This is it. On Tuesday I set foot in my last school for the last time and gave my last lesson. On Wednesday I collected all my teaching materials together, resisted the urge to burn them and ceremoniously dumped them on the table at my office. I then spent the rest of my day disinfecting, de-clogging and emptying out my room until it once again began to resemble a domain where a human person might happily live. My sweet flatmate presented me with a celebratory big bunch of roses and my colleagues and I toasted our success with Club Mate, one of the deadliest and most delicious ways to stay awake for six straight hours (it’s a popular caffeinated soft drink which tastes like how cigars smell and has a mysterious and shadowy stranger as its logo).
And that was the end. No longer a teacher, now I’m just another one of the aimless students bumming around Berlin commenting on the awesomeness of just how ‘like, Berlin‘ everything is. Suddenly and abruptly stopping work is a bizarre thing to have to come to terms with. No longer having a wake-up time or an after-work time, all time is finally free time, and my brain is taking this opportunity to dumb down in the most startling way. I find myself spending solid minutes pondering things which before I was too frazzled even to consider, but that now I have the luxury to consider and reflect upon for entire chunks of wasted life. For example, my thoughts over the last few days have dawdled on such topics as:
– Mint-flavoured floss. Why does this exist and how does no-one notice the brazenness of marketing such a product? No-one brushes their teeth, then flosses with regular floss and thinks, “Well, my teeth are sparkling and my breath would be perfect if it weren’t for this overpowering stench blasting out of the small (admittedly clean) crevices between each tooth…” I will never buy this again simply as a protest against capitalism.
– Berlin strikes me as an incredibly dusty city compared to everywhere else I have ever been. There is dust everywhere and whenever I get home having been outside I find that my shoes and feet are coated with a fine layer of Schmutz which then gets onto the floor and then back onto my feet and ends up just getting trekked around the place which is irritating because it means your mum was always right when she said that you ought to take your shoes off and stop trailing dirt from room to room. I think this is why the Germans love to sweep so much. The dust.
– Could you make jam from melons?
Clearly this new-found free time is not good for me. It’s time to go out and start living it up Berlin style and discovering yet more exciting things, I reckons.
But never fear. This is the city of endless possibilities and there is no reason to be bored when you can go out and do something weird and new. Let me tell you about the Freiluftkinos.
Freiluftkinos, outdoor cinemas, are a big deal here in Berlin, and the minute the weather stops being so oh-good-god-I’m-never-going-to-be-happy-again terrible they all open and start showing a selection of crowd-pleasing or ‘eh?’-inspiring films depending on the venue. Beautifully, each one has its own draw, from the Freiluftkino in Kreuzberg where you get to lounge in deckchairs while watching your movie to this particular spot in which the cinema is buried deep within the trees of a gorgeous Volkspark, conveniently near to a varied selection of fine drug dealers. We will all be used, thanks to conventional cinemas, to having to sell a kidney to buy popcorn and to arguing with latecomers in the first half of the film because even though they’re late and obnoxious they still claim the right to sit in their designated seats and shunt you over to your place right beneath John Travolta’s colossal left nostril. But here it’s different; as long as you clean up your own mess you can bring what you like, so you get a wonderful atmosphere of people drinking Rotkäppchen from picnic cups and eating their snacks from Tupperware rather than the ultra-rustly packaging of every sadistically designed cinema snack.
We saw the film Almanya, a sweet and funny flick about a Gastarbeiter family living in Germany and what happens to them when they go back to Turkey to renovate a house that should later serve as their holiday home. I won’t go into a full review of the film but it seemed to be a crowd pleaser from the fact that everyone clapped at the end and the woman sitting behind us was hooting with laugher so loudly I wanted to clap her for being an example of living life to the fullest. At any rate, it’s certainly worth a try regardless of whether you’re going to see a good film or not, just for the fun and the novelty of sitting on little foam cushions and watching a film on a screen lightly peppered with bird droppings.
