B.I.G

Bonjour from Berlin! I’ve only been here for a week, but time is flying by. I’ve spent countless hours wandering the sometimes cobblestoned streets of Neukölln and Friedrichshain, I’ve looked at a bunch of possible flats, learned heaps of new words, made a few new friends, and went out to a club where they played all of the greatest guilty pleasures from the 80’s and 90’s. At the end of that night, after dancing until well after sunrise to Whitney Houston, The Eagles, Rod Stewart and The Backstreet Boyz, I realized I was outrageously hungry (and clearly gay). I begged my friends to take me somewhere, anywhere, that I might find food. Minutes later, laughing drunkenly and giggling on our way, we arrived at a Turkish bakery that had literally just opened. I forced the door open and ran straight to the display case where all the food was. With my face pressed firmly against it, with the flat curiosity of a pet fish, I eyed my options and selected what appeared to be a bologna sandwich. Marina looked at me to confirm it was what I wanted and then told the woman I’d have the wurst.

“No!” I yelled.

Everyone stopped and stared at me. “Nein,“ I clarified, “I’ll have the BEST, not the worst!” No one seemed to find this as funny as me, so I just gave up and told her to give me her wurst. Three bites was all it took to devour the sandwich. Never before had liverwurst tasted so good. This is Deutschland.

There is something about this city that I haven’t been able to name just yet. It is outwardly gruff and often times filthy, covered in graffiti and trash, but despite this the place maintains some redeeming quality. It reminds me of hideously ugly woman with a great personality; you find yourself oddly attracted even though all of the normal mechanisms are misfiring. The weather is gray and oppressive for most of the year, but everyone tells me it will be magical in the summer, which, I am also frequently told, is a quite a long ways away. Despite this, there is a deep and warming camaraderie in Berlin, particularly, it seems, amongst expats. Last night I had dinner at a packed ramen joint where Kreuzberg meets Neukölln, right on the river. The restaurant was decorated to look like it was straight out of Japan; full of lanterns and wooden counters, bamboo, small candles, and even smaller Japanese waitresses. I struck up a conversation with an Italian guy who was in town for the Berlin film festival which wraps up in a few days. He told me he worked in film and that he used to live in Berlin but had to move due to the weather. I asked him how long he had lived here and he told me three months. What a brittle ass spirit, I thought. I guess you should all check back with me in three months to see if I’m similarly brittle. We talked about famous directors, particularly Werner Herzog and Fassbinder.

After dinner I went out to meet an Australian bartender friend I made, who introduced me to another bartender and some of his friends. He arrived in Berlin at the same time as me. Predictably, we stayed out until the wee hours of the morning telling stories and drinking proper German beer before calling it a night. This did not help my sinuses, which were misbehaving and filling up like hot air balloons with snot and pus. Walking into a German drugstore is a unique experience. They carry over the counter drugs, but they are behind the counter and you must interface with a pharmacist who speaks broken English to explain your symptoms before they will hand you something.

"It burns when I pee," I told him.

"Vhat?"

"Umm, my pee pee," I started, pointing to my Netherlands, "it's fuego when I, uh, ppppsssssssss."

"Dis ist not goot."

"Ja. I know. But, no, really, my sinuses are killing me and I've got more goo coming out of my nose than a pornstar on a bukake set."

After going back and forth like this for some time, he handed me a nasal spray with eucalyptus in it and a package of pills that are half ibuprofen and half pseudoephedrine. I've been snorting fiery eucalyptus like a cracked-out koala ever since. On the bright side, I locked in an apartment today. I hesitated a lot about signing the contract because it requires a two-year minimum lease. Now, that's about the time I was planning on staying here anyway - so it should be fine - but everyone has informed me what a commitment 2 years is. I lived in my previous apartment for 6 years - I don’t have commitment issues. I deliberately selected an apartment here that's optimally located so that I won’t need to move again anytime soon, barring any unforeseen circumstances, of course. If my health goes to shit, or the company goes belly up, or I get fired, then I likely won’t have a choice but to terminate the contract early, and at great cost (if I can't find a replacement tenant). This is a risk, certainly. But the housing market in Berlin is fiercely competitive, somehow much more so than even San Francisco. My status as an outsider, lacking the ability to speak the native language, and also lacking any meaningful German financial history, puts me at a sizable disadvantage when apartment hunting. There comes a time when you have to take what you can get. Once I’ve established myself, and I’ve proven to be a reliable tenant and debtor, then I can reevaluate whether I want to remain in Berlin in my existing flat or move somewhere else. It's hard to explain just how difficult it is to get a callback for an apartment here. Often, when attending a viewing, there are 30 other people there, all of them trying to engage in convivial talks with the agent. I've heard stories of lines forming out of the apartment all the way down onto the street. Other times the real estate agent will agree to meet but never show. What I mean to say with all of this is: I had little choice in my choice. The apartment is nice, clean, recently renovated, nicely located and seems quiet. The price is slightly more than I wished to pay, but it is clear that the great deals were not going to come my way. Flats are on the market for several hundred dollars less, but they are typically missing kitchens or not as ideally located or are situated directly over a storefront on a noisy street etc., and these go quickly to those with German citizenship and squeaky clean SCHUFA reports.


I'll end with an absurd thing I witnessed the other day. As I was walking towards my temporary flat by Alexanderplatz, I came upon three hotdog venders standing in close proximity to one another. At first, I thought the chance coincidence of three competing vendors gathered together seemed not only odd, but wonderfully photogenic - so much so that I cursed myself for not having brought my camera - but as I approached them I noticed they were looking at each other rather stiffly. Well, as stiffly as they could; the hotdog vendors here are ridiculously outfitted, wearing suspenders that hoist an entire grilling apparatus housed in cheap looking plastic around their waists. Over their heads, there is a rectangular shade structure which instead of a traditional umbrella, looks more like an awning. So here I am, coming up on some commotion that is starting to simmer. By their hurried, lilting exchanges, I can tell the men are Italian. They parry back and forth in little bursts that sound almost operatic. People on the street begin to take notice. One of the hotdog men stands idle and watches the other two bicker, unsure of where his allegiance lies, while they continue argue and flail their arms around antagonistically. One of the men seems more upset than the other. I can’t understand what they are saying, but the combination of the scene’s increasing tension and their comical appearance has everyone on the street smiling. I slow my pace so I can see more of the action. As I am parallel to them I can tell they are almost ready to come to blows, and then, based on the look of astonishment on the one man's face, it’s clear that the other had said something intolerable. In an outburst of unbridled fury, the hotdog man retaliated by smashing his body against the other hotdog man’s body, causing the rickety plastics on their midsections to collide fiercely. With high-pitched Italian invectives they begin to mash themselves together, the hotdogs in their transparent stomachs bounce around like unfastened bodies in a car crash. What better show of bravado, what better dick-measuring contest than two men literally thrusting at one another with bellies full of frankfurters that jostle around like lubed up dildos?

Berlin is great.