Beer-mindedness

All set for tomorrow's flight to the UK to spend Christmas with my family.  It's been a very beer-oriented few days.  On Thursday evening we checked out Hops and Barley in Wuhlichstrasse, Friedrichshain, a micro brewery with an inviting tiled-walled bar area, complete with mash tuns.  The Weissbier is a lovely deep colour and certainly doesn't disappoint on flavour.  On Friday we headed over to Spandau to check out the Christmas market there.  If, like me, you are stuck in the eighties, the name Spandau probably makes you think of the band Spandau Ballet or the place where the infamous Rudolf Hess was incarcerated until his suicide in 1987.  It was suitably atmospheric - we got there just as it was getting dark - but the ambience in the area around the Rathaus was somewhat sullied by the unrelenting gaudiness of the market.  On the way back we called in at the Eschenbrau Brauerei in Wedding, another micro brewery.  It was tricky to find - the surrounding area looks a bit like a Battersea housing estate and the actual 'keller' is down an alleyway and underneath one of the blocks.  It was well worth it though, for a few of their 'Panke Golds'.  They also distil their own whisky.

Things have been a bit more low-key today, although I am now looking forward to visiting the awesome Coopers Tavern in Burton tomorrow night, with fingers crossed that they have Sarah Hughes or Jaipur on tap

The 'tasteful'...

and not-so-tasteful sides of Spandau Christmas Market

Back in the DDR

The one thing I’ve learnt about Berlin weather is that it seems to do something different every day.  Sometimes it even seems as though we get ‘four seasons in one day’.  This week, however, has been consistent – cold but dry and still and sunny – perfect for an urban ramble.  Yesterday we turned out of the flat and headed along Prenzlauer Allee into DDR territory – blocks of Cold-War era housing and even the odd Trabi to be spotted.  I love walking in this part of Prenzlauer Berg – it’s so different from the unrelenting prettiness of areas such as Kollwitzplatz, with its ubiquitous middle-class parents and its twee little shops selling overpriced stuff that absolutely no one can have any need of.  The buildings further out are built with utility rather than beauty as the main concern and the shops are more functional – bakeries and bike repairs for example.  It’s more like I imagine the DDR to have been before it was invaded by (sorry, ‘reunited with’) West Germany.  After an hour or so’s wandering we eventually came to the bridge at Bornholmer Strasse.  We last came here on the 9^th November – the 24^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  To see traffic hurtling across into Wedding now it’s difficult to believe that this was once an international frontier.  I don’t believe that walls should separate people, I don’t believe in barriers of any kind, physical or ideological, but I fear that modern Germany is doing its best to erase the old East.  I worry that monuments such as the memorial to Ernst Thälmann (a socialist leader murdered by the Nazis) in the park that bears his name will disappear.  There are already plans to ‘develop’ the park by building yuppie homes in the place of flats that were once occupied by DDR officials.

I’m not defending the surveillance practices of the Stasi (even though they were only doing what the ‘land of the free’ does routinely all the time, i.e. spying on everyone and justifying it as being in the interests of national security), I just believe that capitalism is the great evil, and the capitalist world, with its injustice, its inequality, its corruption and the weight of the establishment-friendly media behind it has done its best to try to convince us all that socialism is bad.

Atmospheric Soviet-era architecture

Trabi!

 

 

I'm not a camera

Waking up to the morning rush hour on Prenzlauer Allee, I watch the street life rolling inexorably on; the trams that slide in and out every few minutes, the S-Bahn station across the road that, at similar intervals, disgorges a fresh swathe of passengers, the frequent clamour of an emergency vehicle as it hurtles towards whatever calamity requires it.  In the Vietnamese restaurant next door a cleaner is mopping the floor in readiness for another day’s business.  The florists across the road have spread their wares out on the pavement – fir branches, poinsettias and bunches of mistletoe.  Over to the left, through the naked branches of the tree outside my balcony, I can see the huge silvery globe atop the Fernsehturm.  It is a clear morning and Christmas is nine days away.

I am reminded of the opening passage of Christopher Isherwood’s 'Goodbye to Berlin': I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

I don’t want to be a passive observer, merely receiving transitory images, but an active agent, participating in the life of the city.  In my own small way, as I make my way to my language course of a morning, or sit in a café reading my book while nursing a coffee, I feel that I am weaving my own little thread into the fabric of a Berlin day.  I am among pedestrians and cyclists, people forging ahead towards their own destinations, people exercising their dogs or taking their kids to school. There is traffic noise, movement, human voices, many of them foreign like my own, belonging to people like me who have sought to make their home in this once divided, now eclectic capital.

Bite Club at Urban Spree, Friedrichshain, Sunday 15th December

 

 

 

Christmas fever

On Monday the Christmas markets opened and the weather played along accordingly.  It’s almost as though the cold was lying in wait and came rolling in as the markets began trading.  I’m now leaving the house buried under layers of weather-combatting garments so that not much of me is visible beneath hat, coat, snood, gloves… It takes forever to leave anywhere because getting ready to face the outside world is like a ceremonial robing.

The whole city seems to have turned Christmas-mad overnight.  The florists have all given themselves over almost entirely to Christmas-related flora.  I see people riding by with fir branches swaying in the baskets of their bikes.  The shop windows are all decked out with festive displays and even the little bakery where we take our breaks has put up a tree.  On Stargarder Strasse strings of twinkling lights zig-zag their way across the pavements from buildings to trees.

The temperature slips perilously close to zero and the air has a dank, clammy quality.  Often now the TV tower is either totally invisible or only hazily apparent through a murky gloom.  Small children go about looking like astronauts in their thickly-padded all-in-ones and the number of cyclists has definitely dwindled.
Thursday provided a temporary blip by dawning bright and springlike, in defiance of the dire predictions of the weather forecasters but Friday returned to wet and dreary normality.
Venturing out of doors brings anew the shock of cold.  By far the best place to be is a cosy candlelit bar or café, especially in the late afternoon when the daylight begins to give way to an atmospheric city twilight.  One can only feel for the homeless and for the refugees at the Oranienplatz camp for whom the creeping cold of another bitter Berlin night must be anything but atmospheric.

Christmas tree at the Christmas market in the Kulturbrauerei

One of the weirdest 'attractions' I've ever seen - great heavy medieval-looking coats suspended from poles that people huddle into whilst sitting on top of radiators - very cosy I'm sure, but very strange.

Another oddity - the gluhwein yurt