Berlin: Bummed Out

Thanks to the odd scheduling of these, the general business of life/dissertating, and my ever-roaming focus, I’m writing about Berlin after I’ve left it, scrawling these thoughts from a café in Bruxelles-Midi as I wait for the Eurostar to London. That’s not a bad place to start talking about what I want to cover in this post, which is: the bummer-towne aspects of my month in Berlin. After the jump: when life on the road gets rumply!

Street art! The sub-theme to this post is: even when you're having a rough time, Berlin is GOOD.

Part of why I love slow travel, as I never seem to shut up about, is that it helps me strike a balance on the road: exploring new environments and exploring different cultures while also setting up routines and getting a sense of familiarity and home base to my life. I’m not alone in this; read almost any travel writer’s rundown of their routines and you’ll find the nods to this need for touchstones on long trips. For some it’s a certain alarm clock, for others it’s a family photo or tchotchke they set up in every hotel room/apartment rental, and for some it’s behavioral. For me it’s usually the latter: as soon as I’m checked in somewhere, I like to find the nearest markets for groceries, the local café or pub where it looks worth becoming a regular, orienting around the nearest public transit, and so on.

This is pretty nice even for short trips, but at about a weeklong trip it’s very ideal, long enough that you start to develop a nod-and-smile (at the least, depending on local norms of friendliness) relationship with the bakers/grocers/baristas, and at least in your immediate location you develop that instinctive muscle memory that helps you feel centered. Well, me, at least.

In Berlin, where I rented a friend’s apartment for July, this totally happened! There’s a great street market on Saturdays down the block from the place, right next to a stellar little bakery. (Their spritzkuchen, what we’d call French crullers, were dangerously perfect.) The M4 and M10 trams were perfectly triangulated to get me around all the corners of the city I wanted to frequent. But that sense of settling in just… didn’t take, for a while. While that corner turned, there are a few reasons why I think it took longer than usual.

#FRIEND! A li'l corner near the Deutschestheater. One of the downsides of the month? Working meant not as much time to just roam the streets looking at all the excellent work out and about.

First and foremost, in renting a pal’s apartment, I slipped into that most dangerous of mindsets: Why Isn’t This Working For Me? My phone’s screen had cracked on the way into town, and the process of getting a replacement lined up was… drawn-out. Deliveries were complicated for no apparent reason (one shipper, shipping to their own retail store for pickup, marked a package as “address not found”). When I finally got the phone, it was four separate visits to electronics shops and wireless carriers before I found out that a law had gone into effect three days before my arrval in Berlin under which you couldn’t activate a SIM card without a residency permit. Meanwhile, on the train into Berlin I’d ordered a couple of items to deliver to Brian’s place, which as of now, almost a month later, are still bouncing around the delivery networks. It rained… a lot, probably between a third and half of my time in the city. The stay marked the halfway point in my summer’s longest stretch between seeing friends in person. Throw in a few frustrating errands ending in “you need different paperwork,” and the whole thing made for a slow start to the month, and worse, that slow-motion awful feeling of “I’m being a stupid tourist and I don’t know how to stop being one.”

Bizarrely, the moment this all changed was when a clerk at Telekom told me of the governmental policy that meant I wouldn’t have a working phone for the month. My initial frustration faded fast, as I somehow now had permission to let that project go – I wasn’t gonna have a phone, so I didn’t need to keep trying to fix my phone. Likewise, my shipping service woes faded as I remembered that Brian could send these things on to my hosts later in the UK (assuming they don’t spend another month in package-shipment purgatory). These tiny things finally registered as the tiny things they were, and not the existential “Why can’t I use my arms the way normal people do” style frustration.

FUN FACT/gloomy image: in Austria (and, based on this corner, perhaps Germany?) funeral plots are leased, not bought, and if the family doesn't pay the once-a-decade bill, you lose that spot. Which is a preamble to saying: on a ramble I stumbled into this corner of a graveyard, a sort of headstone graveyard. Layers on layers, that's pretty much Berlin.

And this I guess is the takeaway: trying to control your circumstances is always a mug’s game. And while long-term travel is a glorious way to get under the skin of a culture (if only slightly!) and wrench yourself out of the dull chore of checklist tourism, it’s also prone to let you forget that you’re a guest in a strange world, however similar it may be to your own. So, moving forward, hoping to do more of what I did toward the end of my stay here: to do what I can to address the day’s frustrations, and then set them aside whatever the outcome, knowing that both they and I will be around to try again tomorrow.

To which end: up next, the good and fun times in Berlin, as they were more plentiful than you might assume after reading this womp-womp update. Honk honk, as the fellow says.