Magpies on the Move

Catching up a bit

2010-04-19T01:20:00.000-07:00

OK, I admit it. I got depressed during the long icy winter and fell down the rabbit hole. It's been lonely and isolating and I turned to painting and personal writing rather than this more extroverted form of narcissism. Also I napped. I hope I'm back to blogging for a few weeks, though, as I've missed it, have a lot of things stored up to write about and am down to my last 6 weeks in Europe. Where formerly just being in Europe for 6 whole weeks at all would have been the height of luxury, after 7 months here it is starting to feel somewhat minimal and I am getting sentimental and sad about leaving. I will spend the summer in Seattle, my role changing from that of temporary ex-pat to that of mother-of-the-bride. Assuming the Icelandic volcano stops popping by the end of May and doesn't keep me stranded here...

I will re-enter the blogosphere with a brief accounting of just a few things that I will hope to pursue a bit further subsequently. We'll see how that works...

Since I hit the skids this winter I haven't done as much as I had hoped to do and am now trying like crazy to make up for a bit of it before I leave. Some of the museums here are so huge they have required multiple trips - I still haven't finished with the Deutsches Historisches Museum or the Gemäldegalerie; the Judisches Museum could take weeks. But I have made it to the Nolde and Kollwitz Museums, the Märkisches Museum, to Checkpoint Charlie, the Eastside Gallery (the longest stretch of the Wall still standing and which was repainted by something like 88 artists and just reopened to the public) and to new exhibits at the Guggenheim, the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Scharf-Gerstenberg, the Berlinische Galerie, the Hamburger Bahnhof, not to mention revisiting my old favorites a few times as well - the Bode in particular, the Pergamon, the Neues...none of which will mean anything to anyone who hasn't been here so I won't go on, but it gives me a sense of satisfaction to make these lists. I hope I wasn't an accountant in my former life, but there is a whiff of possibility there.

Occupation with words continues with more names at the dog park, my favorite new one belonging to a black pug named Zoltan. There is also a funny white bull terrier named Vanna, an enormous young Great Dane named Tennessee and an incredibly cute puggle-Jack Russell mix puppy absurdly named Bob. I have collected a few what-were-they-thinking business names as well, such as a boutique named "Ass Style," a bathroom fittings supplier called "Bad Ideen" (which just means "bathroom ideas" but has other English overtones), and of course my favorite "Titanic Travel" which I have already mentioned. (I think it is possible that the Germans came up with the name "Nova" for the Chevy that had notoriously poor sales in Latin America, "no va" meaning "no go" in Spanish.) There's a hot dog cafe called Mr. Miller's, whose darkly ambiguous tag line is "Eat Here, Diet Home." And since I find the whole idea of limousines and stretch limos repulsive, I am quite amused by the stretch Hummer I see from time to time; "hummer" is the German word for lobster which to me significantly lowers the pretense value of riding in such a vehicle. Cruising in my lobster? Maybe not so cool.

Friends are here for 10 days and it's been a great way to goose me into hyperactivity. Yesterday we started with a church service at the Dom so we could hear the organ; there was a stellar trumpet playing as well and as it was a baptism service the bishop was present, dressed in his Calvinist black robe with the white neck tabs. Very eighteenth century. We had a printed program of the service basics in English but as we opted to sit in the middle of the church rather than the small rear apse where simultaneous translation was available on earphones, we were in the aural dark for the readings and sermon. (I probably would have been anyway, even in English). It was a little bit like the Gary Larson cartoon of the guy talking to his cat and all the cat hears is her own name - "blah blah blah blah Muffy blah blah blah Muffy"; I caught the occasional German word, like Jesus and Afghanistan.

It's been a beautiful weekend after another chilly gray week and people have been out in droves, sucking up the sunlight. Saturday we went out to Grünewald, which is a lovely wooded area with a few small lakes scattered about. We walked a way in to the Teufelsee (Devil Lake) which is really just a pond but is a clothing-optional pond with the only WC for miles around. Criss-crossed by paths, roadlets and absolutely no directional signs whatsoever, we felt lucky to have found the antique tin toilet facility at all, and sat for a while pondside. We talked to a nice young man from Tennessee who thought he had made better progress than he had, working with speech coaches on his aiksent. He's here coaching kids' soccer while his wife teaches art at one of the international schools. He needs to be understood. One creepy note about the Grünewald is the very visible white dome of the old American Cold War listening post on top of one of the hills. Its covering is tattered and shredded now, and it vaguely resembles a poorly designed stage set of the Taj Mahal that has been left to rot like an old circus tent. I find the phrase "listening post" to be a bit chilling. It's like that woman's voice that comes over the radio waves in the middle of the night reciting numbers ad infinitum. Creepy.

I am expecting my friends at any minute and am thinking we'll go out to Potsdam today, before the rain resumes tomorrow for the rest of their visit. I am supposed to go to Paris on Friday to meet another set of friends, so we'll see if the Eyjafjallajokull volcano will allow us all to travel by then. I am attempting to remain optimistic.

Winter

2010-02-14T03:40:00.000-08:00

I have not been blogging in a month. It is partly because my adventures have tapered off as Berlin has been plastered with snow and ice since Christmas, partly because I am spending more time painting and cogitating, and partly because the longer I live here the less strange and remarkable things seem. I'm pleased with my creative work, still blissfully encountering a museum or two each week, but I'm caught up also in personal work and medical issues that are simply not fodder for public blogging, at least not here.

I have met more interesting people - a screenwriter, an actor, an actress, a head chef, an art historian (17th century Italian), an importer of Chinese furnishings, a graduate student in social sciences - and continue my friendship with the marine biologist (American) I met at the Goethe Institut. He has introduced me to other interesting scientists (all so young!); we brunch at least once a month. The screenwriter is very interested in my paintings and I send him new images as I get them made; he responds with very interesting, intuitive feedback. I have lost touch with the sports psychologist.

I have a whole slew of new, sometimes-stupid-beyond-belief dog names from the dog park - Paul (for months I thought it was "Powell"), Phil, Spike, Freida, Frodo, Bones, Cacao, Jimmy, Lumpy, Carlos, Laddie, Fido, Lucy, Murphy, Suzie, Celia (Suzie and Celia are particular new favorites of Maggie's), DuBeaux, Nyla, and two more Kieras (bringing that total to seven). They are all loving the snow, which falls endlessly, it seems, and which they delight in eating and rolling in. I have given up on ever retrieving my old glasses.

The snow brings out droves of parents with children on sleds - high-centered ones, very different from the Flexible Flyers or saucers that American children travel on. The Volkspark is well used, having some great sledding hills. I have to say that I find German children for the most part to be adorable (cutest hats ever!) and well behaved, and I have never heard anyone speak sharply to a child here or exhibit any sign of anger or annoyance. Parents seem infinitely patient and infinitely delighted with their offspring, and the fathers are as much involved as the mothers. There is a cafe near me, "Cafe Paul & Paula", that caters to people with young children, and seems to be run on the principle of common sense so lacking in the States. I am often tempted to go in and offer my services as a surrogate grandmother. Children crawl on the floor and play with common toys while their parents sit at low tables drinking coffee and tea (yes! hot liquids near tiny people!), and during the holidays there were even real candles burning in hurricane lamps on the higher tables. Imagine THAT in the States, where everyone sues everyone else for the slightest mishap they themselves might have prevented. Oh, sometimes I dread going back to that particular brand of insanity. Others, too...

The lack of threat of civil suits here has a downside, however, at least in this weather. Apparently it is quite unclear as to who is responsible for the state of the sidewalks - the city, the building owner, the tenant, or manager - so everyone is reluctant to spend their resources in dealing with the ever-increasing ice-scape that is developing through this winter of snow-snow-snow-freeeeeeeze-melt-freeeeeze-snow-snow-freeeeeze-melt-freeze. In some (most) areas it's like trying to walk on a Lilliputian version of the Himalayas. The clinics and ERs are stuffed with people who have fallen. I've fallen once myself - no injury except to my sense of equilibrium. There's no point in embarrassment, as everyone else is falling, too. There are varying degrees of effort made to sprinkle sand and gravel, but by not clearing it all up after the first big snowfall at Christmas, they have allowed it to pack unevenly and freeze over to a point where it now requires major labor with pickaxes and shovels to budge any of it. Some cars which haven't been moved in weeks, are now cratered by at least 8" walls of ice and couldn't be moved without a tow truck. They've run out of salt for the roads and are now importing it from Morocco, and some weather reports say this will last through March. It does keep the maniacal bicyclists off the sidewalks, for the most part, but the joggers keep jogging and the baby strollers keep strolling. I do find the white landscape to be bright and cheerful, much preferable to the darkness of soggy winter mud, so I'm not entirely disheartened by it all, only to the extent that it discourages me from getting out and about as much as I would like. I feel like I live in Narnia under the rule of the Ice Queen.

But not getting out and about means I am spending more time painting, and listening to audiobooks and podcasts as I work. Anyone who's ever read Julia Cameron knows about "morning pages" and these I write assiduously. This combination of painting and writing is allowing me to move great quantities of psychic baggage from the overloaded storage unit in my brain and fling it out into whatever receptacle the universe provides for such detritus. May I please never see any of it again. And if Berlin isn't the most symbolically perfect place to be undertaking this labor of personal integration, I don't know what is.

Grim Reapings

2010-01-16T03:58:00.000-08:00

I've said before that it is startling to find myself, an American child of the Cold War, living happily not only in Germany, not only in Berlin, but in east Berlin, place of the double-whammy: from Nazi to Soviet, and that's only going back a war or two. Never mind the mess the Kaiser made.

Although we never talked about the War at home, we did know that my father had lost his three best friends to the Germans, and culturally I was raised with the still-fairly-fresh war stories of those who did talk about it, and write about it, and put it on television. Even cartoons had their mad scientist characters with sinister German accents and white lab coats. I learned to think of the Germans as the evil race, bloodthirsty Nazis all, with harsh accents and harsher faces, goose-stepping and heiling through so many of the movies of my younger years. Judging by the number of mind-numbing war-movie dates I went on in high school, at least the boys I grew up with had an insatiable voyeuristic appetite for this recent and ghastly past. In addition to the Hollywood spin, at some point in high school I heard part of a transcription of graphic testimony from the Nuremburg trials that gave me nightmares for years. We moved into Viet Nam, but The War never went away. In my thirties it revisited my consciousness as Herman Wouk's extraordinary books "The Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance," then the mini-series.

(My own maternal great-grandparents were both German, first-generation midwesterners in a tiny town in Illinois; they named their 8 children such American favorites as Ralph Waldo and James Blaine; there was also a Roy Valentine and a Cedric Montgomery; hardly a whiff of German. They even Americanized the family name from Schneider to Snyder. And of course their parents had had the good sense to emigrate long before any of this particular ugliness was in the works and were therefore exempt from the racial blame of the post-war decades.)

By the time I was in grade school, of course, the Russians had taken their place as the new menace in our collective psyche. The Cold War brought the ever-present threat of The Bomb, which was articulated for us every Wednesday noon by the testing of the air raid sirens and was also taken up - very profitably - in a whole new array of plotlines by film and television producers, the old German faces and accents blurring into the new ones of the Soviets. In 1961, when the Wall went up dividing Berlin, I was nine years old. I remember the stark black-and-white TV footage of the 11 o'clock news report my parents watched the night it was completed, but it was their fear and the grim atmosphere of our living room that was truly frightening. (The only other late-night news report that imprinted itself on my young brain was almost exactly a year later when Marilyn Monroe was found dead. And then of course, it was only about a year after that that JFK was shot and childhood was just over.) In the sixth grade we were made to watch documentary footage of Russian soldiers shooting people who fell into an open mass grave, probably something to do with the Russian Revolution so we could see just how vicious these people were. Why anyone thought this was appropriate for young schoolchildren I will never know. (Propaganda: Frighten early, and often.) More fodder for years of nightmares. Newsreels of Soviet arms parades were, of course, a staple at the movie theater. It was hard to grasp how we could have just been wartime allies, fighting the Nazis, with these people we now feared with every breath.

In early November, the day of the Wall-Fall celebration, I finally wandered through the Holocaust Memorial which sits behind the U.S. Embassy in what was the death strip between East and West. It is nearly 5 acres of sarcophagus-size concrete chunks of varying heights, laid out in a grid that tilts a bit to create an intended feeling of being off-balance, a world gone awry. Designed by American (!) architect Peter Eisenman, it has the feel of a stark necropolis, a somber acknowledgment that Nazi Germany exterminated 6 million Jews. In spite of the optimistic view of a dear friend, who is inspired to play hide-and-seek in here and sees this as a positive legacy, I am inspired only to mourn.

At Thanksgiving, when my brother and sister-in-law were here, we visited the Berlin Wall Documentation Center which is near the Church of Reconciliation - an 1894 structure that ended up in the wide no-man's-land between East and West, sealed off from its congregation, and finally razed by the Communists in 1985. The congregation got its property back after the Wall came down and put up a new chapel. Across the street, facing the longest remaining segment of the Wall, is the Documentation Center, which houses a permanent exhibition (which we did not explore) and a viewing tower (which we did) that gives you perspective on just how wide the death strip was and how the Wall affected an individual neighborhood. We learned that the Wall was modified to prevent breaching by automotive vehicles through the addition of a long, sloping foot at the base. If a truck tried to ram its way through, the weight of the truck on this foot would prevent the wall from falling in the opposite direction. This memorial is still being developed, but there is a good outside display of the Wall's history and of the plans for the completion of the complex. I can only absorb so much of this stuff in one day (poor me); it is all so sad. It has taken me about three weeks just to complete this blog entry.

At Christmas I was invited to join the Berlin ice hockey team on a tour of one of the underground bunkers renovated during World War II as a public air-raid shelter. (Many of these had been constructed during WWI as protection against poison gas attacks.) Berlin's population in 1945 had not yet hit 3 million, but it was close; this bunker could only hold about 1,000 people during a raid, and probably was not even deep enough nor safe enough to be an effective shelter had it been hit. The walls are coated in phosphorescent paint (we were warned not to lick them) and still glow for a while when the lights are turned off and most of the original signs are still in place, pointing to the segregated bathrooms and to the Mothers-and-Children room. There's apparently even a birthing room, but we didn't see it. People sat on backless wooden benches in small rooms of 20-40 people, for 7 or 8 hours at a time, and when they were released, depending upon the success of the raid, they came out to streets strewn with body parts, dead children, obliterated homes. They learned to wear their fur coats, if they had them, and to bring all their papers and valuables with them in suitcases, and to sit on the suitcases. It was pitch dark once the paint stopped glowing and theft was easy and rampant.

(The War still intrudes here from time to time when pieces of unexploded ordnance are encountered by farmers, construction workers, and survey crews. In 1997 a bomb went off in the neighborhood I now live in, killing 3 people. Just a few weeks ago a 500-kilo bomb, discovered near Bremen, was safely moved to a "detonation area" after 8,500 people were evacuated. It's estimated that about 20 tons of the stuff is still found each year - bombs, mines, grenades which sank into the soft German soil.)

When the Soviets moved in after the war, things did not go well for the Easterners, especially for the women. In addition to the 6 million Jews, the Nazis had also killed 12 million Russians. The Russians pulled their soldiers from wherever they could find young men, many of them young, uneducated boys from the vast rural countryside, coerced into service with guns at their heads. Needless to say, when they got their piece of Germany they were in a very vengeful frame of mind. They systematically raped at least 90% of the women here, many of them multiple times, for years. And yet, when things settled down, the women in the socialist system encountered a more equal distribution of labor. Yes, they may have had crummy government jobs - that's about all there was after all the industry moved out of Berlin - but they had as many jobs as their male counterparts. And the men helped with the housework and childcare, an ethic that looks to be still firmly in place, judging by the number of men I see pushing baby strollers and playing with their children in the park every day. I find it an interesting statistic that one in eight Germans - Westerners and Easterners alike - would prefer to go back to the old segregated system.

Now I have done my duty to myself by recording all this. I will happily go back to the art museums this week.

Losing Things

2010-01-02T03:49:00.000-08:00

I have now lost my glasses in 8 inches of snow at the dog park. I took them off in the twilight of New Year's Day so I could watch the intriguing ascension of a small paper hot-air balloon, fueled by some sort of live flame - I wasn't close enough to the young women who were inflating it to be able to see if it was a candle or some other special device, but whatever it was it sat high up enough into the balloon to make it glow a deep orange like an enormous pod from a Japanese lantern plant. It glowed, and drifted farther and higher for at least five minutes; I watched until it either went out or got too far away to see. I couldn't believe how far it went; I had assumed it would last 30 seconds before being extinguished and spluttering to a wobbly descent. Nor could I believe that its chief engineers didn't watch the entire performance, but they wandered away after a while, joyfully content with their moment of fun. The whole thing was magical.

(Speaking of balloons, ten years ago in Paris a boyfriend and I had been most amused by the incongruous sight of a green balloon bobbing along the street in a construction zone. Yesterday, New Year's morning, another green balloon found its way into my walled garden, where it remains parked in a twiggy shrub.)

After the hot-air balloon disappeared I was distracted by yet a third sign of celebratory New Year's whimsy (somewhat unexpected in still-dour east Berlin) - a large chocolate Santa, still fully clothed and unmolested in his foil wrapping, stuck into a mound of snow on one of the park benches. There was something so endearing and so generous in this gesture - hard to imagine myself willingly giving up anything sweet for some stranger or leaving such a token for possible removal to a garbage can by a paranoid parent. It was awfully cute. (It was still there today, only sitting on a different bench, devoid of its snow base.)

And then I lost my glasses, probably as a wildly enthusiastic young black lab leapt at the pocket in which both glasses and dog treats resided. I didn't discover the loss until I got home, by which time it was quite dark and a return trek was pointless and out of the question. St. Anthony was supposed to find and hold them for me until I got back there today, but he apparently has other plans. I think it's just possible that the great patron of lost things has in mind a new vision for me this year and that my old way of seeing, as manifested in my old bifocals, will remain lost. (Looking for them without being able to see much because, of course, I have lost my glasses, reminded me of the Ray Bradbury story of the misanthrope who sits out a nuclear war in the bowels of the city library, is ecstatic to find the rest of the human race wiped out so he can read in peace, and then obliterates his one pair of glasses in a fatal misstep.) It is also possible that they will turn up when all this snow melts, along with the earring I lost a couple months ago.

A few weeks ago I lost a glove at the farmers' market, on a VERY cold day. I retraced my steps around the circuit a couple of times with no luck - and a very cold hand - but on the third round, with Hannah in tow, I found the errant handshuh carefully placed at eye level on a fir tree at a Christmas tree stall. Thank you, St. Anthony.

At the St. Lucia concert at the Berliner Dom I lost both gloves, again on a VERY cold evening. I discovered my loss on the way out, swam back upstream to my pew without finding them, dropping my hat in the process. The gloves turned up in the vestibule, neatly placed on top of a display case, probably dropped when I arrived for the concert and was hunting for my ticket. St. Anthony has my undying devotion.

I have also dropped a hat at the dog park, retrieved by Mocha, a young chocolate lab, and a glove, joyfully borrowed for a quick romp by Fattska, the puggle puppy. I left a hat behind at a museum cloak room and had to go back for it. I lost my wallet at the grocery store. I locked my keys inside my apartment. I lost Maggie's leash one day, also in the snow at the dog park. I have lost track of my German online-banking pin three times. I lost a Visa card before I even got here, although I think it's safely locked up in my shed at home. I am finding it harder and harder to keep track of what little German I've learned. I have lost any motivation to do ANYTHING. Some days I feel I am losing my entire mind except the part that mandates food intake. St. Anthony does not seem to be helping much in that department.

On the flip side, I have now found a total of €21.79 and a quite useless 2-Deutschemark coin, although I suppose it is entirely possible that at least one of the €5 notes I have found was one I had dropped myself. I choose to believe otherwise. I must have SOME dignity left, especially after stooping to pick up so many 1¢ coppers off the sidewalks.

Pinball

2010-01-02T03:04:00.000-08:00

After as dreary and dismal a day as yesterday (Christmas) was, today was sunny again and finally the ice is all melted from the sidewalks and streets. I miss the snow, but not its gradual trajectory into frozen death-traps and the inevitable piles of grit. It's particularly treacherous on all the slick granite cobblestones a lot of the paving here comprises. I will hope for more snow this winter; Maggie adores it and I find it so much cheerier than sludge. Besides, it fits my fantasy of winter in Germany.

Watching Maggie in the dog park this evening was like watching a rerun of my own afternoon at the Deutsches Historisches Museum. I finally appreciate what she is up to when she smells bush after bush, digs a little in a mud puddle, wanders over to the fence for a good sniff, moves some sticks around, snuffles under a pile of leaves, and moves on to yet another bush. The bushes all look the same to me, but Maggie knows better.

Today was my first visit to this historical museum. I need some new territory to prowl around and mark as my own, and there is a LOT of acreage at this one. I stayed within the confines of the medieval period, which was all my eyeballs could take in in a two-hour period, and is my favorite, anyway. I snooped happily among the pieces of pottery and woodcut books, avoided the armor for the most part although I was drawn to the paint-encrusted leather battle shields, and bounced like a pinball marble from Cranach portrait to Dürer portrait, back to Cranach, on to a huge carved wedding chest and an Imperial edict of some sort with a fringe of huge wax seals along the bottom. Another Cranach. A gold folding pocket sundial. A Bosch. A Breughel or two. (Some more Baby Jesuses but I didn't have my camera with me.) The place is a wonderland, and beautifully laid out. I will probably have to get a yearlong membership there as well. It would pay for itself in a few short months. Oh, but wait. I don't have a year left here any more. Just 7 months as I will be home by the end of July for my younger daughter's wedding in mid-August. Unless I come back after that for a second year...

Christmas Day

2009-12-25T13:17:00.000-08:00

Somehow I have lived here for four months without picking up a hint that Christmas Eve is the big family day here. Everything closes down at 2:00, even the Christmas markets (open again Christmas afternoon) and the big retailers (not open again Christmas afternoon). (Imagine Nordstrom or K-Mart missing an extra 10 hours of sales!) Since I had been hoping to make plans to go out for at least one holiday dinner with a friend, I hadn't thought about meals much. But my friend ditched me for the flu and I realized that if I didn't want to eat tuna on Skorpa crackers for Christmas dinner I'd better go to the store. I was lucky to get there before they closed, although the in-house bakery had already shut down. Just as well.

Then the bigger "what now" issues arose - what WOULD I do with the rest of Christmas Eve? What WOULD I do on Christmas Day? Being alone in Berlin was never part of my plan, no, no, no. I was either going to be alone in Crete or Mallorca, where it wouldn't even feel like Christmas, or be amused with a friend here. This had the makings of a major Christmas Fail and I was getting more than a little grumpy at this new scenario. I needed to turn this fiasco into a project.

I went into town on a quick errand before things shut down and while I was there decided I needed a nice candle for the apartment, to cheer me up and add a little holiday touch. Browsing the Christmas market for the right one, I realized this was exactly the project I needed for Christmas Eve, to be Santa for myself since I didn't have the usual Santa-ing for my daughters to do and nobody else was going to be Santa for me. I'd forgotten to rent a video when I went food shopping so I ducked into my favorite large department store to see what they had for sale that Santa could bring home. Aha! First season of 30 Rock! Perfect! Oh, but wait, there's the 12th season of South Park. Better have both. This could be a long week until Hannah gets home again. And getting to the videos, the toys and games section caught my eye and I had another revelation - what I really needed was a good jigsaw puzzle. Yes! Now Santa is in full swing! Christmas Eve with pork tenderloin and Tina Fey, Christmas Day putting together a map of Berlin with Eric Cartman. And let's not forget the sugared nuts from the Christmas market; they're only available for another few days. And a marzipan Santa. Just a little something for my stocking. Except that I don't have a stocking here and had to use my hat.

Got home fully laden, as a good Santa should, and took Maggie for her Christmas Eve walk, which somewhat deflated my spirits as none of my regular dog-park friends were there, and the group of my nodding acquaintances were all drinking hot toddies together out of a thermos, telling their German jokes, laughing their German laughs, breathing their alcohol-spiked breath into the air. I felt - and was - completely left out. Not that I wanted a drink, I wouldn't have accepted even if one had been offered; but a friendly greeting would have been nice. So home we came, greetingless, and a little sad. Well, VERY sad, to tell the truth. But I did have a nice dinner and then a fun Skype chat with Hannah, then some 30 Rock before bed. And I had a plan for Chrismas Day.

I discovered that in fact the museums here ARE open on Christmas and so I decided that for my Christmas project I would go to the Bode Museum, which has a luscious collection of medieval and Gothic art, and photograph as many Baby Jesus statues as I could find. Seemed in keeping with the theme of the day, somehow. So, after spending the morning doing laundry, mopping my floor and cleaning up the dog yard (snow's all gone now...), I went off with my camera and came home three hours later with 122 pictures. Not all of them are the Baby Jesus, mind you; I got a nice one of St. Vitus in his cauldron and one of a head of St. John the Baptist on a plate, a few baby-free Virgins, and some of the mourning Mary 33 years later. I got sidetracked by the notion of Mythic Motherhood and got very annoyed that the wise men (hah!) hadn't thought to bring bath salts, a good moisturizer, and a nice new bathrobe for the new mother. Wise women would have known.

And now I have done it. I have survived Christmas alone, with my faithful dog Maggie, bless her large canine heart. And thanks to the ever-to-be-praised developer of Skype I was able to have video chats with my daughters and both brothers this evening - in Seattle, Indianapolis, and Mexico. I said on my FaceBook page today that having Christmas alone is something either nobody should have to do or everybody should have to, at least once. Like chemotherapy, I hope never to have to do it again, but if I do at least I'll be experienced at it. And now it's time for some more 30 Rock.

A Christmas Tea

2009-12-25T12:15:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to an 'Adventstee' by a new acquaintance, my so-called Tandem partner who helps me with my German while I help her with her English only we never end up speaking English and it's beginning to dawn on me how little I understand of her help with my German. As Hannah says, Birgit doesn't dumb it down for me. But she's fun and I have enjoyed the couple of outings we have had together. She has three grown daughters and was excited to have me to tea at her home. For my part, I am always intrigued, especially in Europe, to see the insides of others' apartments and what they serve for food.

The tea was set for a Sunday afternoon at 3:30, the day Hannah flew back to Seattle for her 3-week Christmas trip, and a good day for me to have an entertainment planned. It required a tram ride and probably about 20 minutes by subway, so I allowed an hour travel time. First misstep was leaving my apartment 10 minutes late, probably looking for my lipstick. This caused me to just miss the tram and have to wait another 10 minutes for the next one. Got to the subway station, a conglomeration of two separate lines, the S-Bahn and U-Bahn, which don't necessarily go in the same directions, and just missed the U-Bahn train I wanted. I had to wait another 10 minutes for the next one. Once on the train, I realized it had been an S-Bahn train I needed. Fortunately there was another stop coming up where the two lines again converged; however, I managed to miss that S-Bahn train by about 5 seconds while trying to determine if this was the one headed in my direction. Waited another 10 minutes for the next one and THEN had my 20-minute subway ride. I decided that tears really wouldn't help.

By now, of course, I was trying to reach my friend by phone to tell her I was running late but I couldn't connect. At 4:00 I emerged from the subway into the dark, unable to see any street signs. A passer-by kindly directed me to the street I wanted, which was at the intersection with another street of exactly the same name which somewhat confounded me as to which way to turn. At this point my phone rang and it was Birgit wondering what had happened to me. She hadn't had my phone number at home (she usually meets me after work) and had to call her daughter in Frankfurt to get it. My cell couldn't connect with her landline because you have to have an additional prefix for that here, which she had forgotten to give me, and her cell phone was off. The phone system here can be more than a little annoying. And so I arrived.

I was assuming that a daughter or two (English speakers) would be joining us, but nope. It was just Birgit, her introverted husband, and me. I don't think he was too happy that I was a half hour late and I had a hard time explaining what had happened. We spent quite a bit of time examining all the pottery their daughters had made in grade school before Birgit brought out the coffee, which I can't drink at that time of day. I had orange juice instead. Their English isn't much better than my German so conversation was a little jerky, at best, and neither of them seemed inclined to eat which was, oh, just a little awkward, given the poppyseed cake and platter of cookies they kept passing my way. I stayed for what seemed like a polite length of time and then bolted. One more merit badge earned.

I was really glad that I had had the foresight to remember a hostess gift, especially under the circumstances; not that Birgit needed mollifying, but it would have added a layer of boorishness to the all-too-obvious other incompetencies in language and use of train schedules.

Concert Fail and a Hockey Game

2009-12-22T15:12:00.000-08:00

We had a VERY cold week last week, between 7 and 10 degrees most days, with an occasional high of 12. It snowed first so the white has stayed put pretty well until today, when suddenly it has been almost 40 and I don't really need the extra-warm hat and slightly warmer dog-park coat I just bought. There is still a lot of winter to get through, though, so I'm sure I'll get my money's worth by March.

This clearly did not turn out to be the daily disciplined writing I had hoped for, but the days have begun to blend together and move so rapidly it has gotten hard to keep track of what I've done. I have been to a lot of museums: the Pergamon, the Neues Museum, the Altes Museum, the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Alte Nationalgalerie, the Bode, the Guggenheim, the Berlinishe Galerie, the Dali Museum, the Illustrators Forum, the Berggruen, the Bröhan, the Hamburg Banhof, the Kunstgewerbemuseum, some of them multiple times by now. I've also spent a lot of hours at the Volkspark walking Maggie and hanging out at the Hundplatz, getting impromptu German lessons and making acquaintances of dogs and people alike. And then there have been the Christmas markets and concerts I've been attending lately.

The third concert, on Sunday afternoon, was not what I expected. For one thing it wasn't in the Dom itself, but in one of the separate chapels which could have doubled as a meat locker it was so cold. I got a front row seat, but that didn't matter as the choir, the Capella Cantorum Berlin, performed in a loft where nobody could see them. The 300-year-old Italian organ was also in the loft, so nobody could see it either. What I was left looking at were a couple of huge and quite ghastly religious paintings, one of the Pentecost I think, as the altar piece, and one other mumbly composition with lots of rolling eyeballs, gesticulating digits and stiffly floating drapery off to one side. There was a vast quantity of liver-colored marble as well, in the huge columns supporting the ceiling and in the altar itself. Maybe not my favorite stone.

The 17th-century Northern German music would have been lovely if the basic a cappella men's choir had been left alone to do its thing, but someone's misplaced zeal mandated the addition of a boys' choir to the mix. We know that everyone loves the Vienna Choirboys, but these were not they; being shrill and unblended they were a distraction rather than an enhancement. A rather tedious hour, it was, and with nothing else for my visual sense to latch onto besides the paintings, it led me to wish very much for a Pentecostal-like revelation of German as a language I can suddenly speak and understand.

Musical entertainments were punctuated by a hockey game on Friday night, to which I was invited by one of my gracious dog park friends, who is a sports psychologist with the Berlin team. I sat with his parents who were visiting from Frankfurt, his fiancee and a friend of hers, as he, of course, had to sit with the team. There were the usual stadium-pounding loudspeakers spewing rock music before the teams appeared and stupid contests for fans at the intervals, but much less hawking of merchandise and food and very little rambunctious behavior in the stands. One whole end section of the arena is designed just for standing - no seats at all, just rails to lean on. This was filled with the die-hard and well organized fans of the former East German team, who still - and continually - shout out the old cheers to the beat of a couple of drums hammered mercilessly by unrelenting pack leaders. Most of them were dressed in team jerseys, and despite the constant goading by the drums they were very orderly in their enthusiasm. The whole game was surprisingly tame - much more like the college hockey games I've seen, but then the Berlin team - the Eisbären or Polar Bears - is on the first rung of a five-rung league structure and still seem to play by strategy and skill rather than brute force. Not that my take on hockey means a hoot, but hey.

I completed my Christmas music entertainment schedule this evening, back at the Dom for a superb concert by the Rundfunkchor Berlin ( the Berlin Broadcasting Company) - in a very unusual program of newer music, at least mostly 20th-century; a spectacular piece by a young Latvian composer called "Sun Dogs", parts of a Rachmaninoff Vespers liturgy that was as rich and haunting as anything I've heard, a couple of organ solos, ending with the required German carols "Vom Himmel Hoch","Stille Nacht" and "Er ist ein Ros entsprungen", all of which I have heard at the previous concerts in one form or another. And I'm sorry, but nothing can induce me to like organ music.

A Concerted Effort (to Enjoy Christmas Alone)

2009-12-19T14:14:00.000-08:00

I am looking out on my white snowy garden, watching a tiny mouse run along the edge of the wall, eating German Christmas cookies, listening to the CD I bought at Tuesdays Dom concert by the "Stockholms Musikgymnasiums Kammarkör." This choir was the first-place winner of the International Chamber-Choir Competition in 2009. They were in Berlin to sing at the Federal Foreign Office, an event organized as a musical thanks to Germany for its support of the Swedish EU presidency. They sang there on Monday and at the Dom on Tuesday, presenting these two concerts for the big Swedish feast day of St. Lucia.

(As the name implies, this is a Chamber Choir from the music high school in Stockholm. It was begun in 1989 as an addition to the program for senior-level singers, a fact I note with mild interest, given the celebrations here this year commemorating reunification and the fall of the Wall, also in 1989.)

It was an entrancing evening, my first visit to the Berliner Dom, as I have been too cheap to pay the €5 admission just to look at yet another Baroque cathedral, especially one hailing from the 20th century and not one that Baroque composers such as Bach or Handel would ever have enchanted with their presence. And this one really is pretty much what its name implies - a huge dome sitting on its piers, enclosing an enormous unbroken interior space - no long, vaulted aisles or transept chapels - and without those peripheral spaces it is accoustically like sitting inside a huge bell. The music really rings.

St. Lucia became a biggie in Swedish lore although she was a Sicilian virgin martyr. (I researched the tradition once for a book I wrote for the Seattle Children's Museum; my younger daughter also did a report on this and I made her a Lucia outfit for her school presentation, although with fake candles. I consider myself fairly Lucia-friendly.) Lucia is celebrated as a 'bringer of light' on the darkest day of the year in one of the darkest parts of the world, and as a help during a terrible famine. Once when people were starving in Sweden, a boat filled with food was seen upon Lake Vannern, a woman at the helm with a glow about her head. She was recognized as Lucia because one of the other legends already circulating about her was that she took food to Christians hiding in the catacombs and in order to see her way through the tunnels she wore candles on her head. This early headlamp became her trademark and explains why the Swedish Lucia girl - or "bride" - wears a crown of candles as she takes her tray of coffee and buns around the neighborhood. There are enough versions of how Lucia lost her eyeballs - later miraculously restored, of course! - to fill a whole blog entry alone.

The choir - about 40 singers aged 16-19 - was dressed in full Lucia Day regalia: the girls wore long white gowns with red satin sashes, red and green twined garlands on their heads and the boys wore starboy outfits which only need ruffled collars and large black pompoms to double as costumes for a producion of Pagliacci. They are basically white pajamas and tall white pointed hats with varying degrees of decoration - star and moon cutouts and a few strands of tinsel for the most part. (It looked suspiciously as though the young men had made and decorated their own hats.) It was a little hard to take them seriously at first, looking like so many overgrown schoolboy dunces of another century, but their musicality more than made up for the initial distraction of this peculiar traditional garb.

The choir processed down the main aisle of the darkened Dom, holding candles - yes! real lighted candles! - which provided most of the light for the whole evening, and once they were in position in front of the altar they sang the Lucia bride down the aisle on her own. This girl didn't get to sing very much as her job was to carry the blazing 7-candle gold crown on her head to the front of the choir and stand there - also holding a candle in her hands - while being serenaded by her choirmates for the first half of the concert. She was able to join the singing once the conductor finally lifted the crown off and laid it on a stand, where it continued to flame for the second half, making a weird candelabrum with definite medieval reliquary overtones. (But then, I had just been to see a fine collection of such medieval objects at the Kunstgewerbemuseum and was particularly alert to this echo.) The crown goes beyond a mere 4-candle Advent wreath - there are 6 long, thick candles around the head and one right on top. It is this last one, with its necessary curved cross-pieces meeting at the top of the head, that gave it the feel of something still inhabited while sitting on its own. I admit to having gotten a little worked up over the fate of that poor 15-year-old Sicilian girl while gazing at this illuminated headpiece, musing on her story and the terrible sufferings imposed by intolerance while listening to haunting music in the semi-dark. Fortunately for my public face I did not cry until I got home.

So, they sang carols in Swedish and German - all the music memorized - and moved around within the space a bit for variety. At one point they spread out through the cathedral and performed a song that morphed and shifted chords among their various positions, which must have been very difficult both to perform and to direct in such a darkened cavernous space. It was eerie and mystical, all those trained voices clear as bells in a cold winter night, right on cue although they could barely see their director. They reassembled, sang "Silent Night" while the Lucia bride was once again crowned with the still-burning candles. They serenaded her back down the aisle to "Santa Lucia" and then followed her out with subsequent verses. They could not be persuaded to do an encore. We tried.

I followed this with a second concert on Wednesday evening, also at the Dom. This was by the 10-piece brass choir "German Brass" and although the first half of the program focused on Bach and Handel it had much more the feel of a pops concert, which was a little jarring during the swingier numbers of the second half as they perform right at the marble altar with its crucifix front and center. I was also reminded why all brass, all evening, has not been something I seek out with regularity. Don't get me wrong, they did wonderful things with their instruments - sounded very like an organ on Bach's great Toccata and Fugue, like saxophones and almost like strings a time or two, superb musicians all. But as with any choir of like instruments, the texture and timbre of the sound has a certain constant, no matter the efforts to vary the voices, tempo and mood. It was a LOT of brass.

I bought a cheap ticket from a man selling his in the lobby, figuring that with a brass concert the location wouldn't be as important to me as it had been for the choir concert, for which I bought a good seat. Since the concert did not sell out, though, we lucky holders of the humble seats were moved into better ones, a real bargain, although I seem to be a magnet for people who insist on whispering during performances.

Of the pops numbers they performed, the most memorable was their first encore (they did two), a number I almost know but can't quite place, a rhythmic Latin tune with great trombone slides. The choir had comprised 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 French horns, and a tuba; one of the horns also doubled as moderator, reciting a good bit of German doggerel to introduce each number in a most incomprehensible (to me) fashion. For the encore, however, all but two of them played trombone. After exiting to applause, a really large bass trombone (double bass? I know next to nothing about brass instruments) reappeared alone to begin the number. He was joined after a bit by a slightly smaller instrument who repeated the riff until a third and smaller one came out who repeated it again...and they kept coming and shrinking and playing until there were 8 trombones ranging in size from the large bass to one so tiny it looked like it could hang on a Christmas tree. They were like musical Matryushka dolls. (The other two musicians played maracas and guiro.) They were beautiful instruments, too, no doubt custom crafted for perfect sound. It was great fun, in spite of the crucifix.

I am off to my third Dom concert tomorrow, a late afternoon program of 17th century choral music. And then I hope to attend some at other venues, but it's hard to beat the Dom's offerings. However, St. Hedwig awaits, as does St. Marie and St. Nikolai so I will try and be generous with myself and make the rounds. So much music...

Weihnachtsman is Coming to Town

2009-12-07T05:17:00.000-08:00

Now that Christmas is looming, Berlin is filled with outdoor Christmas markets - Wiehnachtsmarkts - a six-week city-wide (region-wide) crafts fair and food fest, with ice rinks set up in the concrete plazas, even a sledding hill with a snow-making machine at one of them. There are pony rides, donkeys and reindeer to pet, sled-dogs who pull people in a wheeled contraption, children's trains, carousels, swings and huge ferris wheels, the kind with cabins instead of open bench seats. Think Vienna. Think "The Third Man". There are musicians, carolers, storytellers, nativity scenes, and giant-sized twirling wooden pyramids with carved figures going around and around in the breeze. As at home, the city trees are picked out in little white lights so it sparkles at night. Fortunately, there is not a single inflatable Frosty the Snowman to be seen.

The craft stalls range from hand-felted hats and slippers and amusing garlands of flowers to woodcarvings, jewelry, pottery and leather goods. In one, an Orthodox nun sells tacky reproductions of icons; in another is a blacksmith making iron hooks. There are Peruvians selling handknit sweaters and mittens and jewelry made from seashells. There are rows of patterned wax candles from Swaziland, soapstone items from Kenya, the ubiquitous wooden cats-on-chairs from Indonesia, eggshell mosaic bamboo bowls from Vietnam. My favorites are the few stalls run by individual craftspeople rather than the ones selling the mass-produced items, but even the mass-produced objects have a certain charm - the traditional German painted wooden ornaments and toys, the mechanical wind-up Santas and ducks, the beautiful leather gloves in more colors than I would ever need (but I covet every single one).

Being a collector, it is hard to pass up making a few purchases for myself, although I must be mindful of the eventual return trip home and the packing it will require. To make that a little less onerous, I am attempting to accumulate only small things, and to that end my Santa Claus collection now includes a tiny wooden Wiehnachtsman in a walnut shell case, and one in an impossibly tiny matchbox toyshop. I have also purchased a second walnut-shell piece, this one with a nativity scene and a tiny propeller on top to spin it around, to expand my over-the-top nacimiento display.

My favorite acquisition so far, however, is a nativity scene made in an old prayer book binding. I met the artist, an older gentleman from Austria, who uses tiny molds to make figures from ceramic clay, handpaints them all using a jeweler's loupe to help him see the fine detail work, and then constructs scenes of varying complexity, depending upon the size container he is using. He uses old boxes and books and shadowbox frames, mostly fairly small, but he has a huge one on display that must have hundreds of figures in it. In every single scene is the joyous "Jubelkarl", a goofy character from a 400-year-old Austrian tradition which I am still trying to decipher from the German handout I was given. Jubelkarl is apparently some sort of let's-look-on-the-bright-side of things Pollyanna, jolly no matter what the circumstances, and not associated with any particular holiday tradition. His presence in these nativities is completely whimsical. He wears 17th-century Austrian garb and is waving his hat about with happy abandon.

The markets are also crammed with the usual German food stands, with some other regional specialties thrown in, like Hungarian Langos - the eastern European answer to Indian frybread, served with sheep's cheese, tomatoes, sauce - and Dresdner Handbröt which requires an outside brick oven to bake the handmade bread stuffed with cheese to a melting wonder. There's wurst, potatoes in a dozen incarnations, huge pans of cooking mushrooms and onions, kraut and kale, flame-cooked salmon, goulash and soups, pasta, pizza, crepes, pastries, candies, and hot chocolate so thick you have to eat it with a spoon. My favorites are the nuts that are tumbled with a sugar mixture in a heated copper kettle until the sugar has cooked into a crunchy coating. Still warm from the vat they are excruciating. My dentist would be appalled at my consumption. The candy stalls also sell frosted gingerbread heart cookies of varying sizes (some of them must be 18" across) that are strung with ribbons and worn around the neck, and another newbie to me, the Schaumküsse, which are fluffy cylinders of lightly flavored delicate marshmallow cream dipped in a variety of chocolate coatings. (Can you tell by my loving description that I have also consumed several of these?) There is also, of course, beer. And Glühwein; everywhere Glühwein. (The German word for lightbulb is "Glühlampe"; I'm not sure if the warm spiced wine derives its similarly glowing name from the effect it has on its consumers - perhaps the glowing feelings it bestows, or the eventual transformation of those drinkers' noses from mere prosaic fleshy extrusions into something more incandescent. I may never know.)

So far I have no plans for Christmas myself. With the dollar continuing to drop against the Euro, an expedition to Crete is probably not in the cards. I thought about Mallorca as it's super-cheap to get there, but with Hannah gone I would have to board Maggie, which doesn't seem like it's in the cards, either. I am scoping out the Christmas concert scene and plan at least to get to a musical event or two, and will possibly go to Christmas dinner and a movie with an American friend from the Goethe Institute who is also familyless here. In any event, it's Christmas in Europe! What's not to love?

And Now a Word about Maggie

2009-11-17T03:57:00.000-08:00

I am greatly relieved to know that German dog names are every bit as stupid as American ones. We go to the dog park daily, where Maggie romps with an enormous assortment of beasts, some on a consistent enough basis to be getting to know their names and personalities. There is a French bulldog named Anton with a large wen above his left eye, an 8-month-old Great Dane puppy named Ludwig (who stands as high as what remains of my chest), several chocolate Labs named Oskar, a few diminutive no-breed Betties, a Bernese Mountain dog named Donna (Donna!) who barks at me, a Jack Russell terrier named Cesar, and another silly big mutt named Travis (but pronounced Trevvis), who is easily subdued by the Jack Russell terrier named Leo. There's a Tyler, a Lola, a Leila, a Fraulein, a Helmut, a Spike, a Boomer and a Martini. A puggle puppy named Fattska. An ancient Rottweiler named Bruno. Another indeterminate brindle mix named Bones. There are no fewer than FIVE dogs named Keira, one of whom is a Weimaraner who prances obsessively in circles and figure-eights with a soccer ball clamped firmly in her mouth. That is, when she's not chewing on rocks or paving stones. Sputnik's owner has been told by Russians that Sputnik is NOT a good name for a female dog; Maximilian is a shepherd mix who has dug a hole so far under a tree all that shows is his rear end and wagging tail when he's in it, sniffing for treasure.

Maggie is particularly attentive to the two entry gates, continually watching for newcomers, as she gets bored quickly sniffing the same old posteriors. She runs with each new arrival - madly - for about 30 seconds and then putzes around on her own until the next novelty turns up. Sometimes it's not a newcomer at all but a scuffle between kids already on the playground and Maggie is quick to present herself for consultation on how best to resolve the difficulty. Of course, the others all speak German so her suggestions fall on deaf ears. Large, floppy ears, for the most part.

I have spoken to a few other dog owners during these daily excursions, but I don't have good chit-chat German and cannot maintain much of a conversation yet, beyond asking name, age and breed. One friend I have made, however, is a very nice hockey player-turned sports-psychologist, a native from Munich who lived in Spokane for a while, playing hockey for the Chiefs. He's the only person I've met here (not that there have been many) who's even heard of Spokane, let alone Walla Walla. And he speaks very good English. He belongs to old Klara, who became permanently bonded with me one day when I gave her a dog treat for sitting so nicely when I told her to.

Wall Fall Down

2009-11-17T02:45:00.000-08:00

Monday, November 9, was Fall of the Wall day, the 20th anniversary of the breaching of the divisive behemoth that kept half Berlin prisoner for 30 years; not news to anyone, but an interesting day to be here.

It was an odd choice of date, to my thinking, being the same as the ghastly Kristallnacht in 1938.

It was also a kind of odd event, seemingly geared mostly to media and tourists, with the average Berliners somewhat unconcerned and going about their daily business as usual. Their big holiday was on Saturday, October 3, when businesses were closed for the celebration of German Reunification (with the French puppets...), so maybe they were sated with festivities. It's surprising to me that polls, as reported in the New York Times, show that there are still Germans, both east and westerners, who preferred the old, divided system, by some accounts as many as 1 in 8. There were certainly plenty of people who turned out for the day's "Festival of Freedom" but I didn't sense a particularly excited buzz anywhere. It was also an unfortunately cold and rainy day.

I spent the first part of that morning getting my one-year visa at the Ausländerbehörde, a somewhat humiliating adventure in German bureaucratese (as if German isn't hard enough to begin with!), and then wandered to the Brandenburg Gate and Pariser Platz to scrutinize the 1.5 kilometers of huge painted "dominoes" that were poised and waiting for Lech Walesa to push them into a second "Mauerfall" late in the afternoon. They were reminiscent of school and community projects everywhere, created mainly by kids but with a few by "real artists" thrown in for good measure and credibility, I suppose. It was outstanding mainly for the scope and range of the exhibit - laid out with German precision - which began at the far end of the Holocaust Memorial, ran straight past the U.S. Embassy, the Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag, and curved sharply several times to travel along the river, across a bridge, and into the final stretch along the opposite riverbank. There were few notable pieces of art involved, although there was an exceedingly funny one, obviously done by kids. One one side it depicted a happy couple at the beach, standing on the sand in their swimsuits, waving to the viewer. There were written instructions to look at the other side, where the same couple appeared in the same pose, this time in full frontal nudity.

There were some school groups out while I was there but they appeared to be kids whose school or class had painted one of these thousand dominoes. Many of them were dressed in official participant T-shirts or silver jackets, the jacketed ones being allowed inside the protective barricades to stand with their own projects. One security guard became enraged at a few of them, however, for playing hide and seek around the artworks, no doubt paranoid that the entire event would be ruined on his watch by the accidental triggering of the cascade of monoliths. The kids appeared to have the fear of God put into them and Lech got to do his thing, so the guy was at least successful in preserving the day's climax until the appointed time.

For some inexplicable reason, Jon Bon Jovi was the headline entertainment. Daniel Barenboim at least had the good sense to conduct a program of the Staatskapelle and Staatsopernchor by German composers in the tent specially constructed for this outdoor event; what Bon Jovi has to do with ANYTHING is beyond me. At the very least I would have thought they'd choose Peter Fox if they needed a pop star to get people's attention. A German; a Berliner perhaps? Maybe Peter was on tour. But wasn't Barenboim enough???

I didn't hang around for the speechifying, music and evening fireworks. I had enough of a crowd encounter on Reunification Day. Hillary, Angela, Mikhail, Lech and the gang seemed to pull it all off without a hitch, and without any help from me.

Holidays

2009-11-03T13:03:00.000-08:00

Halloween has come to Germany, well, sort of, and last weekend Hannah had a very well attended costume party for which I helped decorate. I brought a number of "Helloween" pumpkins (according to the sign at my grocery store) which we carved, cut out paper skulls and bats, and draped a few wisps of fake spiderweb around. I dressed as Pope Gregory VII, about whom Hannah had that day turned in a paper she had been working on for 6 months; I thought it only fitting to come as her worst nightmare. I was rather pleased with the effect I achieved with a large gold gift bag and a white tablecloth.

Next up is Thanksgiving. My brothers and sisters-in-law are all coming and Hannah and I are planning a full American event at her apartment, with turkey, stuffing, potatoes, gravy, Brussels sprouts and my family's one culinary heirloom, Cranberry Ice, which I will concoct and then transport on the tram, arriving at Hannah's with a very cold lap, indeed. We have invited a number of American friends as well as the fam, and as Hannah is still a little short on furniture some of us may end up sitting on the floor. With that in mind I will leave the dog at home, for which everyone will be very thankful.

For Christmas I was thinking of going to Crete, as Hannah will be traveling home this year to attend an important wedding, and I had visions of myself being alone and homesick in an atmosphere of Dickensian revelry and White Christmas sentimentality in a city that looks so much like "home." I figured Crete would be foreign enough to conjure few associations for me and keep me almost blissfully unaware of Christmas at all. Now, however, I think I will just stay put and take the trip to Crete later with Hannah, as my Christmas present to both of us, and find some ingenious way of coping with the holiday and all its reminders. Too bad the museums won't be open.

Blogged Down II

2009-11-03T13:01:00.000-08:00

My blogging pace has certainly slowed down with my settling into life here. My routines are now not unlike what they were at home, just a few thousand miles away and with a serious sausage flavor. I get up, let the dog out, make coffee, put the couch together, eat some breakfast, feed the dog, write for an hour, shower, dress, paint or read for a while, make lunch, take the dog to the dog park, do some shopping, write some emails, have some skype chats, make dinner, do the dishes, feed the dog, paint a little, read some more, fold out the bed, let the dog out, read in bed, and sleep. I might throw in an afternoon nap, too, if my morning reading has been particularly exhausting. On Sundays I do laundry and go to flea markets, but these are beginning to lose their novelty and blur into one big, slightly foreign yard sale, with a lot of old record albums, electrical cords and plastic egg cups on display. I did buy a mirror one weekend, however.

A lot of the museums are open on Sunday, and are likely to serve as replacement outings for the flea markets. Today I bought a year pass for the cluster that is run by the Stadt of Berlin, so I can just pop into any of them I choose when I am out and about. I spent a part of the afternoon today at the Bode, in the medieval sculpture rooms mostly, until I got saturated with the lushly carved wooden drapery and gilded robes of saints and martyrs, the bland and beatific features of countless Virgins and their orb-headed infants, and began to be disturbed by the violent gestures and grisly allusions animating so much of Christian art. And so to lunch in the museum cafe and a browse in the bookstore, where I found a good book in English on the art and architecture of Berlin. An excellent find. And an excellent museum in a stunning building. I look forward to more curious wandering among the plinths and vitrines.

I had coffee later in the day with a new German friend, our first meeting as Tandem partners - she helps me with my German and I help her with her English - but we spent the whole time auf Deutsch with me struggling both to say what I wanted to say and understand what she said in return. We laughed a lot. I think I am more motivated to work on my German than she is on her English, which works well for me, although my motivation does not extend to doing much study on my own at home, which would help a lot... Next week we will go to a museum together, perhaps the Neues Museum to gape at the newly returned Nefertiti, who has not been on view there in 70 years. Egypt keeps trying to get her back but I don't think they'll ever succeed. Berlin has too strong a hold on her. It is developing a strong hold on me, too.

Falling Back

2009-10-28T14:52:00.000-07:00

Fall again, and feeling winterish with the end of daylight savings time. It's misty, not terribly cold the last few days, and cozily pretty in the way this change of season is each year - the darker days making the inside lights so very inviting, yellow leaves almost unbearably busy on the wet pavement, all of it an inkling that the holidays are coming back for their 58th run at me.

I have been out of school for a week and I miss the daily hours of immersion in the language and my social network, such as it was, not to mention the physical activity of the walks and all the stairs I had to climb to get there. I've maintained one friendship from the class (some of the others had to go back home), but I am now really footloose and completely free here and it's a little disorienting. There is so much to do I don't know where to begin.

I was hoping that making a plan for tackling Berlin would ease my anxiety over the "what DID you do with your year in Berlin?" question that sits so inevitably on my horizon, and to that end I have been making a list of the museums and sights I want to see. There are 178 museums here; I don't want to see them all, thank goodness. I will happily miss sports and medieval torture exhibits, nor am I particularly drawn to the spectacle of German politicians debating - in German - at the Reichstag. (The view from the dome I will take in at some point, but probably not until the weather turns again, which could be another 6 months.) The art and history museums are a must, a few of the stately homes and schlosses, even the Thing Museum (Museum der Dinge), but I put my foot down at the idea of the Currywurst Museum. NOTHING about currywurst is worth preserving. But my plan is beginning to come together so the next challenge will be to get out and actually follow it.

My best friend was here for a week. We did a few museums together when I wasn't in class, and had amusing dinners with our two Berlin children, who are now roommates of a sort. I went to the Berlinische Galerie with two school buddies, went to the International Illustrators Forum on my own this weekend, and have had other amusing dinners with friends at interesting cafes. I have been attending to a few domestic details like purchasing a washing machine and more coat hangers. (Imagine! Having to buy coat hangers! I thought they magically multiplied in your closet. Not so.) I read a lot. I write. I take pictures. I go to flea markets and bookstores. I walk the dog to the dog park every day and explore the neighborhood. Today we went farther afield at the park and discovered another whole huge section of it, much prettier than where we've been hanging out, with ponds and log fences, a Japanese bridge and gong, a fountain, even a restaurant and a sculpture garden. We (well, I at any rate; I don't think the dog noticed) had a great Manet moment, looking across the misty pond in the flat light at a woman in a long pink coat walking under a pale blue umbrella.

And still I worry that I am not doing enough now that class is over. I looked into a weekly life drawing session at a gallery that's still marginally in my neighborhood and will go from time to time. It will be a way to meet some more people and speak some German but it's at night, rarely a good time for me to be working as my eyes give out by then, and more importantly my creative energy takes a nosedive. The thing to do is to let go of the worry. It's like test anxiety, and I could probably spend the energy more profitably pondering the wonder of being in Berlin at all.

Life Skills

2009-10-22T00:32:00.000-07:00

People who think you can just get by with English in Berlin are mistaken, which makes me more and more glad I took the 8 weeks to glean a bit of German as I settle in. It's fine if you're a tourist, as there are always English speakers in the hotels and some restaurants, the museums and major sights. But life abroad is not turning out to be one prolonged tourist stay. I must deal with the necessities of life here just as I do at home - and for now this IS home - and that requires German. I am very happy to have struggled through the classes on banking, the post office, body parts, weather, travel, and occupations. We even had an ex tempore lesson in dog poop one day, a subject not covered in our workbook.

With my shiny new level B.1.1 German vocabulary I have been able to negotiate the following, where English has not been an option:

• speaking with a veterinary assistant to describe Maggie's ailment and make an appointment;
• purchasing a used washing machine with a one-year warranty; including delivery and installation;
• getting Maggie and me registered with two different city departments;
• getting help with my internet surf stick (my building is not yet set up for DSL);
• haggling over the price of a mirror at the flea market (netted me 10 Euros off! I still think I overpaid);
• getting a haircut and maintaining a conversation with the operator;
• discussing cold remedies with the practitioner at the Apotheke and getting myself dosed;
• making purchases at Oktoberfest stalls;
• getting a customer card for my grocery store;
• talking to people at the dog park.

I don't mean to imply that I am in any way fluent. I stumble and stutter, mispronounce, misuse, misunderstand, and generally abuse this new tool of mine. I suffer especially from the frustration of having enough language to do these basic things, but not enough to make real conversation or understand everything I read. A friend of mine from class said it best when he said, "I'll be glad when I can make a sentence that doesn't just use nouns," and although we've moved beyond that Tarzan-speak by now, it still feels like I'm swinging gracelessly through the trees, whacking into things, and thumping my chest to make myself understood. It's great fun.

Church Bells

2009-10-18T13:48:00.000-07:00

It is Sunday morning, my eighth weekend here. There are several churches nearby and their bells are ringing, as they do several times a day, every day. I am no longer a churchgoer but I love the sound of these bells; not musical - too much iron for that, but confident and comforting somehow, and infinitely more satisfying than the electric carillon that spews Protestant hymns from a certain church at home, which I find maudlin and intrusive. The bells here give me the same sensation I get when the furnace kicks on - it feels like someone is home and taking care of things. They also remind me of my favorite Christmas record ever, one that must be almost as old as I am, an album my mother had, called "Christmas in Europe," and which was one of the few old family LPs we saved after she died. It begins and ends with a peal of bells, ostensibly from a picturesque European church akin to these. Pavlov would love my elevated heart rate and daily anticipation of opening presents.

It is unlikely that I will attend church again in response to the (Heaven help me) appealing beckoning of the bells. In addition to my antipathy towards religion in general (a diatribe just waiting to happen) I admit to a certain cultural prejudice against German churchgoing in particular, instilled in me no doubt by my early and frequent exposure to this line from "The Mikado", whose eponymous personage makes a fanciful use of the institution as a sublime punishment:

All prosy dull society sinners who chatter and bleat and bore
Are sent to hear sermons by mystical Germans who preach from ten till four.

What I set out to write about, however, is not church at all, but the sense of community for which I continually search and am sometimes successful in finding. The church bells remind me of my yearning to belong. If I were a Christian, finding a church community here would be the first thing I would do. There's one almost literally in my back yard, so it wouldn't be hard. But Christian I am not, so I resist the bells and their invitation, and will seek community elsewhere.

I have had some great experiences feeling part of a community. I have encountered it in workplaces, neighborhoods, volunteer organizations, boards and committees, and in groups as varied as concert band and my Goethe Institute German class. The German class is now coming to a close - just two days left! - and with it my sense of daily connection with a place and the only group of people I have come to know so far in Berlin.

I will find other groups to ramble around in. Perhaps a painting class or a less intensive language course, a women's group or even a music ensemble. I could try dog obedience, or a book group. An exercise class or a lecture series. But none of these will have bells to tell me where to go. Churches at least let you know they are there.

Keys

2009-10-15T12:46:00.000-07:00

I don't know much about apartment living in the States any more as I've lived in houses since 1976. Here, when you sign your lease, you also get all the copies of the keys to your place. There's no super with a master set. It's important not to lock yourself out.

I managed to do so, however, a couple of weeks ago, just as the housing agent was coming by to pick up his finder's fee. I took the garbage out and didn't realize until I came back inside that I had shut the always-locked-front-door behind me and had only my cell phone, but no keys, in my pocket. It was late in the afternoon and beginning to get chilly. The dog was inside, along with my keys, and my coat.

I had given my second set of keys to Hannah, who is a 10-minute tram ride away, so I called her to see if she could bring them to me, as I was expecting the housing agent any minute. She ran out to get the tram, which only runs every 20 minutes, and then called me to suggest I meet her at the tram stop so she could just stay on and get back home. She had friends coming over.

The housing agent arrived just as I was calling him to tell him what had happened and that my daughter was on her way with the keys. He left for another appointment, but was coming back in a half hour. I left to go meet the tram. Five minutes later Hannah called back to say that bus service had been substituted for the tram and had changed the schedule just enough so that she had missed the one to my house, and she couldn't wait for the later one. I would have to go to her.

But by then I had had an idea. The flat next door to me is still vacant and we have a shared back yard. I remembered leaving my back door open, so if the housing agent had the keys with him to that place, I could go through, step over the fence and get back in. I called him again, he did have the keys, so I walked back from the bus stop to the building. He arrived with the keys, I went into the back yard, and no, I hadn't left the back door open after all. There was Maggie, looking bewildered out the window at me.

Mr. Housing Agent had to go to another appointment and agreed to return in a day or two for his cash. So back I went to get the bus for Hannah's, told the bus driver in my faltering German the only story I could manage, which was that I had lost my wallet with my buss pass in it and had to get to my daughter's, and he kindly let me on. The driver on the return trip was not so nice. In fact he was downright nasty, and to escape his radiating malevolence I got off a stop early and walked the rest of the way home in the dark.

Blogged Down

2009-10-15T12:13:00.000-07:00

I think I am finally rested from the strain of planning and executing this move. I no longer need to sleep for 12 hours at a time and then take a nap a little later. It has interfered with my hobbies. Like blogging. Or doing anything to blog about.

The weather has turned cold; it just went from summer to winter with only a brief courtesy wave at fall. Days of wind and rain alternate with a day or two of bright blue sky, so it's hardly cheerless, at least not yet. We are still on the German version of daylight savings time, so it will only get darker and colder, and the festive Christmas markets will not last through the whole long winter. I think January could get a little grim. Might be the time for me to travel to Spain...

The building behind mine is wrapped in plastic like a Christo installation and it magnifies the sound effects of the wind. I kind of like it. I feel accompanied, somehow, as though I have my own foley artist making me feel glad to be cozily inside. I need a hat.

By the end of next week I will have been here two months. My German course is almost finished; just another 3 classes. I am pleased with my progress on several fronts: a) my language skills have improved; b) I have made some good friends; c) I have dropped the whole competitive over-achiever need to excel and fear of failure. I learn what I learn and work however hard I want to work, which isn't very, and enjoy myself along the way. It's been fun to make tangible strides, to go from such a meager level of comprehension to being able to understand at least most of what is said in class, and to be able to construct some rudimentary conversations. I will miss the structure, the stimulation, and the people when this is over; I will not miss waking up to an alarm clock (my cell phone, with its perky "Beach" theme) every morning nor having so much of my time consumed by just one activity. I am looking forward to a wider exploration of Berlin.

The Goethe Institute offers a lot of additional cultural experiences to their students but I have not taken advantage of these outings. At first I was just too tired to do anything else, and now I don't want to leave the dog home alone for too long at a time, as most of these extras take place after a brief break for lunch on school days. I can't say enough good about the Goethe Insitute, however, and I may take an evening class or two over the winter. It's been an excellent experience and the people have been a hoot. And German? Well, German will be impossible to master so I can work on it for the rest of my life and still be learning something new. It will be completely reliable on that front.

German Oddities

2009-10-07T12:02:00.000-07:00

I. The current German fashion must-have is a long, soft scarf, wrapped around the neck the way Isadora Duncan's must have been wrapped around that hubcap. Around and around and around. Weather and temperature make no difference - 60 degrees and raining, scarves abound. 70 and sunny, ditto. I like a scarf myself, when my neck is cold, which it is NOT when it is 70 degrees outside. One day in early September Hannah and I were on the S-Bahn going to Ikea. It was quite warm, so Hannah opened the top window so we could at least get some air movement. A woman in the seat across from us made quite a point of rewrapping her scarf and pulling it up OVER HER CHIN. Sheesh.

II. Maggie and I have found a small off-leash area at the Friedrichshain Volkspark. The offleash parks I've been to at home are usually occupied by people chatting and throwing balls and dogs running to chase things. At this one, however, the people just stand around. They lean against the fence, don't talk to each other and mostly they don't throw balls, which means that mostly the dogs just stand around, too, not talking to each other and not chasing things. Maggie tries her hardest to get a game going but these German dogs just don't seem much interested. Perhaps it's the language barrier. Once Maggie begins to just stand around I know it is time to go home. Again I say, sheesh.

III. Street food is abundant and ubiquitous here; you can get just about anything: wursts of all kinds, hot dogs, Turkish döner and falaffel, pizza, sushi, Asian noodles and egg rolls, local bakery goods, Italian gelato, potatoes, sandwiches, fresh fruit, crepes, American hamburgers (and I don't mean McDonald's. These are honest-to-goodness real old-fashioned American burgers!). One of the most popular treats is the currywurst, which I felt obliged to try one day at the flea market. Never let it be said I don't sample the local specialties when they present themselves. This particular local specialty consisted of a large bland bratwurst, conveniently cut into rounds in a paper boat, sprinkled with a soupçon of curry powder, and then doused with catsup-based barbecue sauce. Served with a toothpick for tidy dining; this is one local specialty I won't be resampling.

Reunification

2009-10-06T11:54:00.000-07:00

This weekend was the celebration of the 20th Anniversary of German Reunification and the Fall of the Wall. One of the big attractions (oh, this is an unintentional pun) here in Berlin was the 3-day performance by 2 gigantic French marionettes ("Die Riesen"), a little girl looking for her uncle who, inexplicably, is dressed in a deep-sea diving costume, and stands 15 meters high. For two days they meandered separately around the center of Berlin, with their teams of cranes and people swinging from cables to move their limbs, and on the evening of the second day they were, yes, reunited, and spent Sunday wandering together, eventually leaving in a boat. Did I mention they were French?

I saw a brief video clip of their previous performance of this drama in the streets of Paris (funny, I don't remember a reunification issue in France), and decided it would be an interesting spectacle. I invited Hannah to go with me to Pariser Platz on Saturday for the experience. Crowded doesn't begin to describe it. Even when viewing pre-Popemobile John Paul II in Paris 30 years ago, I don't know that I've been part of such a large mass of living organisms all trying to see the same thing at the same time. (I'm sure the crowd would have reduced its volume by at least a third had those huge baby strollers been banned. There's a reason why the Victorian pram became outmoded! Why don't people understand this?) And had I not misunderstood the printed schedule, we might actually have been able to see at least one of the puppets in action.

I thought they finished at 3:00, so we went down around 2:00. No, apparently they took a midday break and didn't begin again until 3:00, so what we saw was the girl puppet sleeping, complete with snoring sound effects. That's it. A few giant snores and a half million Germans. Hannah had brought a friend and neither of them wanted to wait a long time to see if something would transpire, so we exited Pariser Platz and went to a large special-event flea market at Ostbanhof instead. It, too, alas, was a flop. Nary a trinket caught my eye nor was Hannah satisfied in her continual search for furniture.

On my way home I had the oddest sensation of being in Seattle. There is a tram stop near a bridge that has the same feel to it as any of a number of the Seattle bridges, and the street even feels a bit like First Avenue. Very dreamlike and disorienting; surreal; like waking up and not knowing where you are. Perhaps I was unconsciously imitating the little giant girl who perhaps should have awakened in Paris...

September 28-29

2009-10-03T09:58:00.000-07:00

Monday was a HORRIBLE day. German was tedious, the weather had changed, no one had any energy, and I thought poor Herr Muttschall would tear his hair. I hit a depressed funk.

I went home with the intention of going back out to get anmelded but I couldn’t get off the couch once I had sat down. The handyman’s window shades continued in their closed position so I couldn’t get any help for the non-working refrigerator, and when I took Maggie out for a walk it started to rain. We went up to the Volkspark anyway, but there were a Great Dane, two French bulldogs and a Chihuahua in the off-leash area and I wasn’t sure about turning Maggie loose on such an odd assemblage. I could just see her caroming into the Dane and breaking its hip, or having an unintentional game of boules with the bulldogs and Chihuahua. So we just walked for a while, always a good antidote to depression.

Bought a half a roasted chicken on the way home for dinner – oh, they are so good here!

I decided to tackle the depression by making a plan for getting done the things that were most bugging me. The plan was to take Tuesday off from the Goethe Institute, get the fridge problem solved, go to the Bürgeramt to register, then get a bank account and take care of the internet order; do some miscellaneous shopping, as I still need some basics like a broom and hotpads. I had found a bakery with a “free internet here” sign just around the block so that figured into the mix as well. I was feeling very cut off, now living on my own, without email or Hannah’s landline which Sally can call for free so we can all talk.

Tuesday morning, the handyman’s shade is up! Knock on the door, talk with his assistant who informs me they don’t deal with problems like that and I’ll have to call the landlord. I call him and leave a message, then head out to anmeld. There’s a two-hour wait, for which I was prepared with my NYT crossword puzzle book. Got the stamp, but can’t register the dog at the same office; will require a cross-town trek to a different department. Went to the bank and had a pleasant experience opening my account but came out in a rainstorm and decided to forego the internet order and just go home. I took a side street I was sure would put me out at my main drag, but no, it took me way off somewhere with no cross streets, so I couldn’t even exit it. Finally ended up at an S-Bahn station, took the train back to where I started, went to the U-Bahn stop where I can get the tram up to my street. But I got turned around in the underground and came up kitty-corner across a huge platz from where the tram stops and decided it was probably shorter just to walk home at that point. Then it REALLY started to pour and by the time I got home I was as wet as I’ve ever been – raincoat soaked through, shoes squishing puddles, pant knees sopping.

And now I’m at the internet bakery and either their network is not working or my laptop can't interface with their system. Another day without my internet connections, and I didn’t even get it ordered yet. And I haven’t heard from the landlord about my fridge. I will continue with the bananas and peanut butter, I guess.

In spite of all this, it was nice to take a day off from school. That really batters my brain for 5 hours a day. In hindsight, a two- or three-day-a-week program would have suited my needs just fine. I think I chose the Goethe Institute because of its starting dates.

Mühsings – Sunday, September 27

2009-09-30T11:08:00.000-07:00

Maggie and I walked around our new area yesterday for a bit – between Ikea headaches – and discovered a chicken roaster (my favorite!), a bakery (my favorite!), a little park (Maggie’s favorite!) and various cafes and restaurants; even a little art supply store. The Evangelical church nearby has pleasant bells and looks as though it is a concert venue, although the sign only posted summer concerts through September 19.

Today we had a VERY leisurely day. I pulled some weeds in my back weed patch (found the nettles) and discovered that there’s a pear tree just over my back wall. Also an owl, and a pussycat. No pea-green boat, but it’s the first cat I’ve seen in Berlin and I’ve already been here a month. And maybe it’s not an owl. It hooted all day long. I found a snail shell in spite of my efforts to avoid that particular metaphor when thinking about my situation; and a very oddly shaped black rock with a whitish coating, that looks more like a piece of whale vertebra than a rock. Can’t imagine what it is.

After these riveting discoveries I went to the flea market and bought a round, red carved wood-framed mirror (my new couch is red), which I probably won’t even be able to hang because of my solid masonry walls, and then walked the dog to the Friedrichshain Volkspark, where we happily found an off-leash dog play area. Maggie did her bit to uphold the image of the clumsy, stupid American, ricocheting off people, dogs, fencing, and trees with a look of mad glee. This dog needed to run. She had a WONDERFUL time. I’m not so sure about the other dogs.

Got the stink-eye again today! And a lecture to go with it, although I couldn’t understand it and completely ignored the woman who was scolding me for crossing against the light on the way home from the park. Sometimes it’s nice to be uncomprehending. There was not a car in sight for a mile in any direction. Wish I knew how to say “Get a life” in German, but it’s probably more satisfying in the long run just not to have acknowledged the diatribe at all.

I have lovely radiant heat in my floors. Very cozy on this chilly evening.

I am exhausted. It is 7 p.m. and I’m already eyeing my sofa-bed with a deep desire to lie down and see what happens.

Mühsamstrasse Lives up to its Name

2009-09-30T03:07:00.003-07:00

I completed the move to Mühsamstrasse on Saturday, and mühsam it was. After Wednesday and Thursday afternoons at Ikea (30 minutes by subway plus an 8-block walk) Friday was my day for assembling things, at least my sofa-bed so I could sleep here starting Friday night and avoid yet one more first-thing-in-the-morning encounter with the stairs at Hannah’s just to let the dog out. Such are my priorities.

As I did not want to spend any more days shopping than absolutely necessary, I got as much as I could at Ikea on Thursday – sofa bed, under-bed storage box, mattress, couch cover, pillow, sheets, armchair, footstool, wardrobe, pots, silverware, knives, cutting boards, mixing bowls, coffee press, dish rack, 2 cabinets and some storage bins for Hannah. And yes, it’s STILL cheaper than renting a furnished flat, and everything is new and clean. No questions asked. But it was bulky, heavy stuff and I had to go through the store twice.

Because I also took a large bookcase off Hannah’s hands and purchased a table at a thrift store, I needed a different kind of delivery service than Ikea offers, which is priced according to how much you spend. I thought about renting a van, and even recruited some of the young men in my German class to help, until one of them mentioned having seen “Möbil Taxi” trucks around the city. These are freelancers with trucks parked out front of various stores, who deliver furniture for a flat fee, based on where you live, and will make as many stops as you need; you just pay per stop.

After I found a guy who spoke English I hired one of these outfits in the Ikea parking lot, and made my first pass through the store. (Got the stink-eye from the cashier for not having my barcodes all neatly lined up.) I stashed my stuff with the truckers until I came out with the second batch (got the stink-eye from the guy ahead of me in line, whom I ran into with my wardrobe box because I couldn’t see the front of my cart) and then hopped in the truck and took off with two strange men. Imagine my mother doing this! The driver could speak English and he informed me that he was in Berlin because he was in trouble with one of the four construction companies he works for in Poland. I didn’t ask for details.

Friday after school I loaded up my suitcases and miscellany from Hannah’s (except for the dog and her bed), called a taxi (avoiding 6 round trips by myself on the tram), and arrived to begin my assembling. Started with the thrift-store table to get it out of the way and so I’d have a work surface. Easy as pie. Started next on the Ikea footstool. One hole wasn’t drilled deep enough to accept the final piece of hardware. Maybe the building super will have a drill. I’m NOT going back to Ikea. Put that aside and moved on to the critical piece, the sofa-bed. Missing four bolts. Another night spent at Hannah’s, another missed tram and walk back to Boxhagenerstrasse, another morning greeting the %#$% stairs with the dog at 6:30. Good thing I didn’t move the dog bed.

Saturday I returned – this time with the dog and all her belongings, by tram – and started putting together the wardrobe until I could muster the energy to head to the hardware store for the bolts for the bed (1 tram, 1 subway and a four-block walk). Died and went to Ikea hell for a while trying to figure out the directions, but the solution came to me, as so many do, as I lay on the floor in a puddle of tears.

To finish the job I needed a hammer and a bigger screwdriver than the little interchangeable one I brought with me, which was beginning to inflict stigmata on my palms. I went to the apartment I thought was the building super’s, only to find quite a lovely young woman tenant instead, who willingly lent me some tools and came back with me to see if she could figure out why the refrigerator doesn’t work. No clue. But she did know that the building “super” keeps an office around the corner, and does not work on weekends, although the estate agent told me he lived here. He’s not even a super, more of a for-hire handyman who keeps the grounds clean. A few days without refrigeration. I can live on bread, peanut butter and bananas until Monday.

Then I negotiated the huge Home-Depot-type hardware store, got my bolts and a lamp for the kitchen so I could cook dinner. (People take their light fixtures with them when they move; and their medicine chests, toilet paper holders, and towel rods. I’m not kidding. They strip the places clean.) Got another stink-eye from a grumpy cashier for being slow on the uptake when she asked me if I needed a bag for my items (you have to buy bags here), and realized I hadn’t eaten lunch. It was 5:00.

There’s a nice little grocery store just a half block from my place so I stopped on the way home for some provisions; Hannah came for dinner and to finish the furniture for me, as my back had given out. So now I’m done. Except that I forgot to buy salt and the store is closed on Sunday. Oh well, I don’t need salt for peanut butter and bananas, anyway.

Homesick? Nope.

2009-09-20T02:49:00.000-07:00

After three weeks I am suffering from a mild case of what could be called "buyer's remorse"- what was I thinking, moving to Europe????

This was supposed to be cheap! It is not being cheap!

This was supposed to be cultural! It is not being cultural!

I'm stuck in the middle of money hassles and haven't yet settled into any sort of normal life that will allow me to freely explore the city, let alone get out of it on forays farther afield. I'm still tripping over my suitcases in Hannah's apartment, trying to overcome fatigue and the overwhelming need to sleep (what's that about, anyway?), trying to cadge together enough cash to pay the deposit (and three months' rent in advance) on Musahmstrasse (have I just committed apartment-fail?), anxious about furnishing the place once I get the keys (am I stupid to have settled for an unfurnished flat?), and stressing about how little I've actually seen of Berlin (six apartments, Ikea, the Goethe Institute, one department store, one flea market, and a bratwurst stand). No museums, no Reichstag, no cathedral, not even a sightseeing cruise on the river. A lot of the Goethe Institute.

But at least I'm not homesick.

There are certainly things to miss at home - my younger daughter, my brothers, my friends, my other dogs, my furnished house; but I find that missing those things is more a noticing of differences than a homesickly yearning. (Email, Skype, cell phones, blogs and FaceBook help a lot.) Yes, I miss my daughter Sally terribly, but then I always do, whether I'm in the States or not. (I miss both my daughters all the time, and even when I'm with them I'm reminded of their childhood selves - bittersweet memories, to be sure - and am sad that it all went by so quickly. The cliche of middle-aged mothers everywhere. I hate being a cliche, but there you have it.) I miss having Saturday breakfast with my brother John and wandering the Walla Walla farmers' market, but now I have Saturday breakfast with Hannah and wander the Boxhagenerplatz farmers' market. I miss the conveniences and yes, spaciousness, of my little house on Newell Street, but find the under-the-kitchen-counter washing machine here amusing, and have adjusted to having drying racks with damp underwear in the middle of the living room on weekends. Hey! I'm living in Europe!! What's to miss???

Homesickness plagued my younger years. I was the kid who was always homesick on overnights, even just through the back fence at the neighbor's. I was homesick at kindergarten, homesick at high-school summer camp, homesick away at college. I believe I always felt a piece of myself was missing when I was away from home, some keystone that would keep me from collapsing. I stopped feeling that way when I moved to New York after college and discovered I was, in fact, fairly self-contained and reliable, becoming a competent adult, learning life skills like apartment- and job-hunting and how to master a subway system. It's hard to be homesick once you realize your home is you. Another cliche, I know, but cliches, like stereotypes, are grounded in a bit of truth.

As annoyed as I am with Berlin right now - the bureaucratic and financial glitches, the dirt and noise of this part of Friedrichshain, the kaputtnichkeit of the S-Bahn, the unsmiling people on the street, the culture of alcohol and tobacco (firearms left to the States), the difficulty with language - I'm still not homesick. In fact, I love it here. And it will be cheap - after tomorrow I won't have to pay rent again until January and my deposit I'll recover when I leave. It will be cultural - with afternoons no longer spent foraging for an apartment and furnishings I will have time to scour the Museumsinsel and art galleries. In November, after my eight weeks at the Goethe Institute are over, even my mornings will be free. Maggie especially will enjoy that. And maybe the Muse will return and I'll be able to paint. I won't even go into the puns that occur to me with the Muse and Muhsamstrasse.

Buyer's remorse? I guess not.

Catch-22

2009-09-17T13:01:00.000-07:00

Let's talk about apartment hunting, shall we?

I saw my first two apartments in Berlin in June, during my nine-day visit with Hannah. I registered with an English-speaking housing agency that specializes in furnished flats; they sent me out on the viewing appointments. One was a lovely, bright street-side apartment with a small balcony, but I found the surrounding area to be somewhat lifeless and bordered by grim allees, the long, wide boulevards that change from strip-mall to upscale shopping to dead zone to major commercial center. (It was also a fifth-floor walkup...). The second was in a great area but was only one room, dominated by an ugly bed, with the shower stall IN THE KITCHEN, and the WC in a peculiar little space with a deep window and crawl space behind the toilet. It was also dark, being on the inside of the building. Great people as landlords - two art historians and cute baby - living in the next flat; would have been fun to get well acquainted with them but the room would have made me feel like the poor orphan girl in "The Little Princess." So ixnay on emthay.

I spent the summer back home communicating with ExBerlinerFlats, but could not commit to anything online; was simply hoping for there to be something I could send Hannah to go see for me in person. Nothing. So I tried Craigslist, appealing because it's also in English, which should be rechristened Scam-o-Rama and forgotten by the world. 100% of the people who responded to my inquiries were scammers, and not particularly bright scammers, at that. In fact, maybe it's only one person whose hobby it is to list phantom apartments and see who will bite. There was a definite monotony to the stories being related: This flat is the most important thing in the world to me because I inherited it from my dead husband/wife and so your "absolute maintenance" of the place is of the utmost concern and oh by the way I am going to/already in West Africa on a mission and I have the keys with me but once you wire me a big deposit and several months' rent I have made arrangements to send the keys to you and really it looks just like it does in the pictures. I'm not kidding. There must have been at least a dozen of these with only minor variations.

Arriving in Berlin should have made things easier, as I could actually look at places. The first place was a great space - nicely furnished, near the river - and nothing nearby except block after block of apartment buildings. No shops, no cafes, no bakeries, no grocery stores. Nada, zilch, nothing. Not the European urban experience I'm looking for. I don't need Hipster Heaven, but a coffee shop at least is de rigueur.

The second place I went to sounded really promising, being more in the middle of old Berlin, also along the river, in an older restored building, on the first floor; also furnished. The building was truly stunning, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century striped masonry edifice with bay windows and a gracious entry. Again, the area wasn't quite as lively as I would have liked, but the building was so beautiful I would have made do. Except that the "first-floor" apartment turned out to be a dank basement room with Pergo floors and an old, dirty green couch to sleep on. Eeeew!

By spending a work-week's of hours deciphering German online newspaper ads and agency listings I finally understood enough to be able to send out some email inquiries. One guy responded promptly and we set up an appointment but then I remembered to tell him I have a dog and that was a deal-breaker. Understandable. One response was an auto-reply from an agency referring me to their website. I'm guessing they specialize in "fixer uppers" as most of the spaces were in pretty bad shape; one didn't even have a toilet installed, just the pipes where one had been. I did not bookmark their page.

It is very common here for people to take their kitchens with them when they move - sink, stove, fridge, even the cabinets and countertops. I find it a bizarre practice, but at least it helped me narrow my search results to places with cooking areas intact. The toilet thing still puzzles me.

Feeling frantic, I registered with another English-speaking agency, right in the courtyard of the Goethe Institute, specializing in helping people like me - new to Berlin, lacking language skills, needing furnished places. They sent me to two beautiful flats, one in the picturebook district of Schoeneberg, and one in the trendier Prenzlauerberg. Schoeneberg was a very nicely done place - ground floor, nice kitchen and bathroom, flat-screen TV, but was only one room with a round bed in the middle of it. Also a little dark, being on the airshaft side of the building, and the neighborhood gave me a social-class anxiety attack, the way my kids' prep school in Seattle did. Beautiful, but maybe not quite where I belong. And the place in Prenzl? Sheesh! Nice place, but the area is like a freeway for strollers - Hannah calls it "Breeder Central," there are so many young families living there. And did I mention the commission? The agency wanted 2 months' rent for two telephone calls and one email, the equivalent of about $2,000.00 U.S. Plus 19% service tax. Works out to about $100 per minute which means I'm REALLY in the wrong line of work.

OK, enough of that. I did finally find a place, by myself, through the newspaper. Unfurnished. Ground floor. Good light. Pleasant garden, good for the dog. One big room, one nice kitchen, one lovely bathroom, 3 french doors. No partridge.

When you move to Germany - or change your address once you're here - you have to register with the city within seven days of obtaining permanent accommodation. It's called anmeldung. (Visitors who stay in hotels also get anmelded, but the hotels do all the paperwork so the guests don't even know about it.) You need a copy of your lease to get your anmeldung. You need your anmeldung certificate in order to get a bank account. You need a bank account in order to produce enough cash to make a deposit to obtain your lease. Foreigners have to pay bigger deposits. You can see where I'm going with this. I'm now stuck in Catch-22. I can't withdraw a large enough sum of money from an ATM to pay my entire deposit and 3 months' rent in one fell swoop, which means I can't get the lease document to take to the Bürgeramt to become anmelded in order to open a bank account to pay my deposit...

By dribs and drabs I will accumulate the cash I need from ATMs and by using 3 cards. I paid a third of it today and it will take me until Monday to accumulate the rest. And then I get to go shopping at Ikea, which also only takes cash.

The icing on this particular cake is deliciously ironic. Hannah was describing a high-maintenance friend to me the day before I went to look at this apartment. She said, "She's so mühsam." I said I thought the apartment I was going to see was on Mühsamstrasse, and what did it mean exactly? She laughed almost to the point of tears and said, "It means 'pain in the ass'". Perfekt.

A Day Off

2009-09-13T04:13:00.000-07:00

I will begin with a bad pun, given where I am, but Friday night I hit the wall. I was in bed by nine and didn't get up until after nine Saturday morning. Twelve hours after that, I was still tired and was so very happy that evening does eventually follow daylight and that bedtime heaves into sight, every night, at last. It has been an exhausting two weeks, hitting the ground running as I did; no wonder my brain and body both rebelled.

In spite of the fatigue, I walked a good bit Saturday, out and about with Hannah, who is likewise fatigued, to the farmers' market (pecorino!) and paper stores (still on the sketchbook quest; fail) and later out with Maggie for her evening stroll. It was a pleasantly cool early fall day; suddenly this week it is dark noticeably earlier.

Neither of us felt like cooking so we went out for Vietnamese again, always a good choice for tired people who have not eaten particularly well all day. (On days when I have not had my vegetables, I am now able to say "We are not gemused.") We then holed up all evening with our books and laptops, Hannah working on her academic papers on Pope Gregory VII and the Habsburgs, and I moving restlessly between online apartment-hunting and reading my novel. We took frequent Maggie breaks.

Berlin has me thinking about relationships, as what I am doing here these days is establishing a new one, with the city itself. Getting oriented in a city is almost exactly like meeting a new person, beginning with elementary chitchat. Lovely weather we're having = I don't yet need a sweater. I like your hat = This is a pretty park. What do you do for a living = What IS the economic base here? I venture a little farther afield each weekday, but weekends have been for sleeping, cramming for German tests, and doing laundry. We are at an early stage of acquaintanceship.

My hubs so far are two: Hannah's apartment and the Goethe Institute, in two vastly different neighborhoods. The GI is right in the heart of Mitte, the cultural and historic "center" of the city, if Berlin can be said to have one. It is really more like a bunch of smaller cities stuck together, each one with a distinct personality, like any big city I suppose, but less homogenized than, say, a place like Seattle. Mitte is home to the major museums, the Berliner Dom (technically a "cathedral" in name only as it has never been the seat of a Catholic bishop but always a Protestant institution), the Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden, and the most famous modern landmark, the Fernsehturm, Berlin's TV-tower answer to the Space Needle.

I have mentioned that Hannah lives in gritty (I need a new adjective!) Friedrichshain, an industrial working-class district that was heavily bombed during the war and then was part of Soviet East Berlin until the Wall came down. Cheap rent and lots of empty flats made it popular for students and artists right after reunification, but as ALWAYS happens, the cheap-rent era has been followed by gradual gentrification and a slow rise in rents. Although still pretty dirty, F'hain has become a hot spot for the twenty- and thirty-somethings who like its club scene. Students and artists are now moving to the next cheap areas...and so the cycle will go on. I am looking for apartments in Prenzlauerberg, Kreuzberg, and the quieter, cleaner parts of Friedrichshain, near the Volkspark. I hope to find something this week.

Once I find a place and get settled, my relationship with Berlin will change yet again, from first-time visitor in June, to currently displaced flat-seeker, to actual resident, at least for a time. I am eager for that phase to begin. In the meantime, I have a test tomorrow on noun declensions, comparitives, and the passive voice. I think I'll go to the fleamarket.

Stairmaster

2009-09-10T12:28:00.000-07:00

6:30 a.m. it begins:

Down 6 flights of stairs to walk the dog for 30 minutes or 8 blocks, whichever comes first,
Back up to get ready for school.
Back down 6 flights, walk 3 blocks to the S-Bahn station;
Up 2 flights and down 2 flights to get to the platform.

8:00 a.m., arrive at Alexanderplatz, down 2 flights to street level,
6-block walk to school with my crepe-to-go breakfast.
Arrive at school,
Up 2 flights to class.
10:00 down a flight to the break room, back up 30 minutes later.
Down and up again for the noon break, then
Down 2 flights when class is over.

Wander Mitte for an hour to stretch my legs after so much sitting,
6 blocks back to Alexplatz and
Up 2 flights to the S-Bahn to return to Ostkreuz station.
Up 2 flights and down 2 flights to get back to the street.
Walk home - 3 blocks.
Up 6 flights to collapse on the couch.

4:00 p.m., after a rest,
Back down 6 flights to walk the dog for an hour or so,
Back up, a little more slowly. Hmmm. Maybe a lot more slowly.
Down again - to the grocery store, or an apartment viewing (more train stations, more stairs),
or out for dinner, then
Back up again, perhaps laden with bags. (Or a piece of furniture from the flea market. But that was on Sunday.)
10:30 p.m., down 6 with the dog, one last time;
Up the final 6, and
then to bed.

No wonder the Germans have such sturdy thighs.

Weekend - September 5 & 6

2009-09-09T13:48:00.000-07:00

Panic mode has set in. I have a German test on Monday, and, overachiever that I am, it is exceedingly difficult for me not only not to be at the head of the class but to be so near the bottom. This is NOT the Jamison way. And yet, the last (and only) German class I had was one semester at Columbia in 1975, while the twenty-somethings in the course at the Goethe Institute are either currently studying it elsewhere or have had it recently. And their brains are more plastic. Sheesh. They weren't even born yet in 1975. A sobering thought. I should cut myself some slack. I guess just the fact that I tested into the same level with them says something, although it reminds me of the typing test I took while applying for employment at Columbia. I did miserably, but the HR person could see potential! She KNEW I could become a faster typist and therefore be such an EXCELLENT secretary that she hired me anyway. I've always set the bar so high...

Anyway, test anxiety to the point of tears - I can't learn 300 verb forms and 400 vocab words in four days of classes, flash cards or no flash cards. So I went to the farmers' market on Saturday and the flea market on Sunday (Hannah bought a piece of furniture which she had to haul on a rickety handtruck over 10 blocks of cobblestones and THEN up 6 flights of stairs), and took a couple of walks along the river with Maggie. I did study for 5 hours Saturday evening and a bit on Sunday night but it hardly made a dent. I am NOT well prepared. And I am not working towards a degree or credential of any kind, am only doing this for myself, and am 57 years old. Test anxiety needs to go away.

Hannah is wonderful support. She uses the sponge analogy for my brain - soaking up things whether I'm aware of it or not. Studying is now "exercising my sponge." Hannah also either appreciates or denigrates my bad puns, but at least she gets them: T'was billig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe - my "poor man's Jabberwocky, billig being German for "cheap." There have been others.

Favorite word so far is still Krankenschwester (nurse!) although Streichholzschachtel (matchbox) is a close second.

I spent many hours Sunday combing the Berlin Morgenpost for apartments; sent a few emails imploring answers in English; we'll see what turns up. I don't want to do the equivalent of moving to Burien while Hannah inhabits Capitol Hill but nor do I want to live in her back pocket - not only because our lives are separate and we both need our space ("Guess what, Honey, I'm moving to Berlin! And I'm going to live next door! Love, Mom) but also because her back pocket (Friedrichshain) is so noisy and gritty. Laut und schmutzig.

Have I mentioned that one of the top entertainment/events magazines here is called Zitty?

Day 9 - Friday, September 4

2009-09-05T13:42:00.000-07:00

I made the mistake of having a tablespoon of espresso yesterday morning at school - 8 am, mind you, and yes, a tablespoon is all that comes out of the coffee machine's espresso function. I didn't fall asleep until after four a.m., and got up at my new usual time of 6:30.

Wonderfully cooler today, and breezy. A few showers. School was over my head again so I'm going to have to work really hard over the weekend to catch up and prepare for a test on Monday. We get out at noon on Fridays instead of 1:00 so I took the extra hour to walk and shoot photos; got a few good ones, although not all the graffiti shots I wanted.

Spent quite a bit of time looking for a paper store where I can purchase a sketchbook but didn't find the store I was thinking of. Or any other, for that matter. I need a book to begin to paste my ephemera into. Then napped, and spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening apartment hunting online, plowing through listings on German sites. It's a time-consuming process, first figuring out all the vocabulary (warmmiete, kaltmiete, nach vereinbarung, befeuerungsart, kurzfristig, etc.) then locating the address on a map because the pictures don't show you that this particular lovely apartment sits above 3 sets of railroad tracks. Waterfront property in Arizona.

Hannah and I had Vietnamese food AGAIN tonight, the third time since I've been here. I like being able to take Maggie to the outdoor cafes. She's being the BEST dog. I didn't get her out for a long walk today, so going to dinner at least helps make up a little.

Hannah went out to an art opening, and I had good Skype chats with brother Bob and daughter Sally, who just got engaged Wednesday night. And THEN I started making flash cards. Hundreds of them. On Friday night, no less. Sheesh! How my life has changed in 30 years.

I like German, though. It feels like a meaty language, with words that almost require chewing. Mein Stift ist auf dem Tisch. French is easier to just swallow. La plume est sur la table. At any rate, I feel as though I'm roiling around in an atmosphere of alphabet soup; occasionally the letters line up right and I can recognize a word. But mostly it's still just soup.

Day 8 - Thursday, September 3

2009-09-05T13:12:00.000-07:00

Not much of substance to report today. The third day at school went better, although by the end of the 4 1/2 hours my brain is kaputt. I have a LOT of flash cards to make. Home for the usual nap, although without the tears today; progress. Another hourlong walk with Maggie around the neighborhood.

We have been eating a lot of blueberries, which are the best I have ever tasted. I didn't even like blueberries until I ate them here. These are astonishing! There is flavor!

The hot-water heater in this apartment is something new to me, being a little tank high up on the kitchen wall which heats the water on demand. This is not so bad at the kitchen sink for doing dishes, but the shower in the bathroom is another story. The faucet has to be set at just the right angle and must be turned on with the proper amount of force or the water doesn't heat. My first shower was definitely on the chilly side. I've had a few that rival the Norwegian sauna experience as well - first scalding and then freezing. Not my favorite invention.

Day 7 - Wednesday, September 2

2009-09-05T13:04:00.000-07:00

I tested the waters yesterday and today they closed over my head. I struggled in German class to cover the Perfect and Imperfect tenses, Dative and Accusative cases and build vocabulary, which, in a class conducted all in German, is quite a feat. The teacher is a master at it, though - he HAS to be, given how many nationalities he works with. Speaking of nationalities, a lot of our exercises are done among our tablemates - usually 3-4 students per table - which is a fine scheme for interactive learning, most of the time. There's a lovely young Japanese woman at the table I sit at the most, and a young Italian woman one table over, and as interesting as this is in a cultural context, it makes for some difficulties during role-playing exercises, for example, or drilling lists of verbs. Take the verb fliessen. It is conjugated with the verb sein, and progresses like this: fliessen, floss, ist geflossen. Doing drills, we get from the Japanese woman, "friessen, fross, ist gefrossen." From the Italian, we get "fliesseneh, flosseh, isteh geflosseneh." It confuses me to be listening to a foreign language and adding other foreign accents to it.

After being completely overwhelmed all morning I came back to Hannah's in tears. It was hot and humid and I am additionally befuddled by apartment hunting. So I took a nap. Then I took Maggie on the S-Bahn one stop over the river to Treptower Park where we walked for an hour and a half. Hannah and I made salads for dinner and then some friends of hers came over to clean out some books they had been storing here; they stayed to chat and I didn't even start my homework until after 10 p.m.

First Day of School - Tuesday, September 1

2009-09-05T01:38:00.000-07:00

My first day at the Goethe Institute, and the teacher for my class reminds me of one of my favorite professors, a sharp-witted, good-humored, loud-voiced prof. I had for French phonetics one summer at the U.W. Big walrus of a guy.

Since the point of it is to teach us as much German as fast as possible, the class is conducted all auf Deutsch, and since I've been here less than a week, am still getting over jet-lag, and don't know much German to begin with it is quite an exercise for my tired brain. Just like Hannah's 4th floor walk-up works out my flabby thighs (since the rooms have 20-foot ceilings, each floor requires TWO flights of stairs...) I am by far the oldest in the class although I've seen a few other middle-aged people wandering around the Institute in a daze similar to mine. One woman creates the most amazing lip-line for herself with bright red lipstick...and tops off the look with a thirties-style hat that looks like a mangled Hershey's kiss hugging her head. How do they make buckram DO that?

Eventually I am hoping to explore the Mitte area extensively after class, but this first day I was so tired I went home and napped. I stayed up too late reading and now have to get up at 6:30 in order to walk Maggie before getting ready for school. It was very hot again today, which is also fatiguing.

I spent a few hours combing apartment listings, then walked Maggie down some new streets over towards the river, past a grim 19th-c. brick church with a weedy yard and a paving project going on in the back - yellow tape and blue tarps did not add to its already minimal appeal.

We trudged back up the stairs to the apartment only to realize we were going to be out of dog food by morning so I ended the day with my first solo trip to the Kaufland supermarket, where I had my first encounter with the bottle (glass and plastic) recycling machine. Since I am a functional illiterate here, I watched what other people did and began feeding our bottles into the cylindrical opening. Nothing happened. I put in another bottle or two. Nothing happened. A young man in a red jumpsuit appeared and patiently pointed to the LED display on the machine, which of course I was unable to decipher. Apparently this one was full; he switched to English and said "stop putting bottles in the machine." I have such empathy for immigrants! It is so frustrating to be at this level with a language, to feel stupid. I didn't even know the word for "dog food" and so had to wander the aisles, just looking. It worked - one can get by day to day without the language - but it was certainly inefficient, and not much fun. I learned a lot about the German grocery store, however, and discovered (although I did not purchase) a kind of bread called "Bio-Dinkel-Sesam-Knabberli."

I am halfway through a novel called "The Orphan Game," the only book I brought with me so I'd have something to read on the plane. When I finish it I'm planning to stretch my brain with some historical texts Hannah has lent me, beginning with a weighty tome entitled "The Rise of Western Christendom." I am hoping for a year of transformation on many levels of my life, certainly the physical and intellectual. This should help!

Day 5 - Monday, August 31

2009-09-03T09:48:00.000-07:00

I didn't feel well today - probably jet-lag/fatigue combo. I slept late as I stayed up late, reading and eating trail mix. Forced myself out of the apartment in the afternoon to go to the Goethe Institute for a placement test and a small financial hemorrhage, for an 8-week intensive German class; starts tomorrow. I placed just slightly above the very first level so I hope I'm not in over my head. Walked a bit, ate a crepe at Alexanderplatz station, headed to Hansa Viertel to see another apartment; another no-go. I am feeling overwhelmed by the problem of finding digs.

Then I went to the Galeria, a very nice Frederick & Nelson-style department store, and purchased a black leather bag to carry my "school supplies" and laptop in so that I can check housing ads on my breaks; hoping someone at the G.I. (upper or lower?) can help me a bit deciphering the lingo.

Got on the S-Bahn to come home and went the wrong direction; realized it when I thought it was odd to be traveling to Friedrichshain in the late afternoon with the sun in my eyes. It's in EAST Berlin.

Hannah's friends have finally gone back to Vienna so I got her for dinner again tonight - more Vietnamese. I'm so anxious my stomach is in a clench so I don't eat much during the day. Light pho meal was perfect.

Looked online at apartment ads when we got home. Sally called on her break and talked to Hannah - good for the sisters to catch up.

Hannah took Maggie on a long walk in Treptower Park this afternoon so Maggie is happily exhausated in her crate. Time to read in bed.

Getting up early starting tomorrow to go to German class; Hannah and I laughed while setting the alarm on my new cell phone ("Handy"); we chose "Beach" as the theme.

Day 4 - Sunday, August 30

2009-09-03T09:31:00.000-07:00

Cool & sunny morning. Out with Maggie for our first Kaffee and Apfeltasche, sitting outside at a neighborhood bakery, just the two of us. How could I ever eat American grocery store pastries again?? The baked goods here are not like anything in the States, and of course they are fresh every day, not packed in cellophane. They are also not new to me; this is not a revelation. I am simply reminded of one of Europe's marvels.

Maggie is getting bolder as she recovers from jet-lag and acclimates a bit to the noise and activity of city streets; lunging at sparrows under the cafe table! This was my first coffee in four days and it gave me quite a buzz, but tasted so good.

Also took Maggie to the flea market, a Sunday staple here. We went to the one in the neighborhood, at Boxhagenerplatz. More exposure for her to crowds and random dogs. I can't even imagine what goes through her head during these barrages. Does she wish one of these dogs would turn out to be Buster?

Hannah met friends for brunch and I went to look at an apartment - quite a nice flat but in a newly built area with no street life at all. Just apartment buildings. Right on the river and nice for walking but I want the full European city experience, not something that mimics my life in Walla Walla.

Met up with Hannah at the tacky Domane store - an Ikea idea gone terribly wrong; we couldn't get out of there fast enough. We talked about taste and poverty. This store was not much cheaper than Ikea in price but the quality! It should be criminal! Made us feel slimy just to have walked in.

Bought a roasted chicken on the way home - again, one of those things done so well here by sidewalk vendors and so poorly in most places at home. The Leschi mart had good roasted chickens but I don't live in Leschi any more. American grocery store chickens taste like chemicals. This one, from the Haenschen Hutte, tasted like Heaven. Another reminder: this is one reason I remain a carnivore.

On my walk to look at the apartment I thought about boredom, as I have blamed that state for my wanting to make this move. What IS boredom, exactly? And is it boredom that propels me into these big life changes or just a nervous restlessness? Is it a result of the lifelong search for SOMETHING? Why is nothing big or exciting enough for me for very long? What WOULD be big and exciting enough for me? How would I sustain it? And would it paradoxically be what I need to settle down?

I have started picking up ephemera - such a polite word for trash - for collage, which I don't really do. But it seems approachable here, small, lightweight, portable, unlike my larger paintings or assemblage boxes, which would be difficult for me to make here given that I have none of my "infrastructure" except a pair of scissors with me. And I have to pack it all home again.

Found four pennies yesterday; go, Daddy!

Day 3 - Saturday, August 29

2009-09-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

MOSTLY over the jet lag but mid-afternoon was pretty wonky. A little weepy as well but a nap helped. Hannah helped me purchase my annual transit pass and cell phone, then we did a little shoe shopping for her, and walked the dog who is still exhausted.
I have moments of being so overwhelmed by the language that I wonder what is the point of my being here. The intensive language classes here are expensive but without one I can't hope to achieve any sort of fluency in time to make use of it. Will I enjoy being here with only basic skills? Will this turn out to be a waste because I couldn't understand enough? Will one year satisfy me?

In any event, I could not do this year abroad in France or England, places where I speak the language (or can at least get by) as they are much too expensive. No, Berlin itself is why this entire adventure is possible. It's relatively cheap and, more important, it is where Hannah is. So I must learn as much German as I can.

The internet has been down almost all day so I can't satisfy myself about the American and international women's federations, language classes, apartments for rent, or email. Another frustration for one accustomed to instant information gratification. Since I don't yet have my own place and routine, these are at least constructive things to do while I bide my time.

Maggie and I went out for a long walk in the evening and got caught in a cloudburst. The pads on her feet used to be pink. They now look like black patent leather. We walked for over an hour, mostly because it took her that long to pee, but also because I got turned around and we got a few bonus blocks. As gritty as Friedrichshain is, the streets are lively - full of cafes and shops, people with babies and dogs, and splattered with the ubiquitous bicycles and graffiti. There are hundreds of bicycles everywhere, ridden on the sidewalks for the most part, frequently approaching from behind without warning, spooking poor Maggie who is so NOT a city dog. Not yet, at any rate.

In Friedrichshain most of the small green spaces are weedy and seedy, untended, litter-strewn with bottles, broken glass, bottle caps, an occasional dirty diaper, dog poop, and bounded by graffiti-marred walls. At night I hear kids on the street popping the tops off their beers, just letting them flip onto the sidewalks. No one ever cleans them up; they just become part of the pavement. Graffiti is everywhere and I find it disturbing. It is visually unappealing - downright ugly, most of it - and speaks to me of underlying discontent.

Hannah disagrees with me about the graffiti. She thinks it's just part of the rawness of Berlin, a free form of expression, and does not find it threatening. Still, I believe it is a symptom of some unhappiness. Do happy people scribble on other people's property? Or on public property? What happened to pride of place? Is our physical habitat a reflection of our collective mental state? Is it a question of empowerment? How is a more constructive form of power nurtured? And how could Berlin - particularly East Berlin - NOT be in a gritty, transitional state? The wall has only been down for 20 years; not even a whole generation yet.

What a jumble goes on in my head.

While I was walking Maggie I was thinking about tethers - the leash that keeps her by my side and safe in a foreign place, and the metaphoric leash that attaches me to Hannah who provides the same safety for me right now. Tethers to everything that makes up our personal stories.

Hannah had a pre-party for a few friends after first going with them to a new "American" hamburger place around the corner. Hannah brought me a hamburger and onion rings - es schmecht gut!

Day 2 - Friday, August 28

2009-09-01T10:42:00.000-07:00

I experienced Day 2 in Berlin mostly through the overheated and overly heavy eyelids of jet lag. My bags were at last retrieved by Lufthansa and rudely delivered by a belligerent young man who must be unhappy with his job. He was so insulting that I filed a complaint with the airline, something I do not ordinarily do when my feathers are ruffled. I'm usually willing to cut people some slack for having bad days. Not so today. I was high-centered in Hannah's apartment all day, first waiting for Lufthansa to call, then waiting for my bags to be flung at me and it was very hot. Her place is on the third floor with no lift and no air conditioning, which is fairly standard, but does make people unaccustomed to such accommodations a little cranky...

This is the first time I have traveled with a laptop and it changes the feel of being away from home. Nothing seems so far away when I can check email and FaceBook.

I am looking forward to the day when my brain re-engages with the greater world and I begin to think again.

Departure and Arrival

2009-08-27T12:15:00.000-07:00

My dog Maggie and I arrived in Berlin this afternoon to begin a year abroad.

We had a 5-hour car ride to Portland (Maggie's first road trip) where we boarded our 10-hour flight to Frankfurt; made our connection to Berlin although my luggage did not. Better that goes missing than the dog, although I am eager for a change of clothing and my toothbrush. The dog cannot help me there.

Through a special promotional upgrade I flew Business Class on Lufthansa but there was a baby in the first row of Economy who screamed for the whole ten hours, pretty much negating the advantage of being able to recline in order to sleep.

Anyway, I've left home and arrived at a new chapter in my life.