Berlin
A little shameless self-promotion for you on this cold and rainy August day. I recently began working for the NPR station here in Berlin as a food-blogger. About twice a month, you can look forward to my insights on food and drink life in Berlin.
I began with a short piece (very short, in fact my bio is about as long as the review) about a restaurant in Neukölln where Brendan and I had a 13 course meal! Next time I promise more in-depth coverage.
On a similar note, I am writing posts about wine and wine related stuff on our dear friend Stuart Pigott’s website. The posts are in English and fall under the heading “Pass the Bottle”. I have been given very free-reign at Stuart’s Planet Wine, and my style is perhaps a little snarkier than usual.
From the New York Times article; What is it About 20-Somethings?
“The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation. ”
New residency every year, check! Moved back with the rents at least once, check! Ditto for the multiple jobs, romantic partners and unmarried status at 29. I have to say that for all my years proudly proclaiming myself as different, unique and complicated, I am finally very comforted to learn that I am just like the rest of my peers.
As I reach the end of my 20’s (I’ll be 30 in October) with the feeling I’ve got little to show for myself, I recall all the moments of suffering and struggle when I thought…this seems so much harder than it did for my parents! I mean, I know that my mother’s generation was burning bras and juggling careers and kids in a way that was previously unheard of, but at least they had jobs when they got out of college if they wanted one!
I was talking to my 22-year-old sister who is itching to be done with her undergraduate studies so she can begin life in the real world and I just want to shout…Don’t Leave! It’s a fucking mess out there.
Here in Germany, many people my age are just completing their first degree and work life doesn’t begin until their mid 30’s. I wish this fact comforted me. I feel much more like an American when it comes to my sense of where I should be at this stage in my life. And even though I feel totally fine about turning 30 and don’t have this complex that it means I’m losing my youthful energy, looks, etc…I do feel annoyed that I’m not further along. I know that therapists love to throw out comforting lines about all of us developing at different paces but I doubt anyone my age feels good about asking their folks for money, deferring important purchases, or reading about classmates in blockbuster films! I’m talking to you Chris Pine!
For the rest of us, here’s to baby-steps and the hope that the next decade will bring at least a little success and clarity.
So Spain won the World Cup. Spain, the country with no lyrics to their national anthem….how weak is that? What do the Spanish do when their country is war torn and they need to boost morale? Hum to each other.
Sorry if I seem a little cranky. It’s probably because it’s 113 degrees and I could fill a jug with the sweat under my boobs. There is no air conditioning in this country, not much anyway, and I don’t feel bitter about that. I mean, it’s only this hot four days out the year and the rest of the time, it’s like a dark, slightly moist basement.
And, like all extreme weather, it feels sort of pride inducing to get through it as a city. The people of Berlin are doing the only thing they can do. They are going to the lake, the pool, draping wet towels across their necks and sticking frozen water bottles in their crotches.
The heatwave was actually pretty well timed in my opinion. Coinciding with the World Cup meant that I wanted to be out of the apartment drinking beer anyway. Discovering that the little Italian café/grocery across the street from us, Maritnellos, sells huge Moretti Lagers for just 2 Euros, helped sweeten the deal. When you are as hot as I’ve been for the past few days–the kind of hot where you can only eat things that are frozen, a super cold beer is like mana. I drank 66 cl down like it was barley pop.
I also discovered birch juice at a nearby Russian speciality shop. If you’ve never tried birch juice before, it’s very light and refreshing. It tastes slightly sour and has a little bit of that woody flavor you get when you eat fresh sugar cane (such an amazing treat if you can ever get some).
I’m not sure how they drink this in Russia. I tried drinking it with and without sparkling mineral water and I liked it both ways.
Our friend from DC came to visit and I asked, as always, for the two things that I constantly crave but can’t find in Germany: Red Vines and Advil. Usually someone brings me the 32 vine pack but this time I received the gift that keeps on giving, the 4lb, 240 vine tub. Oh bliss! Oh ecstasy! Oh enduring freshness!
Yesterday, I took my vines with me to watch America play Slovenia in their second World Cup game. I know the US won’t win the World Cup, but it’s still awesome to watch a game where you can root for your country and get a little sassy with the audience. I was taking Red-Vine based bets with the German’s to our left and when the US got ROBBED! of their third goal, I felt totally vindicated yelling out, “That is some bullshit!” with all the outrage of a Steelers fan in Pittsburgh. A guy who was sitting behind us actually approached me later and concurred that it was truly “some bullshit.”
I think the reason football is so fun to watch here is that it takes place on this very public level. Unlike the US, sports are not watched on massive couches in curtain-drawn living rooms with close relatives and friends. Rather, bars and cafés all over Berlin (all over Europe) set up indoor and outdoor TV’S, projectors, and long benches so that people can watch the game. I like the fact that there isn’t this sports-bar vibe about these places. Even the quiet Pernod sipping bars will set up a TV and show the game. And the fact that it’s such a neighborhood based viewing culture allows me to recognize who actually lives on my block, which of them are Danish, which are Kiwis, etc…I think we all view it as a chance to spy on each other publicly, but in a nice way, not in a scary The Lives of Others way.
I recently came across this undertaking by Salon advice columnist Carry Tennis, How I Became a Pothead, where he tries to give a personal account of his relationship with the drug and in doing so, to poke at the larger questions of politics and legality surrounding it. It’s hard to be sure, from my liberal pot-smoking perch in Berlin, what the overall cultural climate is when it comes to marijuana, but it seems like we’re turning a corner and daring to talk about the possibility that pot should be considered no more dangerous than alcohol, and probably less so.
Part of this change in perspective comes from smart people admitting to smoking pot. If we don’t come forward, the non-pot smoking contingent will continue to characterize us as tie-dye wearing, low-level employment holding, Phish listening buffoons.
I first started smoking pot at the end of high-school with a group of friends that would gather into a tiny bedroom near Universal Studios, pass a Bakelite pipe around, get stoned and listen to Rock Steady mix-tapes. Sometimes we would pile into a car and head off to Eagle Rock to get these incredible potato tacos that only cost $1.00 for 2. There was nothing especially revolutionary about our group, and we didn’t feel particularly tied to the moniker “pot-heads,” although we smoked quite a lot of it.
About a year into my friendship with this group, I fell in love with a very sweet guy who was a little younger than my friends and I. He had a deep distrust of drugs and alcohol due to the fact that his parents were both in recovery. I gave up smoking pot while we were together and I am happy I did because I got to enjoy the drug that is first-love totally undiluted. At this point, despite the fact that I had been smoking for 2 years, somewhat regularly, I never actually bought pot. I found that there was never any shortage and all I had to do was show up to a party or small gathering, and eventually the pipe or joint would be passed. When I stopped smoking, I began socializing almost exclusively with my boyfriend and oddly enough, my parents, who, at the time, were part of a big group of friends that met every Friday night for dinner and a movie. They were more than willing to cover our tab for the evening and it was sort of fun to tag-along and get to know my parents as people with a social life.
When I went to college in Pittsburgh, I rediscovered pot and broke up with my boyfriend, or vice versa. I don’t think one had anything to do with the other. I just found myself in a totally new world and I couldn’t imagine feeling tied to a long distance relationship. In my last year of school, I had an apartment over a garage in the middle of a parking lot. It was my first time living on my own and it was also the first time I began to buy pot and smoke it alone, usually in the evenings, and let it work its magic. I began to enjoy smoking just a little bit of pot and working on poems, art-projects, etc…I was aware that my concentration was different and that my willingness to follow my instincts was somehow sharper and stronger than usual. I could see an outcome and work until I got there. I could work for hours in perfect bliss.
Here’s the part that you’re not expecting to hear: This never changed. Not only that, but my enjoyment of this drug as a tool for creative exploration has had no negative effects whatsoever. It didn’t get in the way of my personal relationships, work output, punctuality, life’s goals…I was able to get a Master’s degree, own a pet, hold down a job, while intermittently smoking pot. I say intermittently because it hasn’t been this daily ritual that I can’t live without. I smoke and I don’t smoke. If I have a dime-bag, it usually lasts me a month or so. I don’t come home and smoke every last drop and spiral into depression. This is not to say that my life has been peace-signs and roses since my first puff. It’s been a bumpy road and I don’t have everything figured out. But, neither do my friends who don’t smoke pot.
Anyway, I felt inspired by Mr. Tennis to come-out, so to speak. Feel free to come out as well.
When I was growing up in a female dominated household in LA, the shower was always a buffet of choices. At any given time there were at least 5 different shampoos, 6 conditioners (usually a couple of deep conditioners thrown in there as well), 5 different body-washes, 3 scrubs, 4 soap bars at varying levels of decay and no less than 5 razors.
I never once considered what this must have been like for my Dad until I moved in with my boyfriend. Brendan, rightfully so, prefers a spare shower scene. In his ideal world there would only be one bottle of each product, preferably without any labels (he actually peels them off and reuses the label-free bottles). I try to get behind this system because anything minimal seems luxurious after the smorgasbord of my childhood, but inevitably, new bottles creep in. I realize that I need to exfoliate, for example, and so I create some magic potion with salt, mint oil and coconut fat. I decide that one conditioner makes a better shaving lotion and so I bring in a second bottle just for hair. At some point I walk into the bathroom and all my bottles are lined up outside the shower like evicted tenants.
I ask Brendan why, why can’t they all just get along? Today his answer was hilarious. “You already act like a crazy old lady and you’re not even 30. When you get to be old you’re going to run around in a tablecloth and shower-cap, holding two old marmalade jars filled with motor-oil, acorn squash and drive-way gravel, claiming that it’s some sort of skin treatment.”
Sometimes I feel like I write about things that suggest my lifestyle is more affluent than it actually is. The truth is, on a daily basis I get excited about very cheap thrills.
1) Today I found out that the little Indian grocer I go to on Falckenstein Strasse was having a special on coconut milk, 3 cans for 2€. Were they on their last legs? Were the cans damaged? No, the owner told me. They are from South America and therefore slightly lower quality than Thai coconut milk. I pictured coconuts falling from the trees in Guyana, and imagined them feeling sort of shabby and under-dressed for the occasion. I felt sorry for the coconuts and bought three cans immediately. I went home and made a curry with one of the cans. It was slightly less creamy than the Thai brand I usually bought. But it was fine. I felt like a food activist for buying from the lesser loved coconut manufacturers of the world.
2) The other day I was walking past a church on Nansen Strasse and I noticed that one of the second-hand deposit bins was overflowing with donations. I know it’s not nice, but I couldn’t keep from peeking at what was there and I happened upon a pair of black leather jeans. I have been dreaming of owning a pair of these, exactly the style before me, for years. Berlin is one of the only places that you can get away with wearing leather pants in, and i am a sucker for leather anything. I love the way it molds to your body. So I took them home and tried them on and they fit like a dream. I was ecstatic. Brendan made jokes about me getting a motorcycle to go with my new pants.
3) A few days ago I was waiting for the M29 bus on Kochstrasse. An elderly woman, wearing the most kick-ass sixties swing coat, cat-eye glasses and abstractly shaped earrings, turned to me and inquired in a thick Russian accent if I wanted to ride the bus for free as a guest on her year pass. I said absolutely. We chatted a little and I realized this woman reminded me a lot of my grandmother on my mother’s side. I asked her if she like Russia or Berlin better. It was hard to understand her. I had the impression she said she liked Berlin but she missed the Schwarze Manner (Black Men). I was really stunned. I repeated the last part back to her and she laughed at me. Schwarze Meer (Black Sea), she corrected me. It was much easier to imagine her missing that.
That is Miranda, the teen ingénue of Picnic at Hanging Rock. I look at her and all I can think is thank god I didn’t see this film when I was a chubby awkward 14 year-old, because her look would definitely have spawned an obsessive copy-cat impulse in me. From the safe distance of my late 20’s I watched this Peter Weir film about the powerful force of a geological structure known as Hanging Rock and its effect on a small Australian community at the turn of the 20th century.
Here is the story: On Valentine’s day in 1900, a group from an elite girl’s school in Southern Australia picnic at Hanging Rock and 3 of the group never return. One girl is found, a week after the picnic but she has no recollection of the events of the day. The most amazing part, is that this story is true. The place Hanging Rock actually exists and these girls really did go missing there. Whether or not all the spooky aspects are taken from a real account, I don’t know. There was a great detail in which all the watches stop at exactly noon, and this is a foreshadowing of the loss of time that leads to the girls’ disappearance. I hope that aspect wasn’t added for narrative’s sake. Even so, the film has so much haunting mystery and such a mesmerizing hypnotic quality, that the story becomes secondary to the effect of the film on the viewer.
In an interview for Sight & Sound, Weir said of the film, “We worked very hard at creating an hallucinatory, mesmeric rhythm, so that you lost awareness of facts, you stopped adding things up, and got into this enclosed atmosphere. I did everything in my power to hypnotize the audience away from the possibility of solutions.”
For my part, I found that I was drawn to the film the way people seem to be drawn to Lost. The film hints at this hugely unanswerable part of existence. It is not about one specific thing, like ghosts or aliens, but rather about that intangible pull we feel from inanimate objects, that suggestion of another world lurking right beneath (within) the one we can identify and explain. Why do we get the creeps? Why do we feel strangely exuberant during a full moon? These are the questions explored by Picnic at Hanging Rock.
On another level, the film is about the restrictive nature of Victorian society for girls and what happens when they…go native. These are girls who wear corsets and gloves, tights and long-sleeves in the middle of summer because it would be considered un-lady like not to do so. When they explore the monolithic rocks (which, by the way look like huge phalluses) they begin removing their inhibiting layers, stripping their stockings and shoes and petticoats, so they can commune with nature. They become slaves to their body’s will; dancing dreamily under the spell of this rock.
Somehow, because of the graceful cinematography, I think, this film manages to look very fresh visually. It’s a far cry from dated 70’s films of a metaphysical nature like Don’t Look Now. I was very aware of the pull this film must have had on Sophia Coppola when she made The Virgin Suicides. That sleepy, dreamy, quality and the coven of beautiful girls are two things these films have in common.
Sometimes when I see a really perfect movie like this one, I wish there were an historic preservation act for films. A no remake law. It would be a real act of destruction to fuck with this one.
I really dislike bloggers who bleat and bray about abandoning their readers. I did try to write a couple of posts, one about eating pancakes all day that ended up with lousy photos, and one about hole in the wall spots in Berlin that just proved to be too much of an undertaking while my faculties were used up by paid writing work.
If you are not put off by my tone, then I have presents for you….actually for me. The first thing is a book that I ordered off Amazon a couple days before I left Virginia for Berlin. It arrived too late and so Brendan’s parents had to send it to me. Don’t you just love getting a package slip with your name on it? It’s proof that I exist. It’s proof that someone is thinking about me. In this obnoxiously gray month of May, it was like a bolt of sunshine shot through me.
And the book, Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries, is my new bible! I actually used to read this book in the big Berlin book-store chain, Thalia, and with a pen and notebook, take down recipes from it to cook later in the week. It’s unlike any cookbook I’ve ever read. There is this sense of spontaneity and recipes cobbled together from what’s at hand. Real people cook like this and it’s a pleasure to find a book that can be inspirational and simple without being pretentious or pedantic. There aren’t any ridiculous trendy ingredients and you won’t find any step by step photos in here. The photos are more like muted modern still-life’s. You really see the blackened bits that form on the pan after potatoes are roasted, or the purple stained rim of a dish filled with berry cobbler. However you slice it, this is the most beautiful cookbook I’ve ever read.
It was written on a daily basis, and Slater (without being a twit about it) adheres to dishes that are seasonal and ingredients that are local. In May, there is a recipe for five spiced quail with loquats, a cousin fruit to the apricot that I see in the Turkish markets in Berlin. In deep August, there are recipes for salads like: cannelini beans, copa, spinach and mustard; grilled eggplant with mint and sheep’s cheese; and desserts like orange yoghurt ice-cream, and black currant trifle. Autumn dishes are similarly simple but a bit more filling: a ham and butter-bean stew; sweet and sticky chicken wings; pan fried sausages with cream and mustard mashed potatoes; brownies.
Winter is where Slater really shines, though. His recipes are so comforting to read. By comforting I mean they represent that part of you in Winter that just wants to drink to excess and fill up with gobs of stew. The photos are so reminiscent of cold winter evenings where people end up over at your house, drinking beer till all hours and picking out of some huge pot of sausage and lentils, or devouring a lime tart.
The other gift I received was information about a library in Berlin where you can find tons of dvd’s, English books, and music galore. Books are unlimited, and you can check-out up to 10 films for two-weeks at a time. I am gazing longingly at my stack right now. Last night I watched one film, a really amazing British flick about the reality of gay life in 70’s London called Nighthawks. The film was very spare and visually arresting. There are these really long close-ups of the main character, Jim, just scanning the crowd of men with his eyes. Something about the grainy quality of the film itself and Jim’s freckled skin and slightly thick and unruly eyebrows just works. I was mesmerized. Who knows if I would have found this startling portrait if it hadn’t been amongst the library’s film selection. All I can say is that I am grateful it fell into my lap.
I promised a friend that I wouldn’t give away the secret openly, so if you’re in Berlin and you really want to know, ask in the comments and I will email you the information about this jewel of a library. Tonight I will probably watch Picnic at Hanging Rock, which I’ve heard of but never managed to see.
I mentioned the shop Vinh Loi in my last post about herbs and I just wanted to expound on the deep gratitude I feel for having found it. I have always frequented Asian supermarkets and when I moved to Berlin I had a hard time finding a good one. Grocery stores here play by a different set of rules than American ones. They are smaller, for one thing, and unless they are speciality markets or a very well stocked organic (Bio is the word used here) shop, you can expect to find very little in the way of foreign food-stuffs. The average cheap German grocery chain has a lot of the following: würst, dairy products, a variety of dark and white breads, juices that require no refrigeration, a small selection of fresh pork, chicken, turkey and beef cuts, a pantry section with rices, pasta, and grains familiar to Germany, and then a pickled canned section with a variety of mustards, remoulades, mayonnaise, preserved fish and meats, canned (or more often jarred) fruits, veggies and then a frozen section with frozen meats, pizzas, veggies like spinach and kale, and a pitiful selection of ice creams that taste like nothing. Oh and of course alcohol–beers, terrible wines, and the obligatory Kraüter Likkor (herbal schnapps) with a name like “hunter’s delight.”
These grocery stores are fine for your breakfast and lunch needs but for dinner, they sort of lack spark. German’s are not too friendly to spices and spicy foods. I worked in a restaurant where we tried very hard to avoid the word scharf (spicy) to describe a dish on the menu. Instead we were relegated to descriptions like “chicken with exotic Thai spices,” which always felt a little colonialist to my ears, but it was a paid gig, so I didn’t put up too much fuss.
I like spicy food. I would put Sriracha on ice cream if I thought no one would judge me for it. In my day to day cooking life I crave Indian lemon pickle, chili-garlic pastes from China, Thai red curry, wasabi, and all the stuff that goes with it.
I am used to walking into an Asian grocery and finding a giant wall of fresh produce; cheap ginger, bok choy, yu choy and dandelion greens, bitter melon, chayote, and store made tofu swimming in brine. What I found in Berlin was more akin to an Asian bodega. There were big bags of rice, a few vinegars, some soy sauce of dubious quality and sad sad produce withering away in abject despair. These places were dark, dusty and depressing. And worst of all, they were expensive! I don’t mind blowing the dust off a bottle of rice-vinegar if it’s cheap, but I get sort of cranky when I have to ask the question, Is this all there is? I mean, I can deal with the lack of good Chinese restaurants here if I know I can make the stuff at home. But, I couldn’t stay long in a place that didn’t have a decent Asian food shop.
Leave it to my Japanese-American friend Olivia to uncover the wonder of Vinh Loi. It’s cheap, big, and well stocked. It caters to a variety of Asians living in Berlin and it was somehow surprising to hear them speak pidgin German to each other in the check-out line. I recently brought my vegetarian friend Marta there and she literally had to be kicked out because she couldn’t stop shopping. She loaded her bags with vegetarian duck, naturally brewed soy sauce, a variety of Japanese pickles, brown-rice green tea, sweet soy buns, and pickled lotus root. I felt like the proud Senior showing the Freshman the alley where everyone smokes during lunch.
Tonight I’m making cucumber and soba-noodles in spicy peanut sauce with soy-ginger turkey medallions and it would not be possible without Vinh Loi.