Berlin, Personal Journal

Summary of Week 11: June 5th – June 11th

Paper #1 – “Heroes, Wolves, and Refugees: The Fairy Tale of 21st Century Germany” IS DONE!!!! BOOM!!!!

“From the Fatherland to the Mothering City: Dauerwald and the Berlin Landscape” is DONE!!! HOPPLA!!! Two done, one to go and it’s almost finished!

Products I want to have back home:
1. Gösser Naturradler. Sehr lecker!
2. Ritter-Sport chocolate. I think you can get them back home.
3. Knusper Müesli. Not that lame Kellogg’s crap.
4. Döner kebabs. Never happen 🙁
5. Berliner Kindl Weisse Himbeere. Raspberry beer!
6. Brötchen mit Serrano-Schinken und Gurke. Best breakfast on earth!
7. That Berlin Smell. It’s like linden flowers, soap, green, and fruity. Seriously, I want a perfume of this.
8. German guys. SO PRETTY.
9. The Pickles. They are so good here!
10. The Mustard. Has actual flavor, not just burning vinegar.

“Every German Owns a Cello: Finding Cultural Identity in the German Musical Landscape” is… well, it’s done, but I hate it. I just can’t look at it anymore for tonight.

This morning, in outdated internet memes:

Me: “YAY! Done with mah papers! Happy fun play time for last week! Yay!”
Homework: “O HAI! I CAN HAZ THREE SELF-EVALUATIONS, PLZ??”
Me: *PWNZ0R’D!!!* “MY SPLEEEN!!!!!”

Last Thursday morning in Berlin. Chatting with a forestry student online trying to get some final bits of information for my paper before I hand it in. City is waking up, the daily bottle recycling is clanging away, the birds are singing, and somebody is listening to Sigur Ros in our courtyard.

Our U-Bahn, the U8, goes from Hermannstraße to Wittenau. I rode it to Wittenau and then station hopped back to Rosenthaler Platz.

*Proudly posts a photo of herself wearing the pants she was wearing the day she arrived in Berlin that are now 3 sizes too big*

*Eats an extra large Doener Kebab and drinks 2 radlers with lunch to celebrate. Now craves chocolate or a nap*

Hello, my name is Scarlett M, and I have a scarf addiction.
I came with 4 scarves, I am leaving with 16. I am going to need an extra suitcase…

Ok, I am waiting on an s-bahn platform on the outskirts of Berlin. A train just left and I am the only person here. As the train was pulling out, I kid you not, I heard the sound Transformers make when they transform. Not just kind of. Exactly. Wtf?

Friedrichstraße station. One guy is playing Hotel California on acoustic guitar. Across the street a shop is blaring a nauseating Eurovision cover of Call Me by Blondie. This is the soundtrack in hell, my brethren.

So, I’ve made some friends while I’ve been here, but of course because it’s me, they are mostly guys in various flavors of gay and gay adjacent. Because as much as I don’t get along with American women, German women have even less tolerance for me. They make me feel like a poodle in a room full of Dobermans. So every evening I end up getting texts from various people wanting to chat. I have learned Germans are some of the loneliest people I have ever met. Seriously, a lot of people live alone and the way society works here people can end up isolated and invisible pretty easily. But there is always football! Tonight there is a big football match… and for the first time in a week my phone is silent. Hmm… I wonder why?

My last few days in Berlin.
And I am coming down with a cold.
FML

Berlin, Personal Journal

Summary of Week 10: May 29th – June 4th

My second to last week here. This week was punctuated by moments of absolute sorrow at having to leave so soon. Berlin is home now, and I just don’t want to leave. I spent most of this week working on my final papers and trying to get the website up to snuff.

I was annoyed at the sound of something constantly rolling down the street for almost 20 minutes straight. Then I realized it was thunder.

The countdown begins. The final 15 days. I will miss so much about Berlin. Right now, I will miss Deliveroo, the food delivery service. Especially since they are delivering burgers and beer to my house at 11pm. I will miss the fascinating people I meet here. Today I had a beer with the drummer for some big metal band here in Berlin. He works with refugee children and wants to be a social worker someday. I will miss the rumble of the trams, the parks, the food, the birds, the crazy rainstorms, everything. I wish I didn’t have to write my papers now, I want to spend my last few days here just basking in the city and soaking it in for one last time. It’s like my boyfriend is dumping me and I just want one last look at his face before he goes.

Muggy summer midnight in Berlin. Windows are open, sounds of the cafes outside our courtyard and the rumble of the trams. That strange, indescribable smell that this city has, like limes, rhododendrons, and linden flowers. Drinking a radler and working on my paper about the forest. I think this song is now the official soundtrack of this trip for me.

I have been intrigued by the German response to Trump. They all want to talk about him, and they all tell me how funny they think it is with this smirky smile. I keep telling them it’s not funny, and the more I tell them this the harder they laugh. I was confused by this response, how a culture that knows better than anyone the horror of watching the rise of a hate-fueled fascist regime within your own nation could find this at all amusing. Then a guy I met last night at the cafe finally said, “Haha! Everybody likes Germany now! We had Hitler, you get Trump! Haha!”
And then I got it.
Schadenfreude. Germans invented it, after all. German humor is pitch black in the corners.
Touché, Deutschland. Touché.

I have actually met people I hope to keep in touch with. I was texting my friend Jan the Bavarian last night. The language barrier is not too bad, but he insists on speaking in English no matter how hard I try. At one point, things got confusing and we were struggling to figure out what the other one was talking about. (Note that it helps if you can hear this in his deadpan Bavarian accent.)
Jan: I don’t know what to say.
Me: Well then, you say SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS!!!
*long pause. I can feel him pinching the bridge of his nose in annoyance*
Jan: I am not Mary Poppings.
Me: No, but you would look good in the hat. See, we have long words in English too! Like “antidisestablishmentarianism”!
Jan: How cute…
Me: …says the completely unimpressed German

Berlin, 7am. I walk across the street with my Rewe grocery bag to the Spätkauf to get some fizzy water and beer because we are out. I decide to go to the bakery on the corner to get some Brötchen for breakfast. The Fernsehturm glitters in the sunny, damp, and hazey morning. The only people on the street are me, some straggling Eurotrash on holiday who are still up, and the cafe owners who are cleaning up bottles from last night’s typical “Saturday night in Mitte” debauching. As I walk past the tram stop I hear someone blaring music. When I realize the song is “Jack and Diane”by John Cougar Mellencamp I almost bust a gut laughing. One of these things is not like the others….