Trains, bike lanes and child-mobiles

Our nephew Hugo says Luisa looks like the Italian man on the Go Compare adverts. We therefore used to find the Go Compare adverts highly amusing. One of the few things I miss about British TV. That’s quite worrying – on many levels. I suppose it is human nature, for whatever reason, to compare. I’m constantly doing it. I do it with the price of a beer from the local shop. It’s 20p here as there is a ‘special’ on. It was 30p when I arrived. I even do it with where white goods are positioned and think through the logic to see which country has won that war. The German’s have won the battle of the washing machine. They keep it in the bathroom. Eminently sensible, as you don’t want dirty clothes near food.

I thought I’d miss Five Live and reading a paper copy of The Guardian but the online version of the paper has been suffice and I don’t miss Nicky Campbell – at all. When I started to review our two weeks in Berlin it suddenly dawned on me that although it felt like we had done quite a bit – we had in fact, in terms of ‘attractions’, done extraordinarily little. I then read the International Spiegel and realised why. There has been a heat wave for the past two weeks and Luisa and I have been cycling and walking in an attempt to scope out areas to live, drink and dine. At first I just assumed they had really hot summers and this was the norm for a Berlin July. Then I read that trains were coming to a halt (this is a big deal – air con not working on a Deutsch Bahn train to Köln made front page news) and fish were dying in the local canals as they were being starved of oxygen due to the heat wave. The low 80’s is usual – not the high 90’s. Having a siesta each day now sounds quite sensible. I wish we’d done it more often.

On the subject of how people transport kids in this city, loads of parents have these ‘child trailers’. I just find it amusing. I don’t have much to say about them although they do look handy if you do a ‘big shop’. If we stay for years I’ll get one as I was always tempted by the trolleys that older people use – like Nana Wilson. Nana Wilson’s trolley is multi purpose as she uses it as a wind shield. Genius.

The flat hunting is amusing, which is a good job, as it is also a bit of a chore. So far, we have had an art exhibition of demonstrations in Berlin, with commentary from Frau M Scheydner, who incidentally did not give us her forename. That’s quite formal for a younger Berliner. My favourite picture was of lots of quite aggressive looking youths on the Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain border near the Spree River. It was of the annual water fight! This takes place in August. We’ll hopefully be living in one of these two boroughs longer term. If you want to live in Berlin’s answer to Crouch End, with lots of American and French people and would like a sly landlady then let me know as we have the details for Frau Dronski, who laughed when I opened a wardrobe and it nearly fell off its hinges. “It’s an antique”, she claimed. It was just old and of poor quality. Luisa also noticed that she failed to smile with her eyes. This is now a pre-requisite – added to the list which contains, ‘a bed rather than just a mattress on the floor’. No need to compare landlords – they seem pretty similar in the main. Mostly useless with some genuinely nice people.

I’ll close with further evidence for and against the friendly nature of the Berliner. In the red (for, naturally) corner we have our neighbour Stefan who we spoke to yesterday evening. We said we’d share wine soon. We also have the person who sold us 50 Euro worth of PAYG phones for 20 Euro, (she also gave us her landlords details – unfortunately she lived in a shoe box) and the woman that we are meeting tonight who is giving us (for free) two cinema tickets she cannot use. Unfortunately they are for the Twilight Saga. My penance for Luisa having to endure the World Cup. There is also Thomas of British Lion’s FC who has invited me to play in a football tournament on Saturday. In the blue (nice to see Gove making a hash of things, sorry, wrong blog but more about that another time) corner we have the miserable tertiary sector people we have dealt with. The old man in the local beer garden is really miserable and quite rude and wins my new rudest person of the week award. And yes Judge, this is coming from me! He brightened up when I spoke German though so perhaps we just caught him on a bad day. With only an old man in the blue corner I think it is safe to say that the blues are taking a beating…

Bis Dann,
Wilson