Sliding along with champagne, nostalgia and...jelly doughnuts, of course!

These are the foods of the season, after all.

Instead of wishing you 'happy new year' here, everyone says 'guten rutsch!' (good slide!) as in, slide oh so well into that new year.
so
Good Slide everyone, hooray!

Extenuating circumstances

BERLIN or BARD? or Berlin or Bard or Berlin or Bard orBardorBerlinorBardorBerlin or...Berlin?

Another Night at the SO36

The SO36, on Oranien Strasse has traditional dancing every Sunday, with a short intro course for beginners who can’t dance, (like me!). I go with Berlina, Felix and Clare and we try to learn the hrhuhmbahhh (which must be pronounced just like that, accompanying a sway of the head). Traditional partner dancing is in (again) in Berlin, especially with the Kreutzberg queer scene. Nothing compares to watching some immaculately collar shirted and dancing shoed men spin their partners around. Or alternately, playing the guessing game while sitting on the side (which I often do, not knowing the dances) of who’s man/woman/once a man/once a woman/leader/follower/friends/dating?
When we arrive the room is split into leaders and followers as the teacher shows the next step. I realize I can’t tell which side to go to… there is an equal number of women and men on both sides and it’s almost impossible to figure out who is whom…no one ‘looks’ any more like a follower or leader than the other.
Figuring out the steps—which foot, forward, back? oh I have to count and, wait where are my feet supposed to be on the turn?—makes me feel ungainly and pleasantly comical, laughing as I lose the step direction for the oom pah pah umpteenth time.
We leave a moment to go across the street where the Kreutzberg Nose-Flute Orchestra is whining out 50’s pop tunes…novel, but not as melodious as it sounds. Back at the SO, the night continues with a short variety show and then more partner dancing music until some point at which the place turns into a regular disco (here that just means club really). This means music good for single dancing (unless, of course, you can figure out the partner dance steps to Billie Jean…which some people do…)
This dancing is thrilling…if you know the steps and/or have a good partner. It’s also a lot of fun to watch from the side if people have some fancy footwork, but in the end I’d rather dance myself, even all by myself.

The Bethanien

We go to the Bethanian Rauch-Haus because Örjan says there’s a documentary film showing, in celebration of its 35th anniversary as a commune. As the story goes, it was the first successful squat in Berlin. (The film is old and has quirky technical failures that are not quite charming. It is hard for me to understand the people in it and I’m not sure if that hangs on my german or theirs.) From what I gather, it started out as some kids who were trying to find a free space to hang out or live. They found four floors of an apartment building and fixed it up as their own. The group grew to almost 300 (?) people and so they needed to move to a bigger place. Nearby was the beautiful old Bethanian hospital, which had been long abandoned. 'That’s the place!', they said. Then follows a resistance story like many resistance stories. There were demonstrations, some riots. The commune tried to declare their own land, Bethania. City hall was fought, and both sides won, a little. (This is where the film’s sound started having seizures). At least, in the intervening 35 years a compromise was reached and people still live there legally today. Mostly it houses a load of galleries and art events. The building is still a grand graffiti covered castle.

here you can sell your soul

On Fridays there is a Turkish market by Kottbusser Tor, one of the many markets you can find just about any day of the week around Berlin (and, I think, most European cities). This one, running along the south ‘Ufer’ river bank in Kreutzberg is the place to go for olives, nuts, dried fruit, rolls of fabric, rose flavored ground cow bones (ok, ok, actually just the gelatin of turkish delight), grape leaves, spices and lots of kakis (a persimmon fruit that I have been obsessed with for the last month. They are the most amazing experience ever if you can pick a good ripe one.
Unlike persimmons that I’m used to, they don’t need to be soft to be ripe; certain varieties can be still pale yellow and crunchy and be ready. But unripe, OH they are so astringent which, if you don’t know, is just awful….where was I, ah at the market).
I like how it is almost too crowded to walk down the row of stands. Not that there are that many people but the space is comfortably narrow and I am cramped between the bags of rice and grains on one side and on the other, milk white stacks of cheese behind glass. I can’t really tell the difference between the French sheep cheese and the Bulgarian sheep mountain cheese; it’s all feta to me, but I go with the mountain cheese.
The fruit and vegetable stands are green and so much orange. Besides carrots, there’s clementines and satsumis and oranges and more oranges and kakis and mangoes and papaya and pomegranates and humongous slices of butternut squash. The stand owners call out, ‘best price for sharons, here here’, or ‘scarves, gloves, everything, one euro one euro’.
At home I am surprised to realize I bought almost exclusively tropical fruit, walnuts, and three small squares of turkish delight, rose flavored.

In the Oven

Coal scuttles? Yeah we have one of those. The house animals, or otherwise ceramic ovens, need lots of love and attention and feeding. This necessitates frequent trips to the cellar, so you can find me, every so often, black fingered and puffing after hauling a crate of coal up five flights to the apartment. Really, it’s not as difficult as I imagined. At least it’s not the top floor, and at least I’m not a miner (think about how many times you can use that last phrase every day).
The funny thing is, coal isn’t shaped the way I always imagined; in little irregular pebbles. No, this is Modern Coal. It is angular and oblong, looking like compact cars and specially formed to be easily stackable.

When you forget how to tell time to go at your speed

Walking into the lecture hall one tuesday...
hmm, this room is not as full as usual, I thought.
wait, this is not language philosophy, I thought
I bet I...
No, I couldn't have...
Oh yes. I did.
It was Combined Transportation System Logistics
What?
It was too funny not to stay.
Actually it was interesting
Maybe because I never think about those things.
Like how my gloves get here from china.