Berlin: a city that welcomes you with open arms, then kicks you in the stomach

The most threatening German definite article of them all I’m not sure whether this is to do with living in a huge city having lived in a tiny village all my life, or rather whether it is more a heightened self-pity leading to a victim complex, but life in the pulsating mass of a metropolis seems to be rather intolerant of…well, almost all individual human effort. Every day seems littered with small signs that while you are trying your hardest to say ‘yes’ to life, Berlin is giving you a solid ‘no’. Take the case of a  few Fridays previous:...

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50th Post!!! The Adventure So Far…

At our Kita, we pride ourselves on keeping your children as safe as possible. Therefore we only use the largest and most ostentatious Alpine cow-bells in our fire alarm system. Wow, we have reached our fiftieth post on Guten Morgen Berlin and I am so pleased with the way it has gone so far. The number of readers per post is more than ten (by a somewhat considerable amount), which was my secret hope for this project at the beginning, and I have kept it going and not allowed it to pathetically shrivel and die like a LiveJournal. I have...

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Oh no, time for a cookery post

As you may have noticed from the minor hints here and there in this blog, I am a rather keen cook and look forward to the making of my dinner even more than the eating of said meal just because the science and art of it it something I find fascinating. In my opinion there is little more satisfying than watching all the various chunks and slices of ingredients slowly meld and mingle into a whole that is almost certainly a lot greater than the sum of its parts; just as interesting is when it goes wrong and you can...

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Dedicated followers of Fasching

This sure is one…well-endowed…monkey… Over the last couple of days in Germany the buzz is all about Karneval, or ‘Fasching’ depending on who or where you are. This is a sort of pre-Lent festival similar to Mardi Gras and making Pancake Day look about as exciting as a cup of tea (which, let us be frank, usually comes alongside the pancakes anyway). For adults it means dancing around the streets half-naked and completely drunk; last Sunday the Karneval parade took place down Kurfurstendamm street, with pasty and cold German dancing women dressed as if they were in Brazil throwing flowers...

Go with the Floh(markt)

                Far left: “Your baby is adorable! I’ll give you four euros.” Flea markets (Flohmärkte) are a bit of a huge deal here in Berlin. As I briefly and casually mention in a previous post, every Sunday this city suddenly becomes like an abandoned amusement park, full of hollowly empty streets, eerily swinging shop signs and rolling tumbleweed. Flea markets would seem to be Berlin’s response to this unbearable hiatus of human activity, as every Sunday every ‘Platz’ and park you come across is filled with rickety stalls with grimy-coated people selling Trödel...

Please mentally read the following text in the voice of the pubescent boy character in The Simpsons

Butternut squash-chili-ginger soup. You need this soup in your life. It has been a quiet week on this blog, and for that I apologise. The reason for this is that the flecks of baby-spittle which landed on my tongue at the beginning of last week heralded the beginning of the end for my physical well-being. It began with a cold, which rapidly deteriorated into a godawful sniff-fest forcing me to fill my entire bedroom with used tissues, and then after the weekend deepened in complexity and heft rather like a fine whisky; all of a sudden I was unable to...

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If French is the language of love, English is the language of lols

Simple, beautiful genius. Thank you, anonymous stenciller. Look at this wonderful piece of graffiti. I walked past this truck today as it momentarily stopped in a queue and seconds after this photo was taken the driver glared and me and drove off. But for a fleeting moment I stood gormlessly beaming at a van purely because someone had stencilled the English translation of their motto on the side. (I would just like to applaud their attention to detail in ensuring the fonts also matched.) No matter how long I study and immerse myself in German my heart will always belong...

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The Kindergarten method of contraception

My maternal instinct has always leant towards a more stereotypically manly side of the spectrum; I love children, get on with them tremendously and find them often adorable but when confronting the question of having my own in any other real-life context than ‘some day maybe’ my maternal instinct coughs a lot, changes the subject and then turns on the TV. It is a huge decision and I am not going to cement my intentions on something so significant so early in my life, particularly while I am still such an indecisive person that I can spend a good half-hour...

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Elvis has left the (Fort)bildung

About three days ago the city took a sudden and stomach-turning lunge back towards temperatures circling a painful -10 to -14 degrees C, which once again meant that being outdoors for any length of time is physically sore, that the sheer glimmer of a flake of snow in the air makes everyone pause with fright like the kids watching the rippling glass of water in Jurassic Park, and most importantly coincided with me losing my third pair of gloves (not including one hat). Nonetheless, I spent a miserable couple of days with my chipolatas ice-cold in my emergency skiing gloves...

The art of sensing danger. Through fonts.

Of course we’re authentically Asian! We have lanterns! It seems far easier to begin and then to maintain any kind of a business here in Berlin, which I assume is mostly down to the whole rule of it being ‘arm aber sexy’ (arm means poor, not an actual arm). If you are just a simple guy with an idea, fifty euros and a pocketful of dreams you will probably be able to fulfil your ambition of owning a vaguely profitable kebab shop, bakery, dodgy Spätkauf, all-polyester clothing shop etc and keeping it on its vaguely wobbly legs for a good...

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