The barber shops reopened in Berlin this week. I’d booked an appointment as soon as I saw it coming, to beat the mad rush of involuntary hippies. And so I set out this morning to put an end to my out-of-control hobo chic. For the wielders of the clipper and comb, it must be a lot like shearing sheep. At a time like this, I’m thankful to have a Welsh barber. Although the guy who mans the front...
It’s beginning to feel like someone broke the weather. We had snow here two weeks ago — the most snow I’ve seen in four years in Berlin. It didn’t snow at all last year. Before that, a few centimetres once or twice which melted within a day. This year we had 10cm to 15cm. While such an amount would hardly be noticed in Canada, it caused a surprising amount of chaos here, with cancelled trains and...
How big is your head? I’m not suggesting you know its exact circumference in centimetres, but you do have an idea of how much space it takes up, right? I don’t think this is the case for German people. How else would you explain their pillows? The sleep-deprived foreigner has two choice of pillow here in Germany, and each is terrible in its own way. The most common type is the pointlessly huge...
One of my old friends is going native. I went to the beach with her and her sister long before kindergarten was on the horizon, and we attended the same high school in our tiny hometown. You can imagine my dismay when I sent my fellow Deutschland expat an article I’d seen, called How to Avoid Getting Scolded by a German. Her response? “I’ve been scolded many times, but even worse — I’m...
It’s easier to get into North Korea than it is to rent a flat in Berlin. I can say that with great confidence, having done both. In Canada, renting a flat was simply a matter of replying to a few ads, viewing a few places, and filing out an application. The landlord might ask your permission to do a credit check — at their expense — but that was it. It doesn’t work that way in Berlin. When it...
The largest Red Army base outside the Soviet Union was a 40 minute drive south of Berlin. It was just beyond where the new airport — and the old Schönefeld SXF — is today. Wünsdorf-Waldstadt was completely off limits to East Germans during those long, dark Iron Curtain years. They called it Die Verbotene Stadt (the Forbidden City). Others called the massive base ‘Little Moscow’, and I guess it...
I’m moving flats next month and saying goodbye to Tempelhofer Feld, my favourite space in the neighbourhood. But before I pack up my books and lug them across town, I’d like to tell you a bit about the history of what was once the world’s largest building. The 1.2 km long complex was built by the Nazis to be the most advanced airport the world had ever seen, but war cut short their plans and they...
I’m moving flats soon, after four years, leaving this neighbourhood behind for another pre-war altbau in a different part of the city. Imminent departure has prompted me to poke around some of those minor historic sites I’ve passed so often but never gotten around to exploring. One of the largest is just down the block. I biked past that strange concrete mass so many times over the past four...
It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon in Berlin, but it doesn’t feel like spring is in the air. The biergarten are shuttered. The parks are roped off. And many of the ice cream parlours are closed. With nothing else to do but work, I decided to stretch my desk bound legs with a 20km bike ride towards the outskirts of town. My target was a section of open ground near Lichterfelde Süd, where the Berlin...
It’s not surprising that the culture which gave us specific words for a brilliant idea you get while drinking but end up regretting later (Schnapsidee — I get a lot of these), and for the perverse sense of satisfaction at taking joy in someone else’s pain (Schadenfreude) should also have a term for hoarding. The Germans call panic buying Der Hamsterkäufe (‘hamster buying’). When I think about it...