MOVING CITIES:It's the city of division and reunification, of 'Cabaret' and Checkpoint Charlie, of David Bowie and David Hasselhoff, but Berlin's defining characteristic is a refreshing quality of life. Louise Eastwrites about her first month there
September 15th
Berlin Schönefeld Airport
Six weeks ago, with another London winter looming and my lease running out, I decided I needed a change. Within days, I had arranged a sublet on a cheap apartment in Berlin and found a friend gracious enough to give my boxes basement space.
It happened so fast that it's only as I stand outside Arrivals, waiting for the shuttle bus, that I start to wonder what the hell I'm doing in Berlin, a city I've never set foot in before.
I have not spoken German since my Leaving Cert oral several light years ago, and as far as company goes, I will be reliant on a handful of friends of friends who live here.
So why Berlin? Probably because I've never been there. In the absence of anything as dull as facts, my imagination has cooked up a Berlin of the mind, a timeless city where David Bowie is still in the Hansa studios recording Heroes, Sally Bowles is running a kohl pencil under one eye, and across town, chisels are slowly pecking holes in a 12-foot concrete wall.
In this metropolis I have created, I can see myself striding down Unter den Linden in dark weather. I am wearing a trilby and possibly an eye patch and when snow starts to peel off the sky, I duck into a mahogany-lined coffee house, sip on a Pilsner and write pithy notes about the 20th century in a series of black leather notebooks.
Why Berlin, indeed.
September 16th
I wake in my apartment for the first time. Number 64, Kottbusser Damm is a creaky turn-of-the-century apartment, with ceilings of chipped Art Deco stucco and 110 sq m of faded oak parquet. Accustomed as I am to London flats, it is unfathomably vast, and I spend much of my first morning padding aimlessly through the interconnecting rooms like a Labrador hoping for a walk.
Outside is a busy shopping street, its pavements cluttered with baskets of tea-kettles, mop-heads, fibre-optic flower arrangements and bootleg DVDs. The smell of hot bread and roasting doner kebab drifts from the large Anatolian restaurant across the street. Berlin is home to the fifth-largest Turkish community in the world, and Kottbusser Damm is its epicentre.
I am not looking forward to the day ahead. In order to sign up for a phone and internet connection, I need to open a bank account, and for this, I will need to queue for many hours in a civic office to obtain a piece of paper, called if I remember correctly, an "anheuserbuschheimathubelbubbelboilantrubel".
The whole process sounds ghastly, so just on the off-chance, I walk into the bank across the street and hesitantly suggest I might be in the market for a bank account. In excellent English, the clerk apologises for his dreadful English, opens me a bank account and welcomes me to Berlin. I will never mock German efficiency again.
September 21st
Berlin is a wonderful city for walking, not least because it is completely flat. It is also, to me at least, completely lacking in logic. Just when I expect to emerge on neo-classical Gendarmenmarkt, I find myself confronted with the River Spree. I promise myself one of the Opernpalais cafe's 26 varieties of cake, and instead find myself perusing second-hand overcoats in post-industrial Friedrichshain.
This confusion notwithstanding, I decide to buy a second-hand bike. Berlin is a city of Sergeant Plucks and Policeman MacCruiskeens; Flann O'Brien-ish types so attached to their bicycles, you fear they might fall over if not propped against a wall.
The flea markets, I've been told, are the places to buy bikes. They are also, I discover, the place where junk goes to die. At the Sunday market in Treptower, I see money changing hands for a cracked bath plug, a clutch of used light bulbs, a David Hasselhoff LP and one of a pile of nearly 200 old circuit boards, origin unclear.
Many of the items for sale would almost certainly be available cheaper in the shops along Kottbusser Damm, but the near-religious concentration with which people sort through piles of plug sockets and unmatched socks, suggests that when it comes to ephemera, it is the journey, not the destination, that counts.
I examine bikes of every shape, colour and size. Happily for me, Berliners favour my kind of bike - upright and fairly sedate with workmanlike wheels and moustache handlebars. Just when it is getting dark and I am starting to fear the only spoils of my day will be a David Hasselhoff LP, I find her.
Black and shiny, with a saddle the shape of a well-upholstered skull and gears as smooth as butter, I take her for a spin and am hooked. After a friendly discussion, during which the fat Turkish vendor calls me a thief and I counter-attack with an accusation of daylight robbery, we amicably agree on a price of €55.
Euphoric, I head for home, enchanted by the bounce of my lights off the cobblestones, the friendly whir of the dynamo, the neat logic of the cycle paths. Then I ask for directions, turn around and enjoy the ride all over again.
September 23rd
While waiting for broadband to be installed, I've been using a local internet cafe. Despite the name, there's no food or drink on offer, just rows of humming terminals, several of which are usually displaying porn.
I thought I was maybe a little squeamish to find this odd but everyone I've mentioned it to finds it unusual too. The porn connoisseurs of WebWorld, on the hand, are extremely matter-of-fact, publicly scrolling past eye-watering combinations of limbs and orifices as though they're checking the day's headlines.
Today, though, as I walk to my allotted terminal, I notice an unusual absence of porn. Instead, nearly every screen displays photos of Knut, an orphaned baby polar bear whose miraculous survival last year briefly brought Berlin Zoo international fame.
Intrigued, I run a search and find that Knut's keeper, a man named Thomas Dörflein, who kept Knut alive by living in his cage day and night, has been found dead on the floor of his apartment.
Touched, I look around at the faces, several of whom I recognise as habitual porn viewers, but their expressions are no different from usual: absent-minded boredom.
October 1st
The supermarket downstairs is called Pennymarkt and its pricing makes Aldi and Lidl look like the Harvey Nichols Food Hall. A round of camembert costs 69 cent, half a kilo of ground coffee €2.99, a slab of 70 per cent cocoa solids chocolate 89 cent. As with Aldi and Lidl, the quality is perfectly decent.
Soon I find myself in there nearly every day playing a kind of supermarket bingo in which I guess how cheap my basket's going to be, knowing I'll get a lovely surprise at the till.
So I've been trying to cut down my Pennymarkt habit by restricting myself to stuff I actually eat. It's been going fine until today, when I spotted a shop further up Kottbusser Damm, its windows loaded with car-wash kits, multi-packs of sponges, tiny tandem bicycles rendered in china and a variety of 10-piece screwdriver sets.
It's what used to be called a pound shop, and in Ireland, has now become a two-euro shop. Here in Berlin, it is a 55-cent shop, and I'm a recovering alcoholic who's just been introduced to crack.
October 3rd
This morning I left my apartment to find the road outside empty of traffic and the shops in darkness. Which is how I discovered that public holidays, when one is not expecting them, bear a striking resemblance to the kind of Hollywood movie where the heroine wakes up to discover a plague has just wiped out the earth's population.
Later, I meet up with a couple of friends from Ireland and their German friend who tells me the holiday celebrates German unity and was put in place after reunification in 1990.
"It's not much of a day," she says, apologetically. "Not like St Patrick's Day."
Certainly, it's not celebrated with anything like the gusto of Paddy's Day. The local brewery has yet to latch onto the advertising potential of manufacturing fluffy oversized hats in the shape of the Berlin Wall and in neither of the pubs we were in, were people half-dead on the floor with drink.
Because of this, I spend the entire night thinking it's 10.30pm until finally I look at my phone and discover it's 5am. At the table next to us, an unruffled couple smoke cigarettes and drink coffee. Out on the street, a woman walks her Schnauzer while chatting on her phone, in English, about how often you should water cheese plants.
Truly, Berlin is the city that never sleeps.
October 4th
Today, in the chemist, I requested something for a headache and when the kind-faced pharmacist asked whether paracetemol would do, I hear myself answering in Russian.
"Da."
She looks a little puzzled but soldiers on. Am I taking any other medication?
"Nyet," I say.
This was a whole new medical problem. I felt like an Oliver Sacks case story - The Girl Who Mistook Her German for Russian.
Unfortunately, in neither of my new languages was I able to explain I had just discovered the impossibility of speaking in a language other than your own when you are a little hung over.
October 8th
A well-worn statistic about London states you are never more than 10 feet away from a rat. In Berlin, the same is true if you change the word "snack" for "rat". Sausages of every persuasion (most beloved of which is the currywurst, a sausage dosed with ketchup and curry powder), kebabs, pancakes, corn on the cob, half a roast chicken and chips (which usually retails at €2 a pop) and at a stand around the corner, something described as a potato puff.
In this, I truly am ein Berliner, as there is no occasion I can think of which is not improved by the introduction of a little snackerel, but if I'm not to turn into a potato puff myself, I need to get me some exercise, fast.
Conveniently, there's a yoga centre just around the corner and this evening, I took a class for the first time. It was a curious experience, a little like that Far Sidecartoon suggesting that what dogs hear when we talk to them is "Blah, blah, blah, Rover, blah, blah, blah, walk".
Yoga postures are habitually referred to by their Sanskrit names, so I was able to gather where we were headed and in addition, there's the German words I know, such as "head" and "leg" and "don't".
In between though, came long screeds of German incomprehensible to me, but which, judging by my experiences in English-speaking yoga classes, probably went something like: "Imagine a thread shimmering through your spinal cord and spiralling towards the moon."
I coped pretty well until near the end, when I drifted off into a reverie while upside-down in a shoulder-stand and came to to discover everyone else was flat on their back, resting.
Imagine you're a lone oak, I thought, standing tall above the forest floor. Then I took an axe and felled myself.
October 13th
There is a mattress shop right across the street from the window where I write. As far as I can work out, their delivery guy is an overweight middle-aged skate-boy who transports mattresses on a bicycle trailer which looks to be constructed from the detritus of a train wreck.
Most people, however, don't seem to avail of such an extravagant service, preferring to save on delivery charges and man-handle their new mattresses (surely one of the least man-handle-able entities known to man) home themselves.
Right now, a couple so small and slight they could be woodland creatures are wrestling a king-size mattress onto the handlebars of their bikes. The mattress flops around like a sulky teenager for what seems like an eternity until finally it lies flat across the two bikes like a particularly well-sprung catamaran, and the wispy pair launch forth across five lanes of traffic.
Such ingenuity is strangely familiar. Twenty years ago, you wouldn't blink if you saw two men carrying a conservatory down O'Connell Street or a three-piece suite tied to the roof of a Mini.
October 15th
When Christopher Isherwood started his Berlin diary in the autumn of 1930 (a volume which would later provide the source material for the musical and film, Cabaret), he wrote of "streets of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class." That description sounds rather familiar. Although both unemployment and the civic debt have decreased in the past couple of years, Berlin is not a wealthy city. Despite its energy and confidence, it lacks the mirrored shine of New York or London.
Overgrown weeds decorate median strips and civic renovation projects stagnate behind massive tarps, covered in an optimistic trompe-l'oeil version of the future.
It's a month today since I first arrived in Berlin, and as it happens, it has also been the month in which the wheels came off the international economy. It's been an interesting place from which to observe the crash.
All the ex-pats I meet here (Irish, French, American) cite quality of life as their number one reason for living in Berlin. Pressed as to what that means, they talk about the pace being slower, budgets easy to balance, the transport system efficient and creativity prized.
I've noticed that in my neighbourhood cafe, mid-week, a significant proportion of the parents feeding their kids juice are fathers. At the weekend, friends and families gather in cafes to eat breakfast together, like communities of lay monks.
In a city where everyone lives in rented apartments, shops selling plants are nearly as frequent as clothes shops and estate agents are outnumbered by bakeries. Cyclists are slow, rents are low and if someone harbours a desire to rent an empty shop to display their hand-etched matchbox collection, they can afford to do so.
I know, as a newcomer, my glasses are distinctly rose-tinted, but as I sit in a coffee house off Unter den Linden, leather-bound notebook in hand, I am reminded yet again of just how great a city can be, when it is not hog-tied to the accumulation of wealth.