The end of an era for me - but is it the end of the line for the language exchange?

This week I put an end to one particular aspect of my Berlin life when I took my last session at the language exchange.  I’ve loved doing these sessions ever since I hosted my first one almost a year ago and I’ll always be grateful to Darren for giving me the opportunity to keep my teaching skills from getting rusty and enabling me to earn a few extra Euros.  But attendances have been dropping for some time now and I think that the language exchange’s days are probably numbered. 

We first attended a session about three weeks after moving here, when they were held at the St Gaudy Café.  We’d wanted to meet people and try to improve our terrible German.  At the time, the café’s Australian owner (who also ran the language exchange) was in the process of selling up and returning to her native country.  After her departure, the sessions were taken over by Darren but the café closed and he managed to find a new home for us in the Rhino Café on Rhinower Strasse.  The Rhino Café is a lovely, friendly venue whose owner, despite closing up at seven in the evening, agreed to keep the café open late on Wednesdays just for us.  It’s a cosy environment in the winter and on warm evenings we conduct our sessions al fresco around the pavement tables to the bewilderment of locals and passers-by, especially if they happen to come by during the ‘performance’ part of the evening. 

But the St Gaudy, having been owned by an English-speaking ex-pat, always attracted a sizeable English crowd and since the move it’s been ever more difficult to do this with the result that most weeks the groups contain roughly one English speaker to four or five Germans.  Darren’s promotion of the event on ex-pat forums brings newcomers but they hardly ever return.  Since before Christmas there have been fewer and fewer people of any nationality attending. 

There is a ‘hard core’ of regulars who seem to operate on a squad-rotation system; we never know who’s going to attend from one week to the next.  Sometimes someone will disappear for weeks, or even months, and then turn up again as though they’d never been away.  I like this casual, haphazard approach although it means that it’s difficult to plan activities with the participants in advance.  It’s a very close-knit group but not at all cliquey and newcomers are welcomed with genuine warmth.  When I began taking sessions I received a lot of support and I’ve made some great friends.  My new tandem partner Heidi is one example, as is Lars, whose brain is an encyclopaedia of music.  There is nothing Lars hasn’t heard of; he can name the producer of just about every album ever recorded, can say who wrote which songs, who stood in for the regular drummer on the third track or guested on keyboards on the album’s final track.  Franzi, the bubbliest person I’ve ever met, is also a music lover but, apart from a penchant for soul music and a fixation with the Beatles and the Stones, she prefers classical concerts.  Franzi’s other mania is for fashion, particularly unusual footwear and bright lipstick and her infectious good humour is a wonder to behold. There are other friends too, Germans and ex-pats, who we meet up with regularly for birthday parties or spontaneously-arranged evenings out.  I’m sure we will continue to meet socially but, I can’t see a future for the event that brought us all together.

In recent weeks Darren has spoken about quitting as he’s trying to establish a business and no longer has the time for lesson planning.  I’d been giving serious thought to my future participation too and last week I finally told Darren that I wouldn’t be taking any more sessions.  I suggested that, with so few English-speakers and the low attendances we’ve been getting lately, it was time to think about winding it up.  The lack of customers is not helpful to the Rhino Café’s turnover either and it can only be a matter of time before the Wednesday evening late-opener becomes unprofitable.

I shall still attend as a participant but I have a feeling that sooner or later we’ll be having a farewell party there…

January

On Saturday I woke up find to a dusting of snow on the ground so I set off on a ramble around Prenzlauer Berg to take some photos, along with every amateur photographer in the city it appeared.  Berlin is irresistibly romantic in the snow and it provided a perfect end to what can be a desolate month.  By the time February arrives I often have the feeling of having survived something.  It’s as though all the health drives and ‘dry January’ initiatives we subject ourselves to are a form of self-imposed punishment for the revelry of the previous weeks.  Although I despair at the rampant commercialism of Christmas, I do love the event itself and the sense of goodwill it seems to foster.  The atmosphere during advent has always felt quite magical to me. I’m also a sucker for fairy lights and sparkly things.  Once it’s all over and my fellow humans begin dieting, abstaining and facing up to the credit card bills, I feel a strange yet not unpleasant post-festive melancholy, a state for which there should definitely be a German word.

This year January proved quite eventful for me in one way or another.  A few weeks ago I had an interview with the owners of a bookshop and publishing venture that’s due to open in Neukölln.  We met at a café in Weserstrasse and had such a positive and laid-back discussion, that I ended up badly wanting the job.  I was told that I’d be notified a week later but the following Friday I got in touch and proposed working for them on a month's free trial.  I reasoned that I had nothing to lose; if they were thinking of giving me the job then they’d save a month’s wages, and if they weren’t they might at least think about taking me up on the offer so I'd get a chance to prove myself.  I received a very friendly reply saying that they were still interviewing and would let me know the outcome in time.  No reference was made to my proposal so I deduced that one decision they had made was that the job was definitely not going to be mine.  I was disappointed and I couldn’t help wondering if my age had been a factor. 

I’d also applied that week for a job as a tour guide and received a patronising rejection telling me that although I had ‘so much to offer’ they could not proceed further with my application.  In a rare fit of bolshiness, I challenged this, asking why, if they really did believe I had so much going for me, was I not worth interviewing, and their non-committal reply only strengthened my suspicions that they considered me too old for their enterprise.  I think they were probably looking for people to conduct pub crawls rather than in-depth insights into the Cold War, and see bar-hopping as a young person’s pursuit. 

So I was stunned when, on Monday, I opened an e-mail from the bookshop owners asking if I’d be interested in working with them in the publishing side of the business.  I’m not sure what the work entails but I’m overjoyed and can’t wait to find out.

From a creative point of view, January was a very productive month.  What I'm now beginning to think of as 'my novel' reached 70,000 words and I completed a piece of writing about Weissensee that was published on the travel website Slow Travel Berlin.  I’d got a sizeable collection of photographs of the area from past visits but I decided to have another wander around to take some more and to check that everything I wanted to write about was still actually there (it’s amazing how things appear and disappear in this city).  I spent an unexpectedly warm and sunny afternoon gathering snaps; at one point the camera on my phone suffered the same malfunction as it had at the Lenin-Liebknecht-Luxemburg demo so I had to use the ‘proper’ camera.  Alan and I also took a sleepy tram ride early one morning to get some pictures of the lake at daybreak.  Although I didn’t use any of the pictures for my article, it was worth the effort for a very atmospheric dawn walk.  We found the lake silent and still, reflecting orange globes of light from the lamps along the surrounding pathways.  The only signs of life were ducks and a red squirrel and, near the bank, a group of swans.  Before long, lights began to appear in the windows of nearby houses, visible through the naked branches of the trees.  A drizzly rain started to fall which seemed to rinse the blackness from the sky.  We got back on to Berliner Allee, now shimmering in the headlights of the morning traffic and by half past eight we were warming up with steaming hot coffee. 

 

Daybreak at the 'White Lake'

Socially, January was quite a busy month, beginning with a long, lazy brunch with friends Abby and Albert and ending with a birthday party in a tiny flat on Schivelbeiner Strasse.  In between we were entertained by a couple of twenty-something friends who invited us to their flat in Moabit for an evening of curry, conversation, beer and wine and a bit of guitar playing.  I’ve also acquired a new tandem partner in Heidi from the language exchange as my other partner seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.  We had our first session at Heidi’s flat in Schöneweide and spent an agreeable afternoon drinking tea, eating the last of her home-made Christmas cookies and helping each other with our respective languages while snow swirled outside the window.

I’m now getting February under way by attempting to secure Berlinale tickets, reading the Orhan Pamuk book I bought the other day, working on a piece about Prenzlauer Allee, and building on the 70,000 words of my novel.  On Sunday I learned that I’ve made the shortlist of The Reader’s short story competition and I was so delighted that I don’t think I stopped smiling all the rest of the day.