Taking Care of Business in Berlin (or, Unjustly Making Dutch People Look Stupid)

Today I determined that I really had to find a German post office and figure out how to buy stamps and mail things to the States. So I Googled for "Deutsche Post Filialen" that would be on my way to the Karl-August-Platz Saturday market in Charlottenburg, and found one on Kantstrasse (right next to the Kumasch fabric store and not far from Idee crafting supplies, hmm, must check those out at some point).

More monster cucumbers (Schmorgurken) from the vegetable market in Charlottenburg. 

Berliners seem to like to complain that Berlin is lazy and slow and inefficient compared to the rest of Germany; whatever, but if so, someone forgot to tell the people at the post office. They took my international parcel, sold me a couple packs of envelopes, sold me some international stamps, and I was done literally in less than three minutes. Of course, it was all so brisk I didn't actually end up registering or insuring my parcel, but I hope it will get there okay nonetheless!  (The only thing that mystifies me is that for some reason every transaction had to be done separately:  calculate the international postage, pay for that, ring up the envelopes, pay for that, find the stamps, pay for that. I'm not complaining about it---I simply put some euros on the counter and the clerk just took whatever money she needed for the transaction of the moment and put the change back in the pile---I just don't get it.)

Unfortunately, however, the more I make the effort to learn my way around and cope with things in Berlin, the more difficult I make life for the unoffending Dutch. After living for a couple years in the Netherlands a few years back, speaking Dutch (even though I don't do it very well) comes far more easily than speaking German. So if I try to speak German for more than a sentence or two at a time, it veers off into Dutch, or as much Dutch as I can get hold of, at least. Moreover, if I don't know a particular German word I will deliberately use the Dutch equivalent instead, because if I'm lucky it turns out to be the same in both languages, and if it doesn't, well, start over.

Naturally, this linguistic strategy carries the risk of causing people to believe that I'm from the Netherlands myself, which is hardly fair to the Dutch. At the post office today, for instance, I couldn't remember the German word for "stamps" so I asked for "zehn Postzegels", that being the corresponding Dutch term. The brisk clerk whisked a book of ten stamps out of the drawer and kindly but firmly replied "zehn Briefmarken" as she handed them to me. (Oh right, I knew that.) So now I look like a Dutch speaker who not only doesn't know enough to use the German word for stamps in a Berlin post office, but doesn't even know enough to use the English word for stamps instead of the Dutch one since English is more likely to be widely understood in a place like Berlin. Would you want one of your countrypeople going around giving that sort of impression to foreigners? I didn't think so.

I suppose I could try to counter that impression or at least confuse the issue by trying harder to look more American: wearing a "USA" T-shirt or an American flag lapel pin or something. But I'm afraid that would just make matters worse by making me seem like a Dutch person who's obsessively enamored of the US, which heaven knows doesn't enhance anybody's reputation either. The only alternative seems to be to give up altogether and speak only English as an out-and-proud monoglot American, which would be a real waste of an opportunity to improve my language skills. So I guess I'll go on trying to speak German and the unfortunate Dutch are just going to have to take the hit. Het spijt mij jongens, but if it's any comfort, by the next time I visit the Netherlands I will probably know and use enough German words to make German people look stupid too.

In the meantime, getting out of the mostly-English-medium enclave of the Institute and into the life of a German city is fascinating. Even the names on street signs are fun to read, both for pronunciation practice and the recurring startled recognition of historical figures you've read about in books but never seen directly commemorated. (I remember on my very first visit to Germany some 27 years ago being impressed by all the streets named after famous scientists, although it took us longer than it should have to figure out what was going on with all the signs apparently honoring some mysterious Herr Doktor Professor Einbahn.)

Schlüsselkäfer says, "Look at me, I'm a rationalist philosopher!  A priori monad transcendental Ding-an-Sichlichkeit!" Shut up, Schlüsselkäfer, and quit photobombing.

Yarn Store Yatra, Part II: Actually Buying Stuff

Saturday mornings are an important part of the week in Germany because a lot of places close at mid-afternoon and stay closed on Sunday.  So you need to plan your Saturday pretty well if you want to fit in, say, a morning yoga class...

Schlüsselkäfer says, "I spend all of class doing Shoe Protection Pose." 

...And then make it to a yarn store or two while they're actually open.  I stopped only long enough to check out the window of "La Laine" on Kantstrasse, but it looks as though they have some nice things:

But I did meet a colleague for a quick visit to a knitting/coffee shop in Wilmersdorf, "boucle+cafe",  where they sell both yarn and very tasty chai latte without any straw. They have a Ravelry group and a regular schedule of Stricktreffen or stitch'n'bitch meetings, so that would be a good thing to try at some point to get my German language use a little more activated. Also a nice yarn selection:

Most of the yarns are major multinational brands, naturally, but they also had some handsome German natural wools and a selection of variegated yarns dyed by a Berlin artisan called "Wool Queen" (Wollkönigin). And although of course the store was overwhelmingly geared towards knitting stuff, they did have some crochet hooks, including one tiny steel hook that I think is going to save my lace gloves project!

Yarn Store Yatra, Part I: Stitch 'n' Bitch Berlin!

At the moment I'm kind of reminding myself of the immortal Lorelei Lee as she remarked of her visit to Paris: "And when a girl walks around and reads all of the signs with all of the famous historical names it really makes you hold your breath [...] When we stood at the corner of a place called the Place Vandome, if you turn your back on a monument they have in the middle and look up, you can see none other than Coty's sign." Today was my first visit to Berlin-Mitte or the center city, and there were a LOT of famous museums and historical monuments and impressive architecture that had to be ignored in order to fit in all my needlework-themed activities. Well, I'm sure I'll get to the tourist highlights another time!  


I had plotted out a one-way route of about 20 km on Google Maps to bike from our southwestern suburb of Dahlem to the main Berlin yarn stores that I'd found on the internet:

Yes, German shops are closed on Sunday, but that seemed like a good safety precaution: I could go and check out the shop windows and learn where all the stores are without being tempted to spend buckets of money. However, just as I was finishing my route planning, I serendipitously discovered that there was a weekly stitch'n'bitch taking place up by Prenzlauer Berg in the northeast, starting in a bit more than an hour.  

So I got ready and put my project bag on my bike and dashed off to head for the meeting site as expeditiously as possible, without any windowshopping on the way, but it still took me about an hour and a half, counting getting lost for a while up by Torstrasse. Now that I've ridden in the city center, I think I have to revise my estimate of the proportion of Dutch-style biking to Indian-style biking in Berlin to more like 55% vs. 45%.  

But I got there and had a good time, although I didn't get any German practice because all the participants spoke English. Here's the cafe table with various participants' works-in-progress:

Schlüsselkäfer says, "My Tineidae cousins in the Lepidoptera could eat all this yarn in less than a week!" Shut up, Schlüsselkäfer.

It was a good meeting but not very productive in terms of project progress, because it turns out that even after all that packing I DON'T HAVE ENOUGH CROCHET HOOKS. One of my thread-crochet patterns calls for steel hooks in a weird sizing notation so I thought I had covered all the possibilities, but according to my gauge swatch the smallest steel hook I have is still too big. Hope I can find some others at a craft or needlework store here! I left the gathering about 5:30 so as to bike home while it was still reasonably light out, but on the way back I stopped to check out a couple additional yarn shops that had been mentioned. Here's "Loops" on the Wörtherstrasse:

"Angebot" means "sale", and at 2 euros per 50-gram skein it looks like a pretty good price. (Of course, I didn't actually see the yarn in person, and anyway I've got enough stuff to work on that I brought with me.) "Knitknit" on Linienstrasse looked a bit more chi-chi:

You can see the reflection of my bike in the window (and not much else, unfortunately). There were a couple other shops I looked for in the Mitte, but one I couldn't seem to find and the other appeared to be more woolen goods than yarn. I couldn't take too much time looking around before the light went, but I couldn't resist snapping a shot of this display outside the Legoland Discovery Centre in Potsdamer Platz:

If that giraffe looks kind of pixelated it's not because of my crummy-ish camera, it's because it's made out of rectangular Legos! (Schlüsselkäfer sulked because he didn't get to be a reference scale object in this photo, but he would have been way too small to show up.)

Potsdam or Bust

Today was a beautiful day and you never know when it will be the last one of the season, so I decided a long bike ride would be just the thing.  I had heard Potsdam was nice so I headed vaguely south and west till I hit a road called the Potsdamerstrasse, which I was pretty confident would take me there.  I only made it as far as the suburb (?) Am Stern, which has a nice little park around the Jagdschloss-Stern, a royal hunting lodge built for Friedrich Wilhelm I.  (Apparently today they were having a festival of some kind complete with a German Dixieland jazz group (!?), but I didn't get there till after it was over. They'll have a more "authentic" Herbstfest with hunting horns and what-not later in the month.)

Anyway, two and a half hours straight pushing that sturdy three-speed and I am pretty bushed!  But with a nice little detour through a park along the Teltowkanal on the way out, it was a very pleasant ride.

Fahrrad (Preisfrei!)

In other words, free bicycle!  Our institute has a very convenient loaner-bike policy where you can sign up to borrow one of its stable of bicycles.  You get the bike-lock key and are responsible for looking after the bike and putting it back.  So today I got on my borrowed bike and went off to try to find a yoga studio that was offering an 11 AM class in the nearby district of Charlottenburg.

The map I have shows the city center and the main part of Charlottenburg, so I could locate the studio's position easily, but doesn't show anywhere closer to where I am.  So after a quick squint at Google Maps I figured that heading north and looking for signs for Charlottenburg should be good enough to get me onto the map, at which point I could use the map to find the studio.  This worked better than I expected (I ended up taking pretty much the optimal route from the institute to the studio, direction-wise if not bike-friendliness-wise), but not well enough to get me there in time for the class. However, when I got there I saw a sign in the window saying that today's class was canceled, so I didn't miss anything.  

Moreover, I ended up right near Karl-August-Platz where there's an excellent Saturday market.  I had previously found a small Kaiser's supermarket within walking distance of the institute and picked up some staples there, but this is where they keep the real food!  Not to mention the flowers and the hand-carved wooden kitchenware and the cheap sewing supplies and the cheap clothing (3 pairs of socks for 5 euros; see, I told you there was no point packing extra socks).  

The Germans and I see eye to eye on the question of when a cucumber is overripe (pretty much never: when it goes huge and yellowy and develops a sort of watery texture in the seeds and a tangy taste, that's a good thing).  I got a monster cucumber larger than a butternut squash (and at 2.50 euros per kilo, more expensive than three pairs of socks!), as well as some French black grapes and a bunch of cilantro and some pears of a kind I've never seen before.  Also a chai latte with a straw, which apparently is the way you're supposed to drink it here, frothed to the point where the foam is as enduring as industrial effluent.  There were all kinds of other things that I didn't buy, including quail eggs (Wachteleier, both fresh and preserved) and English scones and manuka honey from New Zealand and specialty soaps (but no carnation soap, which is Susanna's favorite but hard as hell to find.  I know how to ask for it in German ("Nelke Seife") but so far I always get the same answer).  

It was a rather drizzly day and over a half-hour ride back, so after some shopping and checking out the upcoming events at the nearby Deutsche Oper Berlin (Parsifal next month!) I retraced my route on the bike and came home.  German bike gears are calibrated backwards from our point of view, with 1 as the most difficult gear and 3 as the easiest on a typical three-speed city bike, and I only wish I had figured that out before doing a long ascent in what I assumed was first gear.  (Door locks are counterintuitive too, so instead of "righty-tighty lefty-loosy" you have to remember "left lock, right release".)  Biking in Berlin seems to be about 65% like biking in Holland and about 35% like biking in India, so I feel right at home.  There are bike paths and bike lanes on many streets, with dedicated traffic lights for the bicycles and so on, but on the narrow streets of the urban centers it seems to be pretty much a free-for-all.  

We have a tiny shared kitchen on the ground floor of the dorm building so I used the rainy afternoon making a huge kettle of dal saag, with a bag of lentils and a box of frozen spinach and a couple of onions and a bag of potatoes and the bunch of cilantro from the market.  Not much else to put in except some salt and pepper, but it came out well and it's nice to have real food on hand.  Storing leftovers in my little cube fridge will be something of a challenge; I think I'll need to pick up some space-saving German Tupperware equivalents.  

Local Happenings

Why are there a grillion film-company vans lined up on our street since yesterday?  And the back yard of one of the houses opposite is all lit up at night.  Somebody's doing some on-location filming?  

A damp day is perfect for a race between a snail (Schnecke) and a slug (Nacktschnecke or "naked snail").  The snail ate the slug's lunch, zooming past him in a blur of speed, comparatively speaking. Moving at a snail's pace is still better than being sluggish!

Schlüsselkäfer says, "Back in my day before I was stuck in this keychain I could go way faster than that even without using my wings!"

Packing for 4 Months in Berlin: 12 Pairs of Socks, 23 Crochet Hooks

Hey, I refuse to apologize for having my priorities straight.  Plus, realistically speaking a crochet hook is much smaller, lighter and sometimes more expensive than a pair of socks, as well as being harder to find in the correct size.  Obviously you should pack the hook and buy the socks overseas.  (Or bring along yarn and make some socks.)

Also, a crochet hook can be much more versatile in solving problems with a temporary residence.  Got no place to hang up your keys in your dorm room?

Schlüsselkäfer the Lucky Chafer Beetle says "Well, why do you think they call it a hook?"

It's a nice dorm room, though, with a pretty view of a quiet street in the Berlin neighborhood of Dahlem, and good for photographing FOs.

Speaking of FOs, of course, I can't resume my blog posting without providing the obligatory photos of a new T-shirt baby quilt, completed shortly before my departure:

It came out pretty well, though the patterned backgrounds are doing it no favors!  I took some other pictures of the construction process, thinking that at some point I'd put together a complete T-shirt baby quilt tutorial, but this isn't that point yet: you really need to document every step.