Sign language

On my way to the laundromat yesterday, I stopped into a corner shop to buy a bottle of water so that I'd have appropriate change for the machines. This was my second experience at the laundromat, and this time I didn't need to look up various words (waschpulver!) in my pocket dictionary to confirm that it was indeed soap I was getting to put into my clothing. I was waiting in line with my water and my ten euro note, and everything was going fine until the very friendly proprietor offered me a date stuffed with a walnut. Thanks!, I said, eating it appreciatively while he told me what it was. Turns out that the German words for date, walnut, and coconut are all practically homophones, and I could see what it was anyway. After I finished chewing the proprietor was waiting expectantly for my response, and all I could do -- because I sheepishly didn't want to admit I didn't know German -- was make an ok sign with my hand, which didn't seem to mean much to him (thankfully I wasn't doing this in Brazil, where it's the equivalent of giving someone the finger) and say thanks again. The one other phrase I've mastered in German is I'm sorry, do you speak English?, and I say it several times a day, when someone asks to borrow a pen, or asks for directions, or asks me whether it's cold in the library (oddly, it isn't). So it's decided, I think: it's time to learn German.

Also on the topic of language appreciation, there are certain phrases that are particularly funny to my American ear. In addition to the worldwide phenomenon of wearing t-shirts with phrases in foreign languages that you think are cool but really don't make sense (do you know that says Media Blitz, Mr. Cool?), the names of German bars amaze me. The Rodeo Club. The Polish Losers' Club. Muschi Obermaier.

I'm going to leave that last one untranslated. It's probably for the best...

On Berlin

When Tom and I were trying to find a mop in a department store yesterday -- a necessity that our flat lacks, given its resident's clear prioritization of things mental over things physical -- I said to him, 'I don't think this guy has cleaned since the wall came down.' While that surely is an exaggeration, it's nevertheless the case that the wall -- and the building, razing, and rebuilding it has entailed -- continues to be a part of everyday experience here, and is characteristic of how this city is uniform only insofar as it's a consistent hodgepodge of squares and train stations and different period styles which were all built, more or less, over the same two or three decades after WWII. The diversity of postwar reconstruction is genuine, but it's nevertheless peculiar: all of the columned, neoclassical buildings look convincingly old, but as soon as you remind yourself that the majority of the city was flattened in the war, you recognize that the stately buildings along Unter den Linden, which runs from the Brandenburg Gate past the opera house and Humboldt University are actually the same vintage as the geometrical, primary-colored highrise apartment buildings that are clustered in different neighborhoods of the city. The old is as new as the semi-new; you can't trust your eye to date buildings based on period appearance. Because rent in Berlin is so low, you see shops in the middle of the city that you would never see in London, say: walking from our flat to the Lidl (the Aldi-equivalent supermarket), you pass a shop that only sells wheels for heavy-duty carts, and a shop that sells gadgets to assist the elderly with bathing and walking, and a variety of other clubs and shopfronts. In a way it evens things out, so that cheap places and expensive places exist side by side, but it also makes for a randomizing effect such that a collonade, which appears to have survived the war, is across from the industrial wheel shop.

I don't have a clear sense of the East vs. West legacy: parts of the wall are in many places throughout the city, in the East Side Gallery, in Potsdamer Platz, where I get off the train every morning, in museums and on posters and reproduced in shops. A friend says you can tell East German men by the vests they wear, khaki for the workplace and black for dress (witness Brüno's assistant). It's easy to stop noticing them; they're usually obscured by tourists anyhow. But it's hard to stop noticing the inconsistencies in the city's reproduction of the accumulation of styles over time: when you realize that the concert hall is no more baroque than the gigantic, space-age Kulturforum, which is mustard yellow and really appears to be designed by an alien architect, it's like seeing the wires suspending the acrobat. The reality effect of this city is a simultaneity that wants to stretch over time, and does, largely because almost all of it is covered with graffiti. As soon as you cover a wall in spray paint, it matters less whether it's old or new, I think. And in any case, one of the ways this city expresses its delightful unruliness, in the midst of an otherwise bureaucratic and rule-bound state, is through all this scribbling. Even the walls of the Camper store along one of the trendy shopping streets are covered with graffiti. When you go in there you can write on the walls. Maybe once it's become part of shoe shopping, it's hardly the same sort of activity, but even so, I like trying to spot artists' work across town. One of my favorites is a Warhol Velvet Underground banana that someone has put on all sorts of walls.

Stealth blogging in the Staatsbibliothek

While I don't officially know that it's against the rules to use the library computers for things other than strictly academic pursuits, the gigantic list in German next to the computer -- though I understand basically none of it -- presumably declares it bad form. So in the spirit of not breaking the rules too much, I'll try to be brief.

Not understanding lists and notices and announcements -- not understanding much at all, really -- has been the order of the last few days. Tom and I have been in Berlin since Sunday, and we've settled in nicely. In general I've been able to get by on the Berliners' excellent English and my baby phrases like 'a coffee, please' and 'thank you!' I think I say 'please' much more when it's one of the fifteen words I know. Unfortunately the word for 'sorry' is really long, so I've had to keep practicing it. Walking around whispering it to myself makes me remember a similar moment when I'd just moved to Florence and Meredith and I were trying to figure out how in the world to pronounce 'spoon' in Italian. We were walking down the street saying the equivalent of 'spooooon' until we realized that we probably seemed like we had sufficiently limited capacities that we ought to be taken off the streets immediately, and possibly even spoon fed. That quieted us down, at least for a moment.

Other than my utter inability to speak or understand German, which makes certain everyday tasks more challenging than they otherwise would be, I have to say that I love Berlin. We're staying in a great big studio in Schoneberg which we've rented from a historian whose WWII books line an entire wall, floor to ceiling. The kitchen is tiled orange and the stovetop is on the windowsill -- just two burners. It's just right for the summer. There's a Turkish market up the street with more fruit and varieties of dried beans than I've ever seen: a good antidote to a city that's otherwise committed to meat and beer. About the latter, it really is good here: I had some pilsner in a ceramic mug with my dinner the other night, and I wasn't about to complain.

Even though I've been away from the states for only two weeks or so, it seems like longer, partly because I've been in London and Berlin since then, partly because so much has happened. We moved Tom out of his Cambridge flat (this involved renting a very, very big van), Tom passed his viva, we did some celebrating at Rules (London's oldest restaurant), we had a BBQ, complete with s'mores, in the garden. I explored London a bit more and got to see Queen Mary, where I'll be a visiting student next year. I also saw the production of Phedre that the National Theatre broadcast to 100 cinemas all over England. Helen Mirren was in it! She was really good -- the whole production was excellent, really. What an unrelenting play. When you see it, you think: 'This is tragedy; it just won't give up being doomed.'

On a lighter note, we're seeing Bruno tonight. I can only imagine...