mein Gott!

The Scheiße hits the fan.

     I think I'm going through something like a perfect storm here. This little expedition to Berlin has been beset with incidents to make a mockery of one's calm, equanimity and serenity. Let alone the carefree holiday spirit you like to think of when you are trying to get away from it all, but “it all” seems to be dogging your heels...or, in my case, my little toe. Let me explain.

     A nagging sense of disquiet has been hanging somewhere in the left parietal region of my brain (near as I can pinpoint it) since a train snafu occurred in Frankfurt when our scheduled ICE train was cancelled for some unspecified reason (which reason may have been specified in German). I discussed this incident in a previous post [the trains don't run on time] and won't linger on it here. But the incident seemed to set a tone...that this was not going to be a carefree getaway.

     We finally arrived at our rental apartment only to meet with a cleaning lady who spoke no English although the website claimed that they spoke English. Since this rental agency is based in the United Kingdom we assumed that English wouldn't be a problem. Uh-uh! We were met by Natalia, and it became quickly apparent that we had a serious communication problem trying to settle the basics of moving into a new short-term apartment: using the stove, dishwasher, where to throw the trash, etc.

      Natalia quickly began to show signs of losing patience and becoming frustrated exclaiming things like "mein Gott!", and what sounded like “never mind, it doesn't matter where the trash goes or how the washing machine works. Figure it out for yourself!” With our persistence (and her and our increasing frustration) she agreed to take road buddy out to show her where to throw the trash, putting her hand on my chest to indicate that I was not welcome to accompany them and I should stay put. Road buddy reports that she kept repeating "mein Gott!" in the elevator.

      Finally, we had enough information to figure out how the place works. Natalia then said: "Geld!" Road buddy knows enough German to know that “Geld” means money. So, with more language discombobulation we finally settled the rental terms and the return of the key deposit on leaving at the end of the month. She also mentioned that “meine Tochter” speaks English, indicating, I think, that if any future issues should arise she would come with her “English speaking” daughter.

      A "future issue" did, in fact, arise. Some of the light bulbs in the apartment blew out. I emailed Yuri, the owner whom I have never met but who can manage English at least in written form, and asked him to have the light bulbs replaced. He sent us our Natalia and her Tochter. We had just started eating before going out to an opera when the intercom buzzed. In blew Natalia and her daughter who did manage to speak some broken English, enough, with body language and facial expression, to indicate rudeness and disdain. They seemed put out at having been required to come and check out the light bulb situation and didn't seem to think it was such a big deal issue. (The apartment was getting pretty dim, as a matter of fact, due to heavy clouds and a northern exposure.) They finally said they would bring some light bulbs that I could then install. I pointed to myself and with raised eyebrow, said: “You want me, a paying guest, to install them?” At which point, the daughter, rudely smacked her own head and said in no unmistakeable sneer: “mein Gott! No problem!”, and both she and Natalia huffed out of the apartment.

       We emailed Yuri and explained the situation. He was apologetic and said he would take care of the problem by sending his handyman to change the light bulbs. He is supposed to come tomorrow, Saturday. We shall see.

PS:

      The German expletive mein Gott! (which, if you haven't guessed, means Oh my God!) reminds me of one of the graffiti paintings on the East Side Gallery remnant of the Berlin Wall. The picture, by Dimitri Vrubel, depicts Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in a fraternal embrace on the occasion of the 30^th anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in 1979. The caption at the bottom of the painting reads: My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love

PS 2:

    Oh yeah, I almost forgot, the little toe. I stubbed it on the sofa in the living room and it started to hurt like hell. I thought it might be broken. It turned an ugly black and blue and was swollen. If you look closely at me in the picture you will notice that I don't look particularly happy. That was a couple days ago and I was in some pain and discomfort from hobbling along on the bum foot. I'm happy to say that it is looking and feeling much better today and doesn't appear to be broken, just badly bruised. But nothing interferes more with travel than limited mobility. Take it from a  veteran traveler! It's as good as gospel.

Ich bin kein Berliner

     In the immortal words of John Fitzgerald Kennedy turned on their heads: I am not a Berliner.

     In fulfilling the demand of another American President considered high on the communicative ability scale, the Berlin Wall has been torn down. Only a couple of short remnants remain as tourist attractions. Haven't been there yet, though.

view from our flat
on a snowy morning

Unter den Linden

     Berlin is a city of large spaces, broad boulevards and streets and seemingly endlessly under reconstruction. The Unter den Linden (right) is a mushrooming of construction cranes and pedestrian bypasses. Decidedly not a beautiful city, at least not in the dead of winter. But, then, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder and my camera picked up little pockets of it on a stroll around the Tiergarten in wintry Berlin the other day—our first foray into a new city. 



impressions of our first walk about Berlin: 

west entrance to the Tiergarten

no idea what this is, but it
looks like a piece of abstract art

entrance to the Zoological Garden

houseboats along the canal

this gentlemen said he comes here every day to feed the birds

Good Samaritans

     But the Berliners can be wonderfully helpful with confused-looking visitors like us trying to find our way through a maze of U-Bahn connecting stations or trying to figure out how the train ticketing machine works or even helping carry baggage down the stairs of the station. Several times friendly folks appeared seemingly out of the blue to ask if we needed assistance. One young woman actually went out of her own way to lead us from one platform to another. Germans have a reputation (I picked up this vibe in Austria) for being cold and unfriendly, but I find it to be quite the opposite here in Berlin.



Brandenburg Gate

Brandenburger Tor

German Jewish poet/playwright Nelly Sachs

     The Brandenburger Tor seen on a snowy January afternoon is uninspiring as far as architectural monuments go. Berlin is a city for history buffs, not for tourists in bermuda shorts and sunglasses. Although there were many tourists posing with “actors” dressed in military uniforms using the Tor as background for the “I was there” souvenir photo, there wasn't a pair of bermuda shorts in sight, but heavy coats and scarves and woolen caps...and the snow kept on falling. It gave off a faint impression of the dreariness you associate with wartime Germany.  


Holocaust Memorials:

Roma and Sinti

Gypsy Holocaust Memorial

     Berlin seems to wear its past on its sleeve. Here and there you can see references to a sense of the collective shame for Germany's National Socialist past. There is a monument to the gypsy victims of the extermination camps between the Brandenburger Tor and the Bundestag consisting simply of a wall with historical texts in German and English and a shallow circular pool surrounded by flat stones of different shapes some of which are inscribed with the names of the camps, some, ironically, with melodious names like Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrueck, Sobibor. The monument was dedicated on October 24, 2012 by Chancellor Angela Merkel. 

Jews

Jewish Holocaust Memorial

     Just to the south of the Brandenburger Tor lies the monument to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust inaugurated on May 10, 2005. The Jewish Holocaust Memorial... “is made up of 2,711 gray stone slabs that bear no markings. The slabs undulate in a wave-like pattern. Each is a five-sided monolith, individually unique in shape and size. Some are only ankle high while others tower over visitors. 


     The paths that are shaped between the slabs undulate as well. The architect, Peter Eisenman, hoped to create a feeling of groundlessness and instability; a sense of disorientation. Most will agree that he succeeded.”













Gays

     After going around the Jewish memorial we crossed the street and entered the Tiergarten on our way to pick up tickets at the Berlin Philharmonic. The park was beautiful with the fresh snow that had fallen all morning looking pristine and virginal. We passed a monument to Goethe when I noticed a lone stele similar to the more than 2,000 stelae in the Jewish Memorial. I didn't know what it was but I snapped a quick shot of it and then we continued on through the snowy paths to the concert hall. It turned out to be another holocaust memorial, this one for the homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis. Discrimination knows no bounds it seems.




On the brighter side:

Goethe monument in the Tiergarten 

the abominable snowman?

gore galore

     At the Schiller Theater in Berlin

the Schiller Theater

intermission

      The Berlin Staatsoper on Unter den Linden was supposed to reopen this year, but the facelift on the opera house is apparently behind schedule and the Staats is still using the small Schiller Theater on Bismarckstrasse. It's great for us because it's an easy walk from our rental flat.

view from the cheap seats

      We attended our second show, a Sunday afternoon matinee of Karl Maria von Weber's opera "Der Freischütz," (The Sharpshooter) based on a German folk legend. This is not a well known opera and is performed mostly in Germany where they are fond of legends: old folk legends like this one, and legends of Nordic gods and heroes as in Richard Wagner's “Ring of the Nibelung” cycle.

     They start their children on opera young here, the audience was full of kids of various ages. Being kids they probably enjoyed the gruesome scene where a wolf is disemboweled in a kind of black mass ceremony to make a deal with the devil, a Faustian bargain—fantastically well staged with red light, wet looking organs from the chest cavity of the wolf, fake blood, dry ice for an eerie underworld effect. Lot's of fun!

the conductor, cast and chorus of "Der Freischütz"

the trains don't run on time

aboard ICE 690

   Mid-afternoon: 

      Sitting on ICE.

      ICE 690, that is. German high speed Inter City Express. A later ICE than we intended to be on.

     One always hopes for an uneventful journey—at least in the transportation department—you know, like, planes that don't crash on take off or are delayed “due to technical difficulties” like the engine fell off or some such minor irritation. Now, Germany, like Japan, is famous for organizational expertise—you can set your watch by the train schedules or so the spin would have you believe. Well, t'ain't necessarily so. We've had our first transportation adventure/drama and it's only day one of our arrival in Germany.

awesome

      It was too perfect. Got into Frankfurt Flughafen (Airport) only about an hour late. Our hotel, by design, sat astride the railroad tracks at the Frankfurt-am Main Flughafen railroad station. You just had to check out from the hotel at the reasonable hour of 10 a.m. and go down the escalator through this incredible glass-domed concourse to the platform for the 10:42 train. But, when we checked the arrival/departure board road buddy noticed a scrolling announcement that said: “ICE 770 has been cancelled”. Now, whoever heard of a train being cancelled? So, we went to Deutsche Bahn “DB Information” desk and the man said not to worry there would be a replacement. We assumed, of course, that the “replacement” would be another ICE train. Wouldn't you?

between trains at Frankfurt-am-Mail Hauptbanhof

      Well, 10 minutes after the scheduled departure time the “replacement” train arrived at the platform. It didn't look quite right to me, but we boarded anyway. But, road buddy and I discussed the slow speed of what appeared to be a local train and we started getting antsy and agonizing about what to do. The train soon pulled into an unexpected station—the Frankfurt-am-Main Hauptbanhof. Road buddy remembered that there was another ICE train from this main station that went directly to Berlin, so we decided to get off the train and change our ticket at the DB, ticket office.

this story on my MacBook Pro

      We struggled with our baggage off the train, reasonably calm under the circumstances, and, with an inquiry here and there, found the ticket office and explained our situation. The very efficient young lady had our ticket changed sans nonsense and in short order to ICE 690 upon which I am sitting and typing and, I'm happy to say, seeing a break in the clouds off in the distance of this rolling hills landscape rolling by the train window on my right. We expect to arrive in Berlin about an hour and twenty minutes later that we had expected.

breaking clouds - right center background

Later:

      We finally found and arrived at our rental apartment on Kantstrasse in Berlin. The landlady spoke almost no English so it was touch and go getting the necessaries out of the way through both fractured German and English. Finally everything got squared away and we did a little grocery shopping for some basics at the market across the street. Had some odds and ends to eat and some wine to drink before unpacking and settling down.

      First opera tomorrow evening at the Deutsche Oper—Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.

     Ready for a good night's sleep.

the only thing between here and eternity...

... is the moment

everything you need to know about life is in this picture

A room with a view...

not your usual holiday photo, but there it is...