety in Germany. The stones and cigarette butts sticking to my bare thighs, pressing indentations and smudging my white skin with grey. Back to the streets and guided ride homeward with stops at traffic lights and hands stroking shoulders and kissing on corners. Skin still tight from the lake in the afternoon, sun kissed and glowing in the night. 

The last week went quite quickly. I just realised that it is Sunday. I also just realised thanks to Dad that I left home with my 25 kgs of life packed into the Australia oversized suitcase a month ago. So (Zo) Summer is teasing and Melbourne like Schizophrenic. Leave the house in a light summer dress with the midday sun blazing and light breeze and arrive home in the dark soaked with tropical thunder storm. Sheltering under awnings is a past time I didn’t expect and only encourages the rolling and smoking of cigarettes as I wait patiently for the deluge to end. Advantages being that it pushes me into small bars and cafes all around Mitte, Kreuzberg and Neulkoln, experimenting with glasses of new German wine varieties and bowls of mushroom soup. The papers cry economic emergency and insect infestation and my legs and torso are testiment to some sort of nasty bitting thing, not to mention the crazed flailling at wasps over breakfast, lunch, dinner and drinks. The streets of Berlin at night are like the 86 Tram, broken glass, crazy people yelling and shuffling and muttering, groups of drunk young men and women falling into the cracks of the cobblestones in their heels. By day depending on the area it’s the same. Kreuzberg does Fitzroy like Fitroy never will, even as gentrification spreads across the suburbs, shop front and cafe walls are covered with graffitti, high rise construction sites in Prenzluer Berg are labelled with anti capatilist slogans and well established squats nestle in the side streets behind shopping strips. I’m still lost 80% of the time, getting cocky when I recognise a street name only to realise after riding in circles for an hour that it was Alle or Platz not Strasse, in need of a compass, constantly confused and promising myself I will return home and study a map of Berlin, standing on my head, or next time I will assume the opposite of what I believe to be my position. 

Currently reading “Berlin Blues” Sven Regener, set in 1989, all hangovers and street names. Bought from the transvestite who runs a book shop in Kreuzberg, when I return it I get all the money paid back minus 1.50 borrowing fee. No need for book shelves, I have a library. 

So off to the pool with me…where I will once again be surprised by the total lack of order of lap lanes. 

Tchuss!

Wonder if Schlecker is open on Sunday?

Week 1 Berlin

Okay so it has been a week since I arrived in Berlin, and the most wonderful welcome with food and beer and bed I could ever have hoped for.

Now what?

Surviving Berlin the first week:

Notes: Get a better map (preferably one that talks)

Stop eating and drinking under the excuse “but it’s new”, it’s not new we have that in Australia!

At least try the German, you know you’re wrong but at least it’s fun. 

So what have I done?

I got lost…everyday…very, very,very lost. On a bike. For hours. Luckily for me I don’t have real commitments here, I turn up an hour after expected because I ride in the wrong direction and correct myself in another wrong direction. I’m not sure how you actually get to the Brandenburg Gate from my place, but I seem to be spending a lot of time standing under it, looking at my useless map with furrowed brows. Nice gate. 

It’s been raining, showers, spray misty rain, torrential downpours, flooding streets. And still I’ve been riding, wet to my bones, newspaper stuffed shoes when I get home wet, peeling jeans and tights and rain running off my chin and nose wet, leaving puddles on the stairs from my jacket wet. In the middle of summer and they tell me it’s the worst in ages. I’m excited and breathless and it’s all so extreme and romantic but the others are already looking to the winter ahead and their batteries are not being refilled with sunshine to help them through the cold grey months. The sky hangs so low here the tops of buildings disappear and they say in winter the sky sits heavily on your head, dark and sad, the snow black and thick. 

And then the sun came out. I got lost in the right direction on my way to the Olympiastadion. Designed and built during the Third Reich for the ‘36 Olympics, this was going to be a step up from Brunswick Baths. Stupid hot day to ride 15 ks around the streets of Berlin was greatly rewarded with an amazing experience. The Berliners lounging around the also roman style tiered steps and baths, the carved pillars and screaming boys jumping from diving boards. I swam my Kms at an incredibly slow pace behind, swimming capped and sunglasses wearing locals, slowly breast-stroking their way up and down, giving me strange looks as I tried in vain to keep my freestyle stroke and not automatically swerve into the left hand lane. I’m not sure if it’s the tattoo in English on my right shoulder, or the Speedo’s or the silly idea that you would go to the pool to swim up and down in a straight line for an hour, but I over heard a mother explaining to her child while the child stared at me panting on the side of the pool, “Australian”. Or maybe it is the obvious skin damage from years of Southern Hemisphere sun. Who knows..but I can be spotted. :) 

Lastly a quick word about German hip hop. 

A car full of young German boys pulled up alongside me yesterday. The music was at the level where the car is propelled by the bass, their windows down, shaved blond heads jerking around at every movement out of the corner of their eye. Tattooed forearms resting on open windows. Hip hop pumping out as they idle next to me. I wish I could understand what the song was about, all I could get was “damen” (women) and a bunch of really fast and spat out words that mean nothing to me, it just sounded so angry! I’m not sure if it is just my untrained ear but somewhere between Rage Rock and Gangster Rap this music and the two MC’s projecting over it was the most aggressive sounding thing I have ever heard. The words forceful, harsh and each with such a clear beginning and end, no drawl, no slur, no sliding one word into another, please forgive my hip hop terminology here, but “no flow”. So German hip hop/rap/rage whatever, you made me smile because of all the things I’ve seen and done so far this week, you win for the most strange and foreign moment yet. 

XXX

It’s just a thing…you know a thing.

So Paris may not be cheap but it is soooo good at not being cheap. 

Dear Berlin, 

I know it’s been a little while and that I’ve been busy with other things but you haven’t left my mind for a moment, I promise. 

I know this thing with Paris was just a side step on my way to you, yes I know I seem to be enjoying myself a little too much, I understand it hurts to hear the things I’ve been saying about Paris but it’s just a thing…you know a thing… a thing where I have a good time with someone a little more attractive, maybe older, great fashion sense, lovely big nose and pretty eyes…okay sorry…anyway it’s just a quick little thing on the side and I am never going to forget that we are meant for each other, I never lose sight of what we promised each other, it’s just a fling, a really great fling…that I have to get out of my system, you know how I am. Would you want me to be unhappy not able to be entirely yours because of some niggling questions? No! You want me to come to you free of all that baggage…and I am…I just have to finish this crepe…and glass of wine…and coffee…and flirt with that guy…I’ll be right there. 

Soon…

Thanks for understanding. 

XXX
Chloe  

Try Berlin

Wow…woke up at 6:30 this morning after an unsuccessful attempt at seeing live music last night, the guy at the one of the most recommended venues told me that due to sound restrictions and summer exodus there was nothing really on in Paris or to quote “Pari’ ist’ shit right now. ‘verywhere in ‘urope ist dead, except per’aps Berlin, Berlin is still breathing.” Well now doesn’t that make me feel better. :)