Friday Favourites

Today I took one of my favourite Friday afternoon Berlin rambles.  Alan and I met our friend Gareth in Schoenhauser Allee and we went to Der Fischladen where Alan and Gareth had fish and chips and I went for the day's special of Gravadlax with Kartoffelpuffer and a large glass of white wine.  Once we'd eaten, the boys set off for the last Union game before the winter break and I headed in the other direction towards Schoenhauser Ecke, which I've always thought of as the beating heart of Prenzlauer Berg.

 

With five roads, three tram lines and an U-Bahn station, there's always plenty of activity here.

 

 

 

Looking towards Eberswalder Strasse Station

 

From there I walked down Kastanienallee, a street that many like to criticise but for which I have a long-standing affection.

 

 

The Prater

 

At Schwedter Strasse I turned towards Arkonaplatz and the Friday market.  As I'd already eaten I didn't succumb to the temptation of a whole grilled trout from the fish barbecue or a garlicky bruschetta from the Italian stand but it's a treat just to wander around and inspect the products on offer here.

 

Approaching the market through the little park, complete with 'Union' bench!

 

The market with the Zionskirche in the background.

I then walked to Zionskirchplatz, where three horse-drawn carriages came clopping by (I've no idea why), and down Veteranenstrasse, to Volkspark Weinberg - my favourite park at any time of the year. It's a lovely place to sit and read for a while or just take in the view.

 

Veteranenstrasse

 

Volkspark Weinberg

As I emerged from the park into Weinbergsweg, twilight was approaching.  For me this is the best time to be out in the city - I find it so very atmospheric in a winter's dusk.

Ambling back towards home, I paid another visit to the Scandinavian-themed Lucia Weihnachtsmarkt in the Kulturbrauerei.  In my opinion this is the most charming of the city's Christmas markets, and it's only a 15-minute walk from home.

The weather was dull but warm and dry - perfect for a stroll across Prenzlauer Berg and into Mitte.  I never tire of walking the streets of my beloved city, whether alone or in company, and the route I took today was one of my most tried and trusted favourites.  A real Friday classic.

Decisions, decisions

We’ve reached the tail-end of another year and I’m asking that perennial rhetorical question: where has the time gone?  I’m in exactly the same position I was in this time twelve months ago: speculating about the year ahead and wondering if I’ll still be in Berlin at the end of it.

 

Things seem to be falling into place here, most notably that we are picking up more work.  I’ve recently had the luxury of having to turn down work at the research centre in favour of a content writing job for a travel website. It meant that for four weeks I had days of working until midnight and had to miss a couple of literary events that I’d badly wanted to go to.  I’ve had no time for my creative writing, and the business idea that I’d been doing some groundwork for had to be put on hold but I can take it up again in the New Year. I’m also trying to complete an application for a freelance tax number, without which I can’t be paid for the travel website work.

 

But with one-way flights back to the UK booked for the end of March, we are now considering the possibility of coming back after a couple of months.  We had extended the lease on the flat until 31^st March and I’m thinking of contacting the landlord to ask whether we can move back in if he hasn’t found new tenants by the time we return. Not that I’ve any particular affection for the flat – there isn’t one piece of furniture that I would have chosen myself and I’m sick of the gigantic tropical plants we’ve had to look after. But it’s been a convenient base in a Kiez that we love and the landlord has been very quick to sort out any problems we’ve had.

If we are to come back to Berlin we will almost certainly have to decide whether or not to sell our house. I think we’re both about 65% in favour of taking that step at the moment.  It would mean we could invest properly in the language and integration course and look for an empty flat.  Besides accommodating someone else’s tastes in interior design, the other downside of living in a furnished apartment and not even being allowed to hang a picture is that it emphasises the temporary nature of our tenure here.  After two years of this I’m beginning to miss my own things. I always get slightly envious when I visit friends whose living environments reflect their own styles and personalities. I would love to have my posters and books and all the other things that were part of my everyday home life around me here in Berlin.  I’ve been longing for a pet too and we aren’t allowed to have one in our current flat.

So, decisions must be made, even if it means sitting in a pub with a notebook and pen itemising the practicalities and pros and cons.  At this moment there is, as ever, so much going on, nothing resolved, and everything still a work-in-progress.

And now for something completely different...

 

Friday 30^th October marked the second anniversary of my move to Berlin. To celebrate I thought I would do something a little different on the blog. Usually my posts are eulogies to the city I love, the things we’ve done here and the places and events we’ve been to. Today, for a change, I thought I’d share some of my least favourite things about life here. I have not dwelt on large political themes such as the erasing of socialism from the city’s past, most manifest in the construction of the pointless new Schloss on the site of the Palast der Republik. Nor is this a catalogue of hate, rather a wry look at certain aspects of life in the city that I have found exasperating, so here is my top five of Berlin gripes:

1: People not looking where they are going

If I were forced to choose a pet hate about living here it would be that nobody EVER looks where they are going. It’s no exaggeration to say that I have at least one collision every time I leave the flat. I either get barrelled into by someone coming out of a building and not bothering to check if the pavement is clear, or I clatter straight into people who have just decided to stop dead in front of me or cut across my path, again without taking the simple precaution of glancing up the street first. Having said that, there have been plenty of occasions when people have seen me but still walked into me anyway.  I also regularly get run or cycled into by children whose accompanying adults haven’t the slightest intention of encouraging their offspring to look out for other pavement users. Just the other day I was walking along Dunckerstrasse and a small child walked backwards straight into me. Rather than alerting him to the fact that I was there, his mother glared at me as though I shouldn’t have been. I haven’t worked out whether this is down to a lack of spatial awareness or just not giving a shit but it’s very, very annoying.

2: Supermarket checkouts

My second bugbear is the apparent city wide shortage of supermarket checkout staff.  At any time of the day or evening there will be only one till open even if the queue is stretching back down the aisles. If a second till is opened there will be an undignified stampede by people determined to get to it first. Also, if I’m standing with a single item nobody will let me in front of them no matter how full their trolley is.  When I do finally get to pay for my purchases I invariably incur the wrath of the checkout operative because I’ve either paid with a fifty euro note which seems to be the only denomination the ATM machines contain or I’ve handed them the correct amount of change which they then grumble ostentatiously about having to check.

3: Hipster hangouts

In third place is the proliferation of establishments such as juice bars and third wave coffee shops run by ex-pat hipsters and frequented by the city’s ‘beautiful people’.  Every week a new place with naked lights dangling from the ceiling, rosemary plants in tins, and furniture made from pallets appears. Blackboards and exposed brick walls complete the look whether it’s a craft beer bar or a burger joint and no opportunity to use quinoa or to put bacon into ‘craft’ cocktails is missed. It’s not that I object to these places – their commitment to sustainably-sourced, quality ingredients is admirable – but often they have sprung up on the site of a former favourite bar or café and I would much prefer it if they were there in addition to it rather than in place of it.

4: Ex-pat ‘creatives’

A recent Guardian article highlighted the ‘plight’ of the ‘creative Brits’ who are currently colonising areas such as Neukölln in a bid to escape extortionate London rents. They constitute the client base for the types of places referred to above and are drawn to street food events where they eat pulled pork sandwiches and drink cocktails from jam jars.  At weekends they frequent the flea markets where they spend a lot of money on crates and tin pails because it’s cool to look as though you can’t afford proper furniture. During working hours they get down to being creative in cafés and co-working spaces (communal offices where people go to stare earnestly at computer screens on a sort of time-share basis), power smoothies to hand.  I very much doubt that any of these people are starving artists driven to seek cheaper neighbourhoods.  Rather they have come to exploit Berlin’s relatively low rents, in the process contributing to the city’s ongoing gentrification problem.

 5: People who treat cafés as their own private offices

Which brings me to my final gripe. I have often taken my laptop to a bar or a café to do some work but I’ve always endeavoured to occupy an obscure corner and respect the fact that it is a public place. Sometimes however, I walk into a café and it’s full of individuals who have settled in for the day at tables that might seat three other people, justifying their occupation by having bought a single cup of coffee hours earlier. Fine if business is slow but not when potential customers are leaving because there’s nowhere to sit. If it really is necessary to spread paperwork all over the table then renting a desk at a co-working space (or even staying at home) would be a more appropriate option. It would also allow cafés to function as social spaces rather than offices. A couple of months ago I was in a café and a friend I’d not seen for a while came in so we started to chat, to the obvious displeasure of a woman with a laptop who was sitting nearby. Eventually she closed her machine and left, taking pains to make us aware that our discreetly-volumed and entirely inoffensive conversation had driven her away.  I hope she found her way to a more conducive working environment (such as St Oberholz, which is not so much a café as a co-working space with a bar) where she could do whatever it was she was doing without being disturbed by people selfishly socialising. 

Now I’ve reached the end of my list I realise how grouchy, old-fashioned and even downright misanthropic I sound, despite my attempt to keep it light-hearted. It’s also clear that some of the points address aspects of the same phenomenon, namely the changing face of the city through gentrification. I don’t write too much about this because I would just be repeating the familiar arguments but it is a genuine issue and if, as that Guardian piece seems to suggest, half the population of Dalston now lives in Neukölln, it’s something to be very concerned about.

I’m now going to go back to writing about the things I love in Berlin, while studiously avoiding kale juice and cold brew coffee.

 

A seed...

It’s been an interesting few weeks.  Lately I’ve been trying to come to terms with the fact that our time in Berlin could now be limited to mere months. We are at the point where we can just about support ourselves here until the end of March 2016.  Unless we find permanent work, our options might be limited to returning to England to work and save until we’ve earned enough for another spell in Berlin or selling our house and moving here lock stock and barrel.  The main risk with this latter option is that we could still find ourselves without a regular income and with nothing then to fall back on. 

About a year ago I wrote about how difficult it is to find real work in Berlin.  Since then nothing has changed.  We have worked a few more weeks at the research centre.  I’ve done a small amount of editing and proof reading.  A couple of times a month I meet up with a German teacher of English to help iron out any grammatical problems she has encountered.  But we still need something more substantial and permanent.

The TEFL course I completed last year has not really led me anywhere. I have considered taking the internationally recognised Cambridge CELTA certificate which is more likely to result in work but at a cost of 1500 Euros it could turn out to be an expensive and fruitless venture.

So with all of this in mind, we decided to face up to the fact that proper jobs are not likely to come our way between now and March.  We plotted an ‘exit strategy’ to minimise the trauma of having to leave.  We located a potential place to live and booked one-way flights to Birmingham (although this was mainly because the earlier they are booked the cheaper they are - it wouldn’t make sense to wait until March when they would be hundreds of pounds).  We started to think about where we might work and what we could do, developing both short-term and long-term plans.

Then, a few weeks ago, amid all of this rationalising, something happened which planted a seed in my mind and led me to consider the possibility of sharpening my elbows and embarking on a business venture.  It’s in a line of work for which I’m qualified and which could, if successful, benefit others in my position.  At the moment it’s very much only the glimmer of an idea and I haven’t properly got my head around it yet which is why I’m not saying too much about it.  It’s also something that I could conduct from any base which means that a spell back in England wouldn’t necessarily be an obstacle (although there is one side to it that is very much Berlin-centred).  It will take time to establish. I don’t have anything set up at all yet – no bank account, website or even company name. Having to take care of all of that is very daunting but if I can get something in place at least by the spring, I will have some idea of how workable it is.  I don’t have Richard Branson type aspirations – I’m no entrepreneur – but it’s something that I’m feeling quite excited about.  I spent the weekend researching practicalities and calculating costs.  At one point we  actually discussed taking out a mortgage on our house in order to finance it. It may or may not come to that but it’s something that I feel I must try, and I'm finding the prospect of returning to Cameron’s Britain quite a motivating factor!

 

Railway Child

 

When, in 2013, we decided to move to Berlin, our number one priority was finding a place to live.  In the months leading up to the move we scoured property rental websites and enquired about flats all over the city (although ‘our’ neighbourhood was Prenzlauer Berg, we were prepared to live just about anywhere).  Almost every evening though we would arrive home to e-mails informing us that the latest property we’d expressed an interest in had been let. In the end just one remained available, a one-bedroomed flat in a renovated Altbau opposite Prenzlauer Allee S-Bahn station. It suited us, being in the part of the city that we had become emotionally attached to. It was a quirky little place; I loved the fact that it was front facing and spent hours on the balcony observing the street life ‘Isherwood’ style. 

The road is wide here and with four lanes of traffic, two tram lines and – of course – the station, it’s constantly busy.  Between the station and the junction with Kanzowstrasse there are a Spar, a florist, a bakery and a 24-hour kebab shop, plus a recently-opened ice-cream parlour.  Just around the corner in Kanzowstrasse, the display of fruit and veg outside the Mizgin späti is another round-the-clock feature.  In the morning, busy, breakfast-deprived travellers call in at the bakery or the Spar for takeaway coffee and pastries while the neighbourhood’s hardcore drinkers gather at the outdoor tables of the kebab shop to smoke and philosophise over the first beers of the day. This is the less genteel end of Prenzlauer Berg; although a mere stone’s throw from its charming café-lined squares and shops full of expensive knick-knacks, it could be a world away. The denizens of this little enclave move in a different orbit to that of the bourgeois-bohemian parents of nearby Helmholtzplatz.  Non-locals are usually only passing through on journeys to other parts of the city or beyond; the station has a direct line to Schönefeld. This little building is the hub, the area’s beating heart. To me it’s like a beehive – a honey-coloured box buzzing throughout the day. At the entrance there is often a ‘Strassenfeger’ seller quietly hoping to collect at least a few coins from the migrating hordes. At other times the site is appropriated by those spreading the word of God, advocating veganism, promoting a new gym or even selling T-shirts. Just inside the station, the colourful and fragrant wares of the Vietnamese flower seller are spread along the concourse.  There is a newspaper seller too, occasional buskers, and a poor homeless guy who huddles at the top of the steps, watched over (if he’s sleeping) by his faithful dog. The only other human fixture is the drug dealer who stands for hours each day alongside the bikes that occupy a wide swathe of the pavement and festoon the railings of the footbridge that spans the tracks. Most will be freed from their chains when their owners return at the end of the day but some bear signs of having been long forsaken with their rusting frames and bent or missing wheels. Last year there was a fatality here and for a while the bikes shared railing space with floral tributes.

The view from the footbridge

 

Just across the bridge, a sleek, modern, and somewhat incongruous building houses a Bio Company which lures conscientious Prenzlauer Berg parents. Outside, for those less concerned with nutritional worthiness, there is a Quarkkeulchen vendor whose cholesterol-laden specialities perfume the air and who does a particularly brisk trade during the colder months (in the summer an Erdbeer Hutte stands here).

As stations go, Prenzlauer Allee is hardly Grand Central, in fact it’s more of a stop than a station, albeit a quaint one. Its alignment with the tracks means that it sits at a slightly peculiar angle to the street but this only adds to its eccentric appeal.  Dating from 1892, the building sustained damage during World War II but was later restored.  It has a steep pitched roof and a yellow-brick exterior with a square clock.  There are two entrance arches giving onto a compact marble-floored concourse and a wide staircase which leads down to the platforms (there is also a lift).  The brickwork is decorative, being from an era when a functional municipal structure could also be a thing of beauty.  There is a shuttered hatch which might have been a ticket or refreshments booth at some point.  Now, drinks, croissants and baguettes can be bought from a small Le Crobag kiosk on the platform and tickets are obtained from what are probably the most unreliable machines in the city. The station is also staffed by (arguably) the BVG’s most unhelpful employees.

An all-too-common sight!

 

The other less than helpful aspect of the station is its name. Like its sister stations, Schönhauser Allee and Greifswalder Strasse, the station bears the name of a street that is about three kilometres long. On more than one occasion I’ve encountered a bewildered traveller seeking a Prenzlauer Allee address and wondering why it is nowhere near the station.  As it’s directly across the road from the Planetarium, maybe naming the station after that landmark would provide a more accurate clue to its location, but I’m not going to be the one to suggest it.

We lived in our little flat opposite the station for six months; the owner wanted to return the following April, so in the spring we had the unenviable task of looking for somewhere else to live.  Miraculously, given the size of the city, the place we found was just three hundred metres away on the corner of Kanzowstrasse and Dunckerstrasse and actually even closer to the station than the Prenzlauer Allee flat.  It was on the ground floor of a three-sided building – the blank side overlooking the railway tracks.  Although I can no longer see the station entrance from my window, I only have to step out through the front door and onto the bridge for a back view.  The tracks are visible from the hof which is only a few feet away from the pointed end of the platform. The trains trundle past along the gorge formed by the tall tenement houses of Kanzowstrasse and Ahlbecker Strasse and the sloping banks of trees which provide a seasonally changing spectacle. When the windows are open, I can hear the station announcer and the trisyllabic signal that’s sounded when the train doors are about to close. Living in such proximity to the train tracks is not everyone's cup of tea but I spent my childhood in a house by a railway line so it's something I've almost always been used to.

From Dunckerstrasse

 

It was only recently, as I was sorting through the hundreds of photos I’ve taken since I moved here, that I realised how many shots of the station I have. I’ve photographed it in the rain, in the snow, in dazzling winter sunshine and in the blue of the twilight hour.  I’ve snapped its deserted platforms during train drivers’ strikes and on the evening of the World Cup Final when Germany’s involvement rendered the entire city eerily silent. I’ve even taken pictures from down on the platform of the graffiti-covered buildings that loom above the tracks.  I’ve lived within yards of the station for almost two years now. I travel from it two or three times a week and walk past it daily.  It’s become one of my anchors – once I reach it I know I’m home. Sadly I have to face the fact that one day my tenure in this little corner of the world will come to an end and it will be with a very heavy heart that I make my way to the platform to board the S9 to Schönefeld for the last time.

 

Long Hot Summer

My last post was all about the amazing night we spent at Neue Heimat watching ‘Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets’ with a Q and A and DJ set from Jarvis Cocker (and an unexpected slice of birthday cake).  We also saw a couple of other films during July. The first was the Mobile Kino open air screening of ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’ on the lovely Insel Berlin, the second was ‘B Movie: Lust and Sound in West Berlin’ a documentary about the music scene in West Berlin between 1979 and 1989, at the equally delightful Lichtblick Kino in Kastanienallee.

 

Insel Berlin

 

We started the month in holiday mode; after flying back from England we decided to give ourselves a few days to visit some of the places we hadn’t been to before. On the Thursday we headed to Friedrichshagen, a charmingly old-fashioned quarter which seems a world away from the rest of the city despite being just a few stops from Ostkreuz.  We walked down the long main street, stopping for kaffee and kuchen in a traditional café along the way.  We then walked through the Spreetunnel, a pedestrian walkway that runs under the river to emerge in woodland.  From here we walked the three or four kilometres to Köpenick where we caught a bus to the Altstadt and rested over an IPA at the tiny Schlossplatz brewery – the smallest in Germany as it likes to remind its customers.

 

 

It could be a derelict barn in the middle of the countryside but it's on Friedrichsagen's main road

 

 

The Spree looking lovely in the afternoon heat

On the Friday we went to the night market at Griessmühle in Neukölln, another of Berlin’s lovely ramshackle spaces.  After mooching around the market which, from what I could make out, consisted of locals selling their no-longer-wanted clothes, we sat for a while with a drink, absorbing the laid-back atmosphere, then went for a wander by the canal.

 

Griessmuehle

 

 

Browsing the stalls at the night market

 

The Saturday was murderously hot and we’d chosen to visit a couple of sites of historical interest.  The Gleinicker Brücke, the bridge where captured Cold War spies were handed over, was our first destination.  On the way back we stopped off at Grunewald S Bahnhof to see Gleis 17 – the infamous platform from which thousands of Berlin Jews were transported to concentration camps. The dates, numbers (where known), and destination are recorded on iron plates along the edge of the platform.  It was a sobering conclusion to our mini holiday-at-home.  The weather played havoc with the Ringbahn that weekend and we seemed to spend much of the day waiting on sweltering platforms among people bound for the lakeside beaches.

 

Glienicker Bruecke

 

 

Gleis 17 - it's difficult to imagine the misery and suffering of the people who

were herded onto the trains hundreds at a time here to be sent to the death camps

 

There were a couple of football-related events during the month, the first being a podium discussion at Clash in Kreuzberg.  The theme was English football fans and their relationship with the game in Germany.  Two of our friends were involved in the discussion which was conducted in English and German so we went along to give our support and to hear what was said.

A couple of weekends later there was a friendly at the Alte Försterei between 1. FC Union and Crystal Palace. We set off early so that we could pay our second visit in as many weeks to the Schlossplatz brewery which was taking part in a beer festival (one of about five we’ve been to this summer), and for five euros we were each given a glass which entitled us to five 0.1l measures of beer.  There were six beers to choose from so we tried all but the Hefe.   The beers that stood out for me were the smoked beer, a fiery cherry-chilli and a beer called Babylon that was made according to a 1000-year-old recipe.  It looked like dishwater but was sweet and delicious.  The friendly barman applied a very loose definition of a 0.1l measure; each glass must have contained at least double that.  Lovely as it was sitting in the little cobbled square trying beer after beer, we had to drag ourselves away and make our way to the ground where Union won 2-0.

 

Assessing the merits of Babylon

Socially July was a busy month with all of this going on plus a couple of parties and a get-together with some of our old friends from the language exchange.  It's probably for the best that I didn't go to any literary events during the month. The Fort Gorgast festival which should have taken place over the weekend of 23^rd-26^th was cancelled, officially because of an injury to one of the organisers but I suspect it was more to do with poor ticket sales. I wasn’t too sorry; my ticket money was refunded and it meant that I avoided the logistical problems of having to drag a tent and a weekend’s provisions half way across Brandenburg. I did complete a piece of flash fiction which I submitted to SAND Journal and I’m beginning to get back on track with my novel which has been stagnating at 93000 words for the past few months.

I’m also back to job hunting which, as ever in Berlin, is no easy feat!

 

Different Class: an excellent evening at Neue Heimat

I love the Mobile Kino open air screenings and always keep an eye out for their upcoming events so when I saw that they were to screen ‘Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets’ with special guests Jarvis Cocker and film-maker Florian Habicht, I was determined to buy tickets as soon as they became available.

The screening was held indoors at Neue Heimat – one of my favourite Berlin venues – on Saturday 11^th July. We arrived at about 9.00 p.m. having first met met up with friends Abby and Albert at Urban Spree where we caught an hour of the acoustic festival that was taking place there. At Neue Heimat we met Mark and Luisa, friends who, having already had their tickets scanned, were able to go straight in once the queue started to form and secure front row seats for us all.  We refreshed our drinks supply and, at about 10.45, Jarvis and Florian took to the stage to introduce the film. It was Berlin-born Florian’s 40^th birthday and he arrived with two enormous boxes of cake which Jarvis proceeded to serve to the audience. Being offered birthday cake by one of my all-time musical heroes was both wonderful and surreal; it was very good cake too. 

Getting ready for the show

 

Not from Saturday, but an older shot of a rather deserted Neue Heimat

 

Jarvis and Florian (with a box of birthday cake)

The opening shots of the film, which documents the band’s last ever gig in their home city of Sheffield in 2012, show Jarvis changing a tyre, feeding ducks and cycling around streets of terraced houses.  In places the film is as much an homage to Sheffield itself as to the band – there are stunning shots of the city and some delightfully eccentric moments: a group of pensioners in a diner singing ‘Help the Aged’ and a local musician explaining how he returned home after living in London because in Sheffield even the muggers are friendly.  Despite the danger of a slight mythologising of the city and its inhabitants, what emerges is an awareness of the symbiotic relationship between it and the band. Along with concert footage there are interviews with band members and fans, the city’s real ‘common people’ and Pulp devotees from further afield (one of whom took time out from being a nurse and single mum in Atlanta to attend the gig). 

When the film finished there was a Q and A session in which members of the audience put questions to Jarvis and Florian, which resulted in some late-night philosophising about class, politics and old age.  There was a bizarre declaration from one audience member who said that her father was wealthy but that she ‘liked’ common people, and an unimaginative intervention from someone replicating Jarvis’s famous Michael Jackson protest. 

After the Q and A we crossed the yard to another part of the complex where Jarvis was to perform a DJ set.  This was another treat; an eclectic collection of favourites arranged chronologically from the 50s and 60s, through to the present, and ending with Lionel Richie’s ‘All Night Long’. Further entertainment was planned but we’d had enough excitement and by 2.45 we were on our way back to the S-Bahn.

DJ Jarvis

It was a fantastic evening – heartfelt thanks Mobile Kino and Neue Heimat.

 

Beer, music and temperamental weather

The rash of festivals continued in June with Berlin Beer Week, a celebration of the city’s craft brewers, which kicked off on 13^th June.  We got in the mood by visiting the BRŁO pop-up beer garden at Platoon Kunsthalle, probably the prettiest beer garden I’ve ever seen.  There were so many fresh flowers and pastel-coloured lanterns that it looked more like a wedding reception or garden party than a dedicated beer-drinking site.  It was a baking hot day and an almighty thunderstorm later kept me confined to the flat for a while but I eventually made it down to Brauhaus Lemke where the Beer Week’s official opening took place.  For the €7.50 entrance fee I received a souvenir glass and coupons for two free Lemke beers.  I chose the Imperial IPA and the Weizenbock.  For the rest of the week Berlin’s craft brewers were given the opportunity of promoting their products at a variety of locations from breweries and bars to humble hofs. On the final Friday (when the weather had reverted to the customary cold and rain) we went down to a back yard in Petersburger Strasse where we found stacks of beer crates and pallets– some of which had been pressed into service as makeshift furniture. The beer was being served from what looked like a ground-floor kitchen.  We had a couple there before heading across the road to Bierlieb where, in another back yard, a barbecue was sizzling.  After a couple of IPAs I judged it prudent to bid farewell to Berlin Beer Week.

 

Berlin Beer Week began under the watchful gaze of the Fernsehturm at Brauhaus Lemke...

 

...and continued in a Petersburger Strasse back yard

 

The annual Fête de la Musique also took place in June. The weather was miserable on the Saturday but we managed to see a few punk bands in Friedrichshain on the Sunday evening when the sun finally made an appearance. 

Fête de la Musique

 

For me the musical highlight of the month was going to Bassy Club to see French Boutik, a band whose style can be described as 60s French pop.  We met our music-loving friend Franzi who, at sixty four, cycled to the venue in red high heels.  It’s such an intimate little club that we were able to chat to the band both before and after the performance, their English being way superior to our French.

French Boutik

 

Also memorable last month was the Exberliner screening of Jean-Gabriel Periot’s Une Jeunesse Allemande (A German Youth) at the lovely Lichtblick Kino.  The film, a documentary about the Red Army Fraction, focussed mainly on Ulrike Meinhof.  Attending the performance was Gerd Conradt, film-maker and one-time fellow student and friend of the RAF’s Holger Meinz.  Conradt worked as an adviser on the documentary and provided some of the footage.  Afterwards there was a fascinating Q and A session followed by the usual wine and snacks.  I’d wanted to go to the following Wednesday’s screening of Conradt’s Video Vertov, but it coincided with the Fiction Canteen, now back at its original location in Wedding’s Alte Kantine.  I finally gathered the courage to read a piece of my own work, after first fortifying myself with a glass of sparkling wine.

Alte Kantine

We ended the month with a visit back to England where we caught up with family and had our first decent curry for a while.

It's a celebration!

 

Jazz im Park, Pankow

 

Berlin has had its share of festivals and celebrations lately, beginning with the May Day festivities.  We went down to Oranienstrasse where food stalls and live music stages lined the street and a joyous atmosphere prevailed.  However, it was so crowded that at one point I genuinely feared that I would be crushed.  I was also dismayed at the number of expensively dressed trust funders, especially the suntanned, perfectly-toothed one brandishing a selfie stick.  Such individuals can surely have little or no sympathy for the principle of May Day and really only want to be there so they can be seen.

There was more breathing space at the Berliner Braufest at Neue Heimat.  A very dark and chilly day punctuated by scatterings of rain could not dampen the enthusiasm of the city’s beer aficionados.  Some very judicious selections had to be made from the 72 stalls.  I started off with a Mikkeler which brought back happy memories of evenings spent in the Mikkeler bar in Copenhagen, then moved on to sample the double IPA at Leeds-based Northern Monk.  After a Craftwerk Belgian-style Tripel we decided to go in search of food.  I had a suitably stodgy burrito before heading back and starting on the Brewcifer Chilli spiced IPA then the Spent Brewers Collective Red Oat Ale.  The evening began to grow chillier so we took our drinks indoors, sitting on Neue Heimat’s pallet seating and braving the elements only to fetch more beers. 

Dark skies but great atmosphere

 

Heading indoors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the last of the three bank holidays in May, the intimate Jazz im Park festival took place at the lovely Bürger Park in Pankow.  We were invited to lunch with friends who live a half-hour’s gentle stroll from the park, and Fran – an intimidatingly good cook – served schnitzel and potatoes with what seemed like a ton of the fat, white Beelitzer Spargel and home-made hollandaise sauce (as it’s Spargelzeit the city’s residents are in the grip of asparagus mania).  We ate in the garden where we lingered with a bottle of white wine before setting off late in the afternoon for the festival. With Norah the dog in tow.  Sipping cocktails and chilling to the live jazz acts as the sun went down was the perfect ending to the weekend. 

The Karneval der Kulturen also hit the streets of Neukölln in May but I was unable to get to that as I went to the final game of Bundesliga 2 at the Alte Försterei instead.  Last games here are always stirring occasions with pre-match presentations being made to departing staff.  After the game, the players were joined on their traditional lap of honour by midfielder Benjamin Köhler, who in January was diagnosed with stomach cancer.  Köhler and his team mates wore ‘Beat Cancer’ T-Shirts as they threw shirts, shorts and boots into the crowd.

Football has been big news in the city recently with the German cup final (DFB Pokal) and the Champions League final taking place on successive weekends in the Olympiastadion, and the women’s Champions League final which was held at the Sportpark.  The city was awash with Dortmund fans for the Pokal and Barcelona fans for the Champions League final (for some reason fans of Wolfsburg and Juventus, the teams’ respective opponents were largely invisible).  Once more, we watched the Champions League final in a bar in Moabit with friends.  The S-Bahn train back to Alexanderplatz was full of very dejected-looking Juventus fans for whom, without having any great affection for their team, I had to feel some sympathy.

As far as literary events go, I’ve been to another Fiction Canteen in the Platzhaus at Teutoburger Platz and am now considering plucking up the courage to read something at the next one which will be back at its usual location of the Alte Kantine in Wedding later this month.  I also went to a whimsical event called the ‘Dead Ladies Show’ hosted by Katy Derbyshire and Florian Duijsens at ACUD.  The evening was a celebration, in English and German, of the lives, loves and works of Irmgard Keun, Dorothy Parker and Pola Negri.  Katy Derbyshire began proceedings with an account of her ‘dead lady’ Irmgard Keun before interviewing author Daniela Dröscher about her novel ‘Pola’ based on the life of Polish-born Hollywood femme fatale Pola Negri.  Finally, Florian Duijsens gave a presentation on Dorothy Parker.  I missed May’s Guinness Books and Records at Curious Fox because of a meeting and I won’t be able to go to the next one as we’ll be in England.  I am however planning to look in on their ‘Bloomsday’ celebrations on 16^th June when the day is given over to the honouring of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Sundays have largely involved checking out the dining options at Streetfood auf Achse in the Kulturbrauerei and mooching around the Mauerpark.

            Streetfood auf Achse, Kulturbrauerei

 

         Traditional Mauerpark treasure-hunting

The festivals continue with the first Music and Streetfood Open Air Festival at Neue Heimat and the start of the Berlin Beer Week this weekend.

 

Playing Catch-Up

I’ve neglected the blog somewhat lately; it's been five weeks since I last posted anything.  The last time I left such a gap was when I was ill last year and felt too lethargic to write.  This time it’s down to a combination of factors, but mainly because I’ve been working at the call centre for the past five weeks.  If the work here was permanent we would earn enough to enable us to stay in Berlin permanently but as things are our German isn’t up to conducting surveys in anything other than English so we only get work when English speakers are needed.  We have another week to go but I have heard that more English studies are planned for the summer. I do hope so because each month that we work earns us enough to stay another month here.

We should be returning to the UK at the end of December but after the General Election result I’m dreading having to go back.  I’m genuinely concerned about the direction things seem to be going in under the vicious venal Cameron government.  In the immediate aftermath of the election I sent off a fresh round of applications to various language schools which attracted depressingly predictable replies.

As part of my ongoing project to improve my German (and thus my employment prospects) I have acquired another tandem partner.  Annett is very politically aware, she likes The Smiths and Joy Division and she writes so we have plenty in common. 

As ever, I’ve kept myself busy writing.  I’ve finished the job of proofreading and editing the children’s book but I have been asked if I’d like to do some further proofreading later in the year which of course I’ve said yes to but again it’s nothing permanent.

I’ve been doing more unpaid writing too.  Several weeks ago I approached Paul Sullivan of Slow Travel Berlin about writing an article on Topics bookshop (whose owner Doron wrote the kid’s book I’ve been editing) and was asked to put together a few paragraphs on this and two more of the city’s newest bookshops that would be used to update an existing post.  For this I interviewed staff in Soda, a magazine and bookshop in Weinbergsweg with a focus on design, and Bildband in Immanuelkirchstrasse which deals predominantly in photo books but also has a section devoted to art, architecture and design. 

I’ve made more (albeit halting) progress with my main writing project which now stands at 92,000 words, and I’ve also been practicing writing shorter fiction, something I’m not particularly comfortable with but I’m imposing the challenge on myself because it can only help. 

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote...

For all the worrying I’ve done about not being able to find work, a couple of weeks ago I actually quit my Wednesday afternoon teaching job with the girls. I hadn’t seen them for four weeks because of the Easter break and the visit from my niece.  I’d had performances from the brat at our previous two sessions and the last time I’d seen her I’d left her simmering in a red-faced rage after one of her tedious tantrums. This time she didn’t even wait until we were out of the school yard before acting up. She refused to answer anything I asked her, sticking her fingers in her ears, shrieking and screwing up her eyes when I spoke to her. Then she stood stock still and refused to move. When I finally did get her home I decided that the money I was paid for this nonsense was nowhere near sufficient compensation. The next day I received a very angry text from the other one’s mother complaining about the fact that I’d quit the job but completely failing to acknowledge that the brat’s antics had forced me into it, only going so far as to admit that kids can sometimes be ‘a pain’. 

On a more civilised note, I have been working on the book translation. I’ve also had another article published on Slow Travel Berlin’s website – unpaid but at least I’m writing – and I’m gathering material for a few lines about the city’s latest bookshops for another article.

I’ve also started to reapply myself to my fiction writing. I had a prolonged period of self-doubt, feeling that everything I wrote was sub-standard, but I’m beginning to emerge from that and last week my main project reached almost 85,000 words.

A couple of Saturdays ago I went to the launch of SAND Journal, Issue 11 at the 1820 Bar in Rosa Luxemburg Platz. It would have been very easy to miss this venue – there was just a door in the wall with a small plaque bearing the bar’s name. Once through the door, I took a staircase down to a dark, smoky basement where beer garden benches and a couple of battered sofas were arranged facing the stage. The evening kicked off with Will Studdert, the winner of The Reader’s short story competition reading his winning entry ‘Horst Wessel Stadt’.  After this a couple of poets took to the stage and finally another prose writer, Kasia Juno van Schalk, read a short story. I particularly enjoyed the fiction. The entrance to the event was three Euros or free with the purchase of the journal so I bought the journal and spent much of the next day dipping into it.

Another month then of reading, writing and employment anxiety. April also included Easter, a birthday party, a couple of meetings with Twitter friends, another visit to Guinness, Books and Records at Curious Fox (which is becoming one of my favourite Berlin events) and some very dramatic weather.
 

 

Wintry-looking scene at the beginning of the month

 

 

The same place a few days later 

 

 

Double rainbow for our friend Albert's birthday (and he's not even a Korean dictator)

 

Travels with my niece

Last week I had a very short visit from my sixteen-year-old niece India. She was only able to get over for a couple of days as she had been performing in a local theatre production which took up most of her Easter break (she has a belting soprano voice). As she’s studying A Level history and is fascinated by World War II and Nazi Germany, there was more than enough to keep her occupied. She arrived on a ridiculously early flight on Wednesday morning so we stoked up with a Spreegold breakfast before beginning our sightseeing marathon with a visit to the Topographie des Terrors via Checkpoint Charlie.  It’s impossible to avoid Cold War ‘sights’ in Berlin so we incorporated a few of those into the trip too. I hadn’t been to the Topographie des Terrors for years so I’d not visited the new indoor exhibition before. The outdoor ‘trench’ is still there and features the exhibition Berlin 1933-1945: Between Propaganda and Terror.  Inside there are temporary and permanent exhibitions devoted to the historical site (several Third Reich institutions including the Gestapo headquarters were once located here), the last days of the war, and Nazi atrocities such as the treatment of homosexuals, political opponents and the disabled. 

 

India with her breakfast pancakes

Nearby, in a car park just behind the Holocaust Memorial – a piece of positioning I find wonderfully ironic – is the site of Hitler’s bunker.  India wanted to visit the site as she’s particularly interested in the Führer’s last days. It’s kept deliberately free of razzmatazz to deter fascists from creating a shrine but there is an information panel. 

From there we walked through the Holocaust Memorial, properly named the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. India’s paternal grandfather was the son of Russian Jews who moved to Britain in the 1930s so it’s possible that some of her ancestors suffered Nazi persecution. It’s a very sobering monument but I’m not a great fan, partly because it’s always overrun with tourists failing to accord it the proper respect. After taking a look at the Brandenburger Tor, the Reichstag and the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche we were ready for a rest so, making the most of a beautiful late afternoon we made our way back to Prenzlauer Berg and stopped for refreshments in the Prater. Alan had to leave us there as he’d got a ticket for a Paul Weller concert so India and I went for a walk around the Mauerpark and dinner at an Italian restaurant.

 

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

 

The next day we went to the Deutsch-Russisches Museum in Karlshorst whose building contains the room in which the declaration of surrender at the end of WWII was signed. The emphasis here is on the German onslaught on the Soviet Union, the crimes committed against Soviet prisoners of war and, naturally, Germany’s eventual capitulation. 

There were things that we didn’t have time to fit in (Sachsenhausen and the Haus der Wannsee Konferenz for example), but by Thursday afternoon we were a little museum-weary and I didn’t want India to return home feeling as though she’d been on a school trip so we decided to head for the shops. As her flight home was early on Friday morning we rounded off the visit with pizza and an early night.

 

Room in which representatives of Nazi Germany signed the declaration of surrender, ending WWII

Obviously it’s always lovely to spend time with family members even if it’s only a short visit. I’m happy that we were able to have such a great couple of days – the weather was perfect and, as well as a few clothing purchases, India got plenty of photos to share with her history class.