Date: Wednesday, December 1, 1999 12:53 Subject: meow Good afternoon, Vita just isn't used to such a big apartment. When she stumbles out from under the bed at noon, after her morning nap, she can't find us. So she sits in hall and howls until one of us walks over and gives her a pat. Yes, we're still alive, we haven't been consumed by large predators or sucked into that horrible vacuum cleaner. It's raining today, but the skies threaten to clear in time for my skating practice tonight. I'm staying home finishing a tech writing job, what fun; Annette will go out to deal with a banking errand, even funner. One week before we leave for Chicago, and so much to do. Haircuts. Christmas shopping. Bureaucracy. Our friend C is going to stay here and take care of the cat, rather than our sending her off to P2's (which would involve talking to P2, something we're trying to avoid right now - but that's a long story). There's a very cheap rail fare here, the "nice weekend" ticket, with which up to five people can go anywhere in Germany for only 35 marks. The catch is that you have to take local or regional trains, not the intercity express lines. So you're effectively limited to about 200 kilometres out and back. This is just enough to get us down to Dresden for the day (a three hour trip rather than the normal two) where there is a very good Christmas market, with much lower prices than Berlin for traditional crafts and woodwork and so forth. We'll try to do most of our shopping there, leaving only a few small mopping-up efforts for next week. Annette ordered a catalogue from this amazing store (www.ok-ok.de) that sells odd household products from Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Central America. There's something quite appealing about simple, everyday items that are just weirdly different. Luckily we won't have it in time for Christmas, otherwise everyone would be receiving Bulgarian toilet brushes and Senegalese salad bowls and god knows what else. I'm now mildly obsessed with the idea of collecting an entire set of Warsaw Pact bathroom accessories. We may soon be hitting the flea markets around the Ostbahnhof in Friedrichshain. (Actually I had an even crueler idea: if you had a big enough house, drag home one of those really nasty German shelf-style toilets and put it in the guest bathroom. Without a brush.) Okay, back to work. Four more hours until I leave for skating. Tick, tick, tick... Regards, Scott PS Today's project is to find a decent radio station. We're tired of listening to the same stories over and over again on the BBC World Service, suggestive though they are of old Monty Python skits. But it's going to take a while to find something other than pseudo-redneck "American" rock stations and cheesy Europop. Date: Sunday, December 5, 1999 21:49 Subject: a complete failure as a shopping trip... Everybody, It is Sunday night. I am alone, temporarily and not unhappily. Annette and C went to a dinner thing with the other women in their running group - the Frauenabteilung. I've had a quick meal of leftover pasta, Turkish Fladenbrot and Aldi-bought Rotkohl, which I've taken to calling "roughage in a can". Now I've settled down to write with a cup of tea, listening to Radio Eins, half-following a discussion with a couple of young authors, including the apparently insufferable Benjamin von S.-B., who as far as I can tell fancies himself a German mixture of Douglas Coupland and Tyler Brulé. Consequently I'm feeling guilty about writing another one of these monstrous messages instead of something a little more "serious" - whatever that might mean. Okay, that program's over, on to some relatively groovy music. I am vastly ignorant of the music scene here, but am slowly discovering things I like. Jazzy drum 'n' bass stuff, mostly; definitely not techno. It's time to cycle another load of laundry through. Load three of four, with dishes to follow. We've let it build up again, plus we need to do all the linens before leaving for Chicago on Wednesday morning. And I need more tea. I've had a typically, pleasantly slack Sunday. Annette took off to meet G and C for their morning run; I stayed home to do a little cleaning and tidying, then went out for a ride a little after noon. Moving to Kreuzberg entails a longer transit to my normal training grounds in the Grunewald. While this is at times inconvenient, it does mean that my regular loops (down the Kronprinzessinweg then either round the Havelchaussee and up Am Postfenn and back again, or out past Wannsee and round to the Pfaueninsel) now last between two and three hours. This will certainly help my endurance. It wasn't an especially pleasant ride, sluggish really, under chilly gray skies with the occasional shower. My normal weekly training schedule is now skating Monday, Wednesday and Friday (one hour on the ice, one hour on the bike riding to and from) plus two additional rides of two to three hours, and it will soon include a combination of yoga, dryland exercises, weight training and hill running on the Teufelsberg, which is no substitute for the Grouse Grind, but you can't have everything. Skating still makes me grin from ear to ear. There is a good group of inliners doing ice for the winter, guys about my speed who will be useful training partners come spring. Annette just called. Things are going to continue a while longer. Apparently there is dancing. Okay... Meanwhile, Radio Eins is now on this weird Jane Birken, Serge Gainsbourg, Nick Cave thing that I am completely enjoying... So we are officially in pre-Christmas, pre-Chicago mode. We've begun shopping. I think we'll be writing our Christmas cards on the plane so that we can mail them stateside, but that's an agreeable way to pass the flight. On Friday we tore around, stringing errands together in one long blur of well-coordinated achievement. Up to Moabit, where we dealt with our stupid bank, who cannot seem to figure out how to change an address. Across to Prenzlauer Berg for haircuts, puzzling over transit connections because even though the two halves of this city have grown together over the past ten years, it still remains divided in your mind, and your first assumption when travelling between East and West is that you will need to spend an hour on the U-Bahn with the inevitable change at Friedrichstraße or Alexanderplatz, when in fact you may be only a ten-minute tram ride away from your destination. So be it. Getting one's hair cut in Berlin requires it's own paragraph. I've only done it once before, in the summer of 1995. I was desperate, the salon was Turkish, the results were dire. This time it went much better. On a friend's recommendation we tried Headhunters, an apparently very hip assembly-line joint in P-Berg where you take a number and sit around waiting and listening to music (and if you are anyone but us, smoking) until someone yells "Next!" and then spends five or ten minutes shortening your existing style for twenty marks. They make you dry your own at that price, although if you are male and willing to flirt a little the guy cutting your hair will offer to mousse or gel it for you. Anyway, drying hair is a big production for most women. I had no idea it could be quite so involved. Were I so inclined - and I almost am - I would consider spending my afternoons in a café across the road, watching the endless parade of primping, tossing, flipping and fussing through the window. Fascinating! So after that we hit the Kiepert bookstore in a new shopping center and thought that it sure looked like a Chapters, complete with its own little coffee shop, except twice as expensive. Shopping in the East is weird - these new developments, very North American in style if not in service, appear to have been plopped down amidst the ruins, the grim unsaniert Altbau and even grimmer DDR pre-fab. And after that I went skating and Annette went to the F.U. to print out the corrections for her dissertation and we came home and discovered each other in the stairwell thanks to a sequence of events that I could not hope to describe without a timeline and a diagram but which required luck, precise timing and the replacement of the front door lock by the landlord. *** We had the bright idea to do the bulk of our Christmas shopping in Dresden on Saturday. A friend told us that they had a good Weinachtsmarkt, with traditional wooden craft work available much cheaper than in Berlin. Plus, we rationalized, the major department stores are all there on the hideous DDR-era square (Dresden's own scaled-down version of Alex) between the Altmarkt and the Bahnhof, so we can hit them all in one shot. We'd buy one of those cheap Schönes Wochenende tickets and head down with C and make a day of it. It's funny how a day in which we failed so utterly to achieve our stated goal could nevertheless turn out to be such fun. What were we thinking? Here is the lesson I learned from our ordeal: never, ever go into a regional capitol on a Saturday morning. Especially not when the Christmas market is open. In a major city like Berlin, Saturdays are certainly busy, but most people can spread their shopping out over the course of the week. In a provincial city like Dresden, every yokel from the surrounding countryside descends on the place come Saturday morning. It felt like all of Saxony had the bright idea of doing their Christmas shopping in Dresden on the fourth of December. Rarely have I endured such crowds. (As if to prove my theory, the greatest human density I have ever encountered was in a small town in Northern Ireland during their summer fair. The entire county was packed into half a dozen small streets. Dad and I needed the better part of an hour to push our bikes through the mess and continue on our way.) We should have seen it coming when we boarded the train at Ostbahnof at an ungodly early hour. We and twenty of our new closest friends were wedged into the little area between the doors in the middle of the car, barely able to breathe, let alone move, for a truly unpleasant two-and-a-half hour journey to some godforsaken hellhole called Elsterswerda. There we sprinted into a slightly roomier train for the last hour into Dresden. People were in reasonably good spirits, thank god, despite some typically pig-headed Central European crowd behaviour. In Dresden, the station was crowded full, the walk from the station to the market was a sea of humanity, the market itself was stuffed to point of immobility - "Stau in Richtung Dresdner Weinachtsmarkt" I intoned in my best InfoRadio voice. A father held his toddler above the curb as she ejected twin streams of urine and diarrhea into the gutter. We were hungry, cold and tired, badly in need of a lunch somewhere warm, with seats and a table. And of course, because this is the former DDR, there are maybe four fancy, expensive Kaffee und Kuchen type cafés in the entire city, and almost nothing else that does not entail standing up, eating some form of sausage, outside in the cold. We walked and walked, finding nothing. You can't swing a cat in Berlin without hitting a good, cheap place to eat, but this is Dresden. We remembered having the same problem during our weird day trip to the German Hygiene Museum last year, searching for the better part of an hour before finding a slightly ratty Italian restaurant where my dining experience was greatly disturbed by the sight of the war veteran with the missing nose sitting a few tables over. Eventually we gave up and trooped back to the ugly DDR square and fought our way into the restaurant on the top floor of the Karstadt for an entirely unremarkable lunch, such as we could have found at any department store in Berlin. But it was warm and we could sit, so there were no complaints. Christmas shopping was a bust. We found one item of clothing for one of the nephews at the H&M (which I've now taken to calling "Hit and Miss") that was just like any H&M in Berlin. We bought next to nothing in the market. The wood crafts were too expensive and the crowd to oppressive. One quick Glühwein for the road, then at three-thirty we fled and took a slower, less direct and therefore much less crowded train back home. It was a very pleasant journey, comparatively speaking. When the train began to pick up passengers in Berlin, I suddenly realized how incredibly white everybody had been back in Dresden. Nothing but white people, drably dressed, as far as the eye could see. No wonder I felt uncomfortable. If you heard anything but German, it was Slavic, not Turkish. The East is still very different - people would stare at us when we spoke English. And Dresden itself is ugly and depressing. Before the war it must have rivaled Prague, but now it looks like the shattered remains of a once beautiful city. Between small pockets of the original Baroque lie great gaping wounds, open spaces periodically dotted with monstrously dull pre-fab DDR construction. Berlin is messy and disorganized and chaotic and sometimes grumpy, but it's comfortable. We finished our day devouring Thai food at Vegetables & Fish, just off Winterfeldplatz, safe in the bosom of our adopted home. *** So, what's on our dance card? Two hectic days to finish the Christmas shopping that we failed utterly to complete on Saturday, a few pre-trip errands, and then off to Chicago at the crack of dawn Wednesday morning. No idea what we're doing once we get to Chicago - we'll figure that out when we get there. Doing four loads of laundry, with linens, was a stupid idea. I have greatly exceeded the capacity of our drying racks. Regards, Scott