As a display of their apparently bottomless generosity, the DAAD took us to Berlin for a week. They paid for our transport, accomodation and breakfasts (!) and gave us an exceptionally well-informed tour guide who slowly but surely droves us all mad. sorry, i should clarify what i mean by 'exceptionally well-informed'. What i mean by that is dirty-rotten-ex-politician-with-bad-teeth-and-a-massive-ego-the-size-of-which-was-only-rivalled-by-his-frightful-stomach. the guy was a menace. he spoke at the speed of economic progress in india, liked to place his hand in the small of girls' backs when they weren't expecting it (oddly, he wasn't expecting the reflex punch-in-the-face from me. i'm kidding. i wish i'd punched him in the face.) and was generally a right wanker. he dragged us around Berlin (which, when not providing a dreary backdrop to his nauseating visage and meandering self-indulgent monologue, is a really nice city) for hours and hours every day in the wet, frightful, bone-chilling cold, making us stand outside buildings of enormous political and historical significance and telling us every single detail he knew about the place, advising us to keep in our minds not only the building now before us ("i swear to god we saw this building yesterday, just from a different angle"), but also to imagine the buildings that stood there in the past ("no i frikking can't can i have a coffee please"), before trudging us along to the next, infinitely less inspiring building. by the end of the week, when he was showing us through cemetries full of famous dead germans, i was about ready to kill him. all that stopped me was the knowledge that the dignity of dying next to bertholt brecht's grave would give him far too much pleasure. that and i wanted to get inside and get a coffee as soon as possible and he's a big guy, it'd take a while.
saturday - long bus trip, ridiculous orientation, wandered through the town with ans, dinner in the aldstadt, dessert at alexanderplatz.
checking emails briefly in the lounge area afterwards i overheard some english guys practicing german profanities and offered to teach them some more. it turned out they were in town for a literature reading as part of some youthy-bohemian-fuck-the-man-we're-deep-and-alternative-and-you'll-never-understand-us-you-capitalist-bastards cultural festival and they kindly invited us. after traipsing through a dark berlin suburb for a while we eventually found the predictably smokey, dimly lit hovel in which they were delivering their cutting edge contemporary dialogues and shuffled in, a considerable passage of time after the official start time, much to the weary disdain of the diehards at the front. i should take my tongue out of my cheek, it was actually really good. very heartwarming to know that the love of WORDS (i know it's wrong to say you 'love words'... but i do.) and EXPRESSION still exists in the world and that some people are still chipping away at that stone, trying to create something new or capture something beautiful or remind us of something we'd rather forget but shouldn't.
sunday - after more walking around (note: this is a developing theme), blah, literature reading! went to gay bar thereafter for hot chocolate, realised only as we were walking out together, having paid for annabels drink, that it was a gay bar. A says bargirl was eyeing us off.
monday - more walking around (theme continues), the whole day, then out to potsdamer platz for cocktails and general wandering around. painkillers + alcohol = happy times. I went home and tried to sleep, A came back and announced they were going out, apparently i told her i'd stay in then messaged her as she was in the lift telling her i missed her and begging her to come back. to say that it was an ill-considered move to continue drinking beyond that point is an understatement. we wandered through kreuzberg, me poking my head into every bar and returning with a full report, which generally amounted to 'yeeeeah!' or 'no it's rubbish' but because we were with The Plain One and she is no. fun. at. all we eventually just went home.
tuesday - more walking around (theme becomes inane and repetitive), walked around with ans in the afternoon, couple of quiet cocktails at gay bar. bar girl now totally convinced that we're a gay couple, might like to join us for a threesome if we're so inclined.
wednesday - it may surprise you to know that the walking around continued (theme begins to grate on the reader's sanity) quiet one, sore back.
thursday - walking around (clarity of theme reaches positively freudian proportions) after which the good man Jens took us on an auto tour, pointing out the less significant yet somehow more interesting highlights (golden quote which sums up Jens' childlike hilarity - "so you are now in East Berlin and I am now in West Berlin because we are parked over the line where the wall was."), followed by beer in a suburb i can't remember in the east. pommes quota (463 serves) hadn't been met for the day so we went out for pommes before he dropped us home like the charming gentleman he is.
hang on, explanation necessary - Jens is a friend of Ellie and Marco, who, before I left, filled my Germany notebook with the contact details of their friends in every major city. ain't they lovely? Jens being the delight he is agreed to meet up with what must have seemed an odd australian girl messaging him out of the blue in barely passable german to see if he had time for a drink. champion people all round, even if Jens did advise that I'd be able to spot him when we first met up (in a dive called the 'Australian Bar', which we stayed in for about 3.2 seconds) because he'd be completely naked.
friday
snow fracking patrol + beer with jens and kathi.
in other news, we're putting on weight. this is evidenced by me having one new chin in every photo that's taken of me and was hilariously illustrated by annabel yesterday when she poked her stomach out over the top of her pants and said 'i think it's yours' before disappearing into the bathroom. she poked her head out the door moments later and said 'no seriously, i think i'm going to give birth to a block of chocolate.'
a note on the gay bar - when we caught up with ellie's brother norm in essen he took us to a gay bar, where we were enormously popular with a person i'm quite sure was an oddly convincing drag queen. further, when i spent a night at Karneval with basti and his friends in cologne, we ended up in a gay bar where we had the most wonderful of times and i was lovingly hit on by a german girl so adorable i almost wished i was gay. the irony of so many queer experiences on my epic search for a european convenience husband is not lost on me.
