Weekday Weekend

In these past 3 weeks any time I could get on the internet was spent locked in the purgatory that is Belushi's hostel, desperately searching for somewhere to live. Now that the crisis is over and I've found a lovely flat on Hasenheide ('hare heath') I feel it is high time I write about this month - even if it is nearly at an end. 

The very first weekend after I arrived here at the start of Ocotober, I had a visit from two friends who study German with me. Saturday Hannah arrived from Halle where she is teaching in a Gesamtschule. With the biting cold there was only one thing to do: shopping. We headed to a place I had never heard of before, a Swedish store called Weekday. Obviously they're doing well as they had an instore DJ. At 5pm in the afternoon. It was so loud my changing cubicle was shaking. I guess that's how the Swedes like to shop. 

Anyway, after our eardrums had recovered we stepped outside onto Georgenstrasse. 

After the cringe-worthy yet highly necessary photo opp we headed East to a second-hand store located in an old office block from the DDR era. 

Hannah climbing on up for that 2nd hand bargain

Evening was falafel  (full homage blog to follow) and then went to CAKE bar to see my friend Melanie deejay

Emma arrived the next day from Braunschweig, where she's working for a publishing company. Having just come from the from the Peggy Guggenheim I couldn't not go to the Deutsche Guggenheim

and so we popped in to catch the last days of an exhibition on contemporary artists' work in film and how it engages with the idea of the fairytale. The highlight for me was a grotesquely fascinating film called 'Dough' by Argentinian-born  artist Mika Rottenberg. Rather than try and explain it badly here's a video of it:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPXpQPfZu4s

I found Peggy's autobiography in German in the shop which made me nostalgic. 

It was funny to see how they'd placed it right next to a film on Hilla Rebay. She was the woman who was responsible for setting up Solomon Guggenheim's (Peggy's uncle) collection which would become the founding collection of the Guggenheim New York. Hilla and Peggy had a particularly vicious series of correspondences where the former accused Peggy of profiteering under the Guggenheim name. Interesting then that she seems to be looking down her nose at Peggy who has rather insouciantly donned her brilliantly oversized sunglasses.  

We took a wander round autumn-coloured Berlin:

Emma's hair was strikingly similar to the tree's leaves

That evening we had sumptuous dinner: pumpkin risotto followed by bananas fried in prosecco, covered with melted Milka chocolate. Healthy.

NOM

 

BAUM/BBC

I have some loose ends of blog posts from Venice that I wanted to put up before I forgot. One seems particularly appropriate as a linguistic bridge between Italy and Germany.

In Venice in September I had the luck of being able to live with a former Italian intern of the Guggenheim called Eleonora. Or Ele. Or principessa depending on what time of day it was. She is a student of arts management at Ca' Foscari and had exams that she had to take in the middle of September. I also had to prepare a talk to give on a painting by Arshile Gorky that's in the Gugg collection and so we headed off to the humanities faculty library to study. But this is not just any humanities faculty library, oh no. This is the Biblioteca di Area Umanistica nontheless and they very proudly state this with the snazzy acronym, BAUM. All fine and dandy. Except in German the word baum means 'tree'. So every time I saw a new poster or notice around the place I thought there was some bizarre German tree cult that had a very prominent presence around campus.

TREE

Here's a pic of us hard at work

Here's what Eleonora made of the double meaning

Who knows, perhaps they were even
aware of the double meaning as this
sign suggests.....

In my room in our flat near the Rialto bridge I made a great discovery. The landlady was obviously learning English at some stage in the 1970s and she chose to do so by using a 6 volume BBC English course. Upon flicking through I started to notice that certain parts where rather Surrealist. Take this chapter heading for example which looks just like the kind of unsettlingly credible yet utterly nonsensical sentence that might be produced from a game of cadavre exquis.

It is a game that the Surrealist group experimented with in the 1920s and one that bored groups on rainy family holidays still play today. You write down a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold it over and pass it on to the next player who writes their own phrase and so on and so forth. At the end you fold out the sheet of paper and have a progression of seemingly linked sentences that offer unexpected and surprising concatenations of surreal meaning. The idea was that by involving chance in the creative process they could produce surprisingly poetic juxtapositions drawn directly from the subconscious. There were also some great picture pages that had the same effect:

Others made me laugh for their sheer quirkiness:

And others raised a wry smile for their depiction of the beloved British weather....

Gemeldet George

As someone from the European union if you stay in Germany for more than 3 months, by law you have to register with the local authorities. It helps them keep tabs on who they've got in the country and to make sure you're not an illegal immigrant or terrorist.

I was warned that German bureaucracy often requires many documents and so I came well prepared; get ready for stereotypically long German words. I took along a Einladungbestätigung which was essentially a proof of residence but translates as 'invitation confirmation' as if my landlord had 'invited' me to live with him. Next was a 'Praktikumsbestätigung' which was a document my employer drafted up to confirm I am indeed working and not just bumming around. Finally just to make sure I had documentary proof of almost every facet of my existence I brought along my passport, student card and a 'Immatrikulationsbescheinigung' which shows that I'm currently a student.

With all this proudly tucked under my arm I made my way towards the Anmeldeamt or registration office of my district, Mitte, past the unmissable main square of the former DDR, Alexanderplatz. The feature that is most recognisable that has become an icon of the city is the Fernsehturm or TV tower, whose profile is reminiscent of a space ship that rises high above the concrete tangle. The site itself however has been important since the 1800s as a cattle market

although it gets its name from the occasion when Russian Emperor Alexander I visited in 1805. Its current form is due to the pedestrianisation in the 1960s under the DDR which also saw a renaming of streets and the construction of huge, non-descript buildings for office and residential use. The conspicuously Communist-named Karl-Marx-Allee is an extremely broad road that seems to have been lined with grey Plattenbauten just to make you feel small and insignificant.

It was a 3-hour wait to get signed on. You queue up to get a form to fill out, take a number and then wait. After staring at my form blankly for some time, without the foggiest how to fill it out, a kindly lady showed me how. She looked bewildered and mildly disapproving when I informed her I belonged to neither the evangelical or the Roman Catholic church. Three hours passed surprisingly quickly as I struck up a conversation with an Iranian woman who was telling me all about her country. Amusingly her passport refers to Israel as 'occupied Palestine'.

In the end all of my proudly presented documents were cheerily dismissed as 'nicht nötig' (not necessary) by the man behind the desk and after he'd taken down my address and passport number I was done. Watch out Berlin, here comes a gemeldet George.

From my window I can see....

Having spent three months in Venice I've now arrived in Berlin to start the second part of my year abroad. It feels great to be back in a city that I know so well and it's exciting to be an environment that is so distinctly different from the otherworldly atmosphere of Venice. Although it's colder and greyer than the Serenissima, it certainly makes up for it with an abundance of Döner, beer and edgy haircuts. However still struggling to get to grips with the concept of cars again.

On my first night here I took a walk round Neukölln which was my 'Kiez' or neighbourhood last summer. At the time all my Berliner friends were saying that it was the up and coming place to be. It seemed like a lively place when I was living there, with several trendy bars and a large Turkish population which meant there was a wealth of shops offering exotic food and there is even a Turkish market twice a week by the riverbank. Having returned I can see the area has now definitely up and come. I counted at least a dozen new bars and restaurants within a small radius and there's even a hotel on Kottbuser Damm. Crazy.

A father of a friend very kindly let me stay in his flat for my first few days. It's a beautiful turn of the century building complete with richly varnished floorboards and high, white stucco ceilings. Something particularly exciting about the place is that it was home to the author Christopher Isherwood in the 1930s. Among other works his most well known is 'Goodbye to Berlin', a fictionalisation of his experiences in the city, chronicling the various debauched lifestyles of the characters he met. The book became the basis for the musical hit Cabaret, with Liza Minelli playing Sally Bowles who also features heavily in Isherwood's book.

We know that Isherwood wrote a lot of 'Goodbye to Berlin' while staying as this flat so it is particularly exciting when you take the first line, “From my window I can see...”. This is what you can now see from his window:

During my stay there I thought I'd take advantage of the imposing space to record a new ukulele video. It's a mash up between two songs that I learnt to play in Venice and I really like the way the two songs create a dialogue with one another: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BK2SVa8uzI

I've now found myself a flat just round the corner from Alexanderplatz and from my window I can see......

I'm sharing with a friendly and smiley guy from Taiwan who's here to study at Humboldt. He cooked me lunch today which was delicious. My landlord, who lives in the flat below, is also a great guy. He works in the restaurant carriage of Intercity trains. He's just about to embark on a 3 month journey in Asia for the winter. This evening we sat in the kitchen and discussed his former employment as a judge and German politics while sipping peppermint tea. Very civilised.

It's a very comfortable flat and Bertie the beaver is well settled in already. Here he is all ready for bed.