BERLIN

Berlin life when you're not a hipster - comments, observations, and advice.

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Poo van in Berlin in action

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The Poo van in Berlin 

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Not the Mr. Whippy van.

A couple of times a week our street gets a visit from the poo vacuum van.  Having a suburban upbringing I was ignorant to the existence of such vehicles.  In the burbs neighbourhood dogs were free to poo on their front lawn and the defecation was left to the owners to contend with.  But here in Berlin there is a little tiny council truck that looks like it came out of your childhood Richard Scarry picture book.  The truck drives up and down the paved footpaths pausing at every tree to suck up excrement.   The actual sucker is similar in look and sound to a leaf blower but obviously works in reverse.   The tiny truck is in hot demand.   There are a lot of apartment dogs in Berlin and very limited poo space.   The tiny patches of dirt that you could loosely call a nature strip are very quickly full.    The arrival of the van is a great relief.   Long before you ever see the van, you can hear it.   The distinct stopping and starting of the suction drone, becoming louder and louder as it nears your block.  It’s not dissimilar to the suburban tradition of waiting for the Mr. Whippy van.  You would always hear it long before you’d see it.  Your anticipation and excitement growing stronger the louder the music became.   Although the poo van offers no such treat, its imminent arrival has that same effect.

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A little addition to my "Berlin Destruction" post.

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Spring destruction

Spring in Berlin is brilliant but unfortunately it signals the start of roadwork season. The big thaw means it’s time for local councils to start digging.   To say the least, it is moderately irritating. Just as everyone is coming outside to play and finally enjoying some sunshine, just as the cafes have dusted off their outside seating and everyone wants to sit outside and have a coffee or a beer, the barriers come up, roads are blocked, and hammering, grinding, digging and general construction hums, drones and clangs becomes the constant ambient soundtrack.

 Big trenches dissect practically every street in which work on laying pipes, repairing roads and other mysterious underground utilities are underway. People have to negotiate mazes of plastic white barriers and steel plates.   Cars are forced to patiently queue and let opposing traffic through.   And in what is always a puzzling turn of events, streets or corners that were dug up only last year seem to be under construction yet again.   What could they have possibly forgot to do last time that they have to repeat the whole tedious process again? The poor shop owners who wait patiently throughout quiet desolate unprofitable winters in anticipation of the expected summer windfalls just to have roadworks at the shop door discouraging any potential meandering customer to pop by.  

  The front of our place has already been under attack for a month.  And although they like to start the hammering nice and early, sometimes 7am, the progress seems to be extremely slow.   According to the note stuck onto our building door, works should have already been completed.  I’m not holding my breath.  

  But however disgruntled I may be, I always spare a thought for the paving guys.  Here in Berlin most of the pedestrian paths are cobblestoned. That means some person has the unenviable job of spending days on their knees hammering in endless numbers of small stones.  What must that be like?  How do they not go insane from an overwhelming sense of existential futility?   Tink tink tink, everyday, tink tink tink, hammering, tink tink tink, another little stone, tink tink tink, another stone…. you get the picture.    My respect and thanks to those men who I see calmly going about this work.

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What a day!

Wow, what an exciting day that was.  Thursday 14th turned out to be a cracker!  Firstly… the Champions League Women’s Final was ausverkauft! (sold out)   The 18,000 seated Stadium was packed to the brim.   Well not really as UEFA had withheld so many tickets that half of the undercover section was empty.  But who cares!  FFC Frankfurt won the game with a brilliant left-footed volley during injury time (although I must say I was hoping Paris St Germain would win)  And who of all people was there at the game to see the German side bring the cup home?  It was none other than Angela Merkel herself.   That’s right.  The Chancellor turned down the offer to go to sunny Mannheim and attend Germany’s Next Top Model in favour of getting home early, kicking the shoes off and having a cuppa tea. 

 Then, if that wasn’t excitement enough, GNTM hit off with a fantastic Jason Derulo live medley performance!  Fireworks went bang around the arena and a gigantic Heidi was projected onto 4 story high screen.  The four finalists strutted their stuff along the stage while Derulo gyrated and sang (to a pre-recorded backing track) his sassy sexy hit “Talk Dirty to me”   Then, just when it couldn’t get any better, it does. Boom! After another burst of fireworks, the real Heidi appears dressed in a bedazzling sparkling disco ball emerald green suit suspended from a dangling platform in the centre of the arena. It was, without a doubt, the spectacular that we had all hoped for and a spectacular the likes of which Mannheim had probably never seen (excluding the Freestyle Moto X ` Night of Jumps’ back in 2010)

 Really, how could you beat that?  Well… what about a Bomb Threat.  That’s right, I kid you not.  About halfway into the live broadcast, as we were eagerly awaiting the next Jason Derulo number, they went to a commercial break and then never came back.   Can you imagine our utter horror as the rolling banner across the bottom of our screens stating  “Due to technical difficulties GNTM will not be broadcast further”   To compound the tragedy, Pro 7 chose to play a re-run of a Sandra Bullock film where she adopts a poor over weight teenager and makes him play American football.  For god sake, bring back Heidi, bitte!!  

 My first thought was that some, not so intelligent and most definitely socially challenged pubescent office hand, did not deliver the satellite booking request form into the right in-tray leaving the multi million dollar broadcast up the creek without a paddle. However, thanks to the efficiency of Social media, it became known, within a hundred thousandth of a nano second after the incident, that there had been a Bomb threat and the Mannheim Arena was being evacuated.  

  Nooooo!   What sicko insane demented person would do such a grotesque hideous thing?  A Woman. Yep, apparently a woman called in with the bomb threat.   Finally!!  Some courageous feminist soldier stood up for us all and said enough is enough!!  She was probably pushed to the edge one too many times.  It was just too much for her to see women treated as objectified commodities (that might have something to do with the earlier scene where the finalists had to pretend they were Barbie dolls… that was pretty bad.  There was rock Barbie, Hippy Barbie, sexy cowboy Barbie and wedding dress Barbie)  She was trapped in hell, a catch 22, doomed to eternal inequality and oppression. She had no choice, she did what only a desperate under appreciated underpaid housewife could do.  Bomb Threat.  

Not bad I say.  Good on her! But I’m glad it’s not me.  It would be a little stressful knowing the weight of the entire global Secret Security anti-terrorism industrial complex was coming down on you.    It would also kind of suck because Pro 7 have re-scheduled.  GNTM Finale will now be on 28th May.   

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Germany’s Next Top Model or Women’s Champions League? – The Feminist conundrum.

Tomorrow, Thursday 14th May is a very important day here in Germany. For those of you who are not in the know, it happens to be the Final live broadcast of Germany’s Next Top Model. (GNTM)  That’s right, only one can be GNTM (as is Heidi Klum’s weekly mantra) it’s pretty exciting stuff.   Heidi Klum, the most famous of German supermodels exports, presents an epic variety spectacular, complete with rock star performances and fireworks, all in the name of promoting young women wearing high heels and sporting pretty frocks.  OMG! Can the girls or `mädchens’, as they are always condescendingly refer too, be able to make it down the catwalk without wobbling (a heinous model crime) 

Meanwhile, May 14th lays the stage for another very important competition, one that I think Pro 7 (the GNTM broadcaster) will not be too concerned about.  Thursday 14th May is also the Final of the Women’s Champions League. The game between FFC Frankfurt and Paris Saint-Germain kicks off in Berlin at around 1800.   Think how many millions of people will be tuning into the Male version thereof come June 6th, but the women’s version, whilst being broadcast by ZDF, will be extremely lucky to draw the same number of viewers as GNTM.

 It’s a sad tale that even today, women’s sport will be trumped by a supermodel competition.  That even today in an era where Angela Merkel has been German Chancellor for over 10 years and lawmakers are voting for women quotas on company boards, in an era where so much attention is paid to female inequality… that German teenage girls would still prefer, above all, to pursuit the dream of being a model.    It’s sad to see that the traditional and patriarchal view of what a women’s role in society is still so entrenched and immoveable that even when we are given a choice between a real sporting competition or a beauty competition, that the later prevails.

Luckily for me, the ZDF coverage of the game finishes at 20.15 just in time to switch channels to Pro7 and catch the beginning of GNTM.

Preparations for the Women’s Champions League Final in Berlin

Preparations for Thursdays Final underway.  Banners are up.

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“Be Free” - bicycles in Berlin

The Bicycles of Berlin are a migratory species. At the first warm sunny day of spring they suddenly appear in numbers.  (And just to clarify `warm’ I mean a day where you don’t have to wear your beany and scarf, and need only your thinner winter jacket)  The Locals drag the bikes out from the cellars where they have had a long, cold and damp hibernation. They dust them off, blow up the tyres and away they go. By the second or third sunny day of Spring the bicycles have arrived in swarms.   What were once empty bike lanes are now clogged with bicycle traffic jams and bottle necks. Bicycles come at you from everywhere.

 It still thrills me to get on a bicycle and cycle around Berlin. It is truly a liberating feeling and for someone who spent most of the time in car freeway cities it never fails to give so much pleasure. The great thing about berlin is they have bike lanes, it’s flat, you don’t need a helmet (although I wear one just to be radically safe) and it offers great neighbourhoods to explore.  The neighbourhoods are called Kiez over here and the areas of Kreuzberg, Fredrichshain, Prenzlauer berg and Mitte have the most coulourful and vibrant.  There is always something new to see.  (more about the Kiez at a later post)

  The Fixies are still the choice of the wannabe cool here although the height of it’s popularity has passed since I first arrived in 2010.  On first analysis they actually function well in this city because it is flat.  But there are two major hindrances, (other than being seen as a hipster that is).  Hindrance number one: there are plenty of cobble stoned streets and uneven unmaintained roads and  paths. Number two: and expensive sleek bike will get pinched.  Forget about locking it up anywhere outside.  You have to lug your fixy inside wherever you go.  Kind of annoying when you live on the 3rd floor and don’t have a lift, which most apartment blocks in Berlin don’t.  

 The next in the rank of cool cat bikes are the vintage road bike or Dutchie original complete with rust and faded metallic paintwork.  There are plenty of new pastiche versions of these that offer better brakes and reliable gears, but they’re not cool.  You’ve got to have an original or a version of that is least 30 years old.  You use to be able to pick these up from one of the weekend markets for 40 euro (granted it was probably stolen) but in the last couple of years they sell closer to 100 euro. Still cheaper than a fixy and yet cool.

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It’s not all grey - Spring in Berlin

Bloody hell winters are long in Berlin.  Too long, too cold, too dark, too wet.  There are days on end where it feels like you’re trapped in “The Scream”   But today it is sunny.  Today there are large extended patches of blue sky.  Today its’ expected to get to 20 degrees.  Spring is underway and Berlin has morphed into this pleasant cheerful village.  People have come out from their dreary apartments to play and they’re smiling and laughing.  It’s unbelievable; the city is a completely different place.  Optimism prevails and people are kind and helpful again.   With the beginning of Spring the streets of Berlin are treated to a short but intense burst of colour.  The barren twigs, which fought to survive the winter, sprout and bloom the most incredible blossoms.  The trees are suddenly a fiery ball of fuchsia and fluffy white.  They distract you with their beauty and even the most hardened Berliners will stop in their tracks to admire them.   However, the visual feast is fleeting. Within a couple of weeks the blossoms have past and the trees gain their leaves.   Here are some photos. Enjoy!

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Back in Berlin town

My how time flies.  I started this blog back in 2012.  `Started’ might be considered a slight exaggeration, as I have never used the blog.  I thought it would be a great way to document my experiences of living in Berlin.   It would give a perspective from someone who is older (I wouldn’t necessarily say wiser) and not so impressionable.  It would give a perspective from someone who has no youthful hipster bohemian dreams of being an artist, musician or Director.   Unfortunately, the thing is…  life got busy with all those little things that happen in life and the blog was never written.  So, fast-forward 3 years.  Here I am and I’m going to finally give it a go.   Things have changed.  What is Berlin like now that the `hipster’ is kind of passé? Let’s face it the world can take only so many preened dressers with bushy beards.  In the last three years Berlin has become the Start-up hub of Europe.  The new hipster is not about artistic creativity like the old hipster, it’s about being a business innovator who wants to be rich, really rich.  Berlin is now the city for Entrepreneurs.

  So here goes… Take 2…  welcome to my blog.  My comments, observations, and advice on life in this burgeoning vibrant Start-up - Entrepreneurial town.  

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