Ich moechte Berliner sein! (I don't want to be a donut, though)
(Note: for those who don't get the historical reference, JFK once gave a speech in Berlin about freedom, and ended by saying "Ich bin ein Berliner", which in German means "I am a donut". To say "I am a Berliner", it should be "Ich bin Berliner". Tsk tsk.)
It's my family's first day in Berlin, and this is the day we start our tour with Insight Vacations. We are on the Easy Pace Berlin, Dresden and Prague tour package, which sounds a lot better than the hectic tour schedule that my mother was initially hoping for ("I want to go to Poland, Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Vienna, and how about Russia?"). Our tour director is this Berlinerin who lives in London, and who speaks with a really crisp English accent that is lovely and a charmingly English sense of humour ("I am called Friederike, and you may call me anything you like, but usually by the end of the tour, people just call me... 'Mother'...").
Getting here from Berlin Zoologischer Garten was a surprisingly easy and charming trip: the taxi that we hailed happened to be driven by a really genial and charmingly friendly Berliner, who regaled us with stories of how life was like in Berlin during the Cold War. To give an example, to leave West Berlin to get to West Germany, West Berliners had to pass through East German territory since West Berlin was surrounded by East Germany. They had to have their passports on them, they were not allowed to carry ANY written materials in the car (presumably to avoid any spy drops or any sort of Western media spoiling East German propaganda), and their passports had the time of their passing printed, so they were not allowed to linger along the highway to West Germany.
So in order to (illegally) speak with his grandparents, who were still in East Berlin, his parents had to drive from West Berlin through East German territory along the highway controlled by the East Germans, and meet his grandparents secretly at a gas station for approximately 20 minutes. When the 20 minutes were up they drove the rest of the highway to West Germany, and made a U-turn to continue the conversation at the same gas station. Just to meet his grandparents.
Germans were not allowed to visit each other due to restrictions imposed by the East German government. The East German government only allowed their citizens to go over to West Germany if they had retired, "so they did not have to pay your pensions!" said our taxi driver.
With the older Berliners I met today, it seems like the memory of the Cold War is just very recent, right below the surface like the memory of 9/11 for most Americans, and it takes but a light tap of the spoon to break through the hard shell to get to the creme brulee of pain. Our tour manager, Friederike, told us that she cannot bear to go through the Charlie Checkpoint museum, because it hit too close to home ("I have lost family and friends at the wall"), and looked like she was tearing up slightly when she said that.
But we also saw the younger side of Berlin, post-Reunification, post-Stasi and beyond Ostalgie (a play on the German words for nostalgia, nostalgie, and the east, Ost).
For dinner we went to this Vietnamese place Monsieur Vuong that serves a daily different menu. It is in the former Eastern part of Berlin, around Hackescher Markt northeast from Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden, which is the place for our hotel, the Westin Grand. It is quite far if we walk there directly, but relatively ok if one takes the S-Bahn to Hackescher Markt, and walk there: it's along Alte Schönbauer Strasse (no. 46), after Steinstrasse and right before Mulackstrasse.
While walking there, I was amazed by the energy and youthfulness in Berlin, in this part of Berlin, which was so inspiring: every single shop we passed by was a gallery or a boutique of some sort, with all SORTS of crazy, cool, fashionable bits and pieces. It is as though everything there was like a cooler version of Samuel and Kevin, which is probably my favourite brand of clothes in Singapore.
It is, apparently, the hip and cool place to be now in Berlin. The best part being they do not take any reservations of any sort, so everyone's equally standing in line waiting for a spare table (just like in Asia), even the drab and the drearily dressed like yours truly. The food, I must say, is really superlative. By no means is it real Vietnamese, but it is real enough, and the ingredients are truly fresh to make the food really superlative.
But even more impressive is the crowd: it really is The Place. Lots of trendy people, with the eclectic and deliberately chaotic fashion of young uni students mixed with the smooth and coherent Hugo-Boss-like style of the Jet Set Leute(Crowd), with everyone looking really beautiful. It is very young, and very hip in a slightly retrospective kind of way. To give an example, one of the coolest 'in' things in Germany now are the Ampelmann, which was the former East German traffic figure for pedestrians. It's quite cool that a number of Berlin traffic junctions actually use this, still, but also cool that you get dispatch bags, shirts, etc. with the cute Ampelmann on it!
Gosh, I really wish I was a Berliner!
It's my family's first day in Berlin, and this is the day we start our tour with Insight Vacations. We are on the Easy Pace Berlin, Dresden and Prague tour package, which sounds a lot better than the hectic tour schedule that my mother was initially hoping for ("I want to go to Poland, Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Vienna, and how about Russia?"). Our tour director is this Berlinerin who lives in London, and who speaks with a really crisp English accent that is lovely and a charmingly English sense of humour ("I am called Friederike, and you may call me anything you like, but usually by the end of the tour, people just call me... 'Mother'...").
Getting here from Berlin Zoologischer Garten was a surprisingly easy and charming trip: the taxi that we hailed happened to be driven by a really genial and charmingly friendly Berliner, who regaled us with stories of how life was like in Berlin during the Cold War. To give an example, to leave West Berlin to get to West Germany, West Berliners had to pass through East German territory since West Berlin was surrounded by East Germany. They had to have their passports on them, they were not allowed to carry ANY written materials in the car (presumably to avoid any spy drops or any sort of Western media spoiling East German propaganda), and their passports had the time of their passing printed, so they were not allowed to linger along the highway to West Germany.
So in order to (illegally) speak with his grandparents, who were still in East Berlin, his parents had to drive from West Berlin through East German territory along the highway controlled by the East Germans, and meet his grandparents secretly at a gas station for approximately 20 minutes. When the 20 minutes were up they drove the rest of the highway to West Germany, and made a U-turn to continue the conversation at the same gas station. Just to meet his grandparents.
Germans were not allowed to visit each other due to restrictions imposed by the East German government. The East German government only allowed their citizens to go over to West Germany if they had retired, "so they did not have to pay your pensions!" said our taxi driver.
With the older Berliners I met today, it seems like the memory of the Cold War is just very recent, right below the surface like the memory of 9/11 for most Americans, and it takes but a light tap of the spoon to break through the hard shell to get to the creme brulee of pain. Our tour manager, Friederike, told us that she cannot bear to go through the Charlie Checkpoint museum, because it hit too close to home ("I have lost family and friends at the wall"), and looked like she was tearing up slightly when she said that.
But we also saw the younger side of Berlin, post-Reunification, post-Stasi and beyond Ostalgie (a play on the German words for nostalgia, nostalgie, and the east, Ost).
For dinner we went to this Vietnamese place Monsieur Vuong that serves a daily different menu. It is in the former Eastern part of Berlin, around Hackescher Markt northeast from Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden, which is the place for our hotel, the Westin Grand. It is quite far if we walk there directly, but relatively ok if one takes the S-Bahn to Hackescher Markt, and walk there: it's along Alte Schönbauer Strasse (no. 46), after Steinstrasse and right before Mulackstrasse.
While walking there, I was amazed by the energy and youthfulness in Berlin, in this part of Berlin, which was so inspiring: every single shop we passed by was a gallery or a boutique of some sort, with all SORTS of crazy, cool, fashionable bits and pieces. It is as though everything there was like a cooler version of Samuel and Kevin, which is probably my favourite brand of clothes in Singapore.
It is, apparently, the hip and cool place to be now in Berlin. The best part being they do not take any reservations of any sort, so everyone's equally standing in line waiting for a spare table (just like in Asia), even the drab and the drearily dressed like yours truly. The food, I must say, is really superlative. By no means is it real Vietnamese, but it is real enough, and the ingredients are truly fresh to make the food really superlative.
But even more impressive is the crowd: it really is The Place. Lots of trendy people, with the eclectic and deliberately chaotic fashion of young uni students mixed with the smooth and coherent Hugo-Boss-like style of the Jet Set Leute(Crowd), with everyone looking really beautiful. It is very young, and very hip in a slightly retrospective kind of way. To give an example, one of the coolest 'in' things in Germany now are the Ampelmann, which was the former East German traffic figure for pedestrians. It's quite cool that a number of Berlin traffic junctions actually use this, still, but also cool that you get dispatch bags, shirts, etc. with the cute Ampelmann on it!
Gosh, I really wish I was a Berliner!
posted by PJ at 4:06 AM
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