Food and Footage

I need yoga. I need it right now and it makes me cringe to admit that. But why? In the 80’s I would have turned to aerobics, perhaps. In the 70’s I might have embraced modern dance. But the further down the historical line you go the less opportunities there were for women seeking health and recovery and that’s a scary prospect. What did women do in the 50’s do to clear their heads and center themselves? Bowling? Ballroom dance? And the 60’s? All I can think of is hula-hooping and swimming.

So here I am going through my little life crisis in the nascent years of the 21st century and I naturally turn to yoga. Or yoga presents itself as the natural choice. Yoga is like the anti-rave. It shares a fondness for trance like states and movement but where raves are about excess and abundance of feeling, yoga is about balance, about slowly heeling spiritual and bodily wounds, and yoga has adopted the language of religion. It is a ‘practice’ and a way to recover self discipline. The teachers are walking advertisements for their craft. They scissor and jump and hold themselves up by theirbig toe with cat like grace. They chant in a language that is usually not their own and they nimbly approach you as you writhe and pant, placing a strong steady hand on your shoulder and twisting you into a position that feels so much better and stronger than the one you were in, you wish you could take them with you always like a puppet-master. Just someone to pull the strings and remind me to stay straight, calm, centered.

I am bad at yoga. I never kept at it long enough to recognize the sequence of steps. I don’t know my right from my left. I always have to fart and then have to focus really hard on not farting for the length of the class. I have a weak leg from a broken knee and putting weight on that leg makes me fall down immediately like a stone figurine perched too far off a ledge. I spend most of the class berrating myself for how far I’ve let myself go. I worry about being a hunched osteoperosis granny. I get so frustrated I want to cry. And today I did everything in German, which was sort of like trying to follow a recipe while watching a foreign cooking show. There’s a woman standing in front of you, conscientiously going through a ritual and you can’t tell whether you’re making a stew or a cake.

When I finally paid my 9 euros for an hour of torture, got out onto the street and farted, I was very…depleted. Two days ago when I decided to do this yoga stuff I was feeling really empowered. I wanted to get it right this time. Stop drinking for a while, stop eating crap, cleanse myself with healthy exercise and massage. But the reality is so much more imperfect than I’d hoped it would be. My body, which looks fine in a dress and heels and even seems young at times, is revealed in yoga to be a rusty machine. Every deep breath makes creaky sounds escape from my shoulders. Each time I let the blood rush to my head, I get incredibly dizzy, and when I try to balance I realize that I have none, and a pot belly.

So why do people submit to yoga? Why has it become the antidote to all human ills? I find the chanting creepy and cult-like and yet at the same time, in my darkest hour, the idea that I would be able to Om with the best of them really made me feel hopeful again. I think it’s partly the promise that the body will fix the mind. For someone like me who can’t escape their thoughts, the idea that I could fixate on my muscles and my breathing, and that that would lead me to a more healthy balanced place seems as disingenuous and alluring as Gwyneth Paltrow’s blog.

On a more personal level, my cynicism toward anything that purports to bring health and wellness seems like a negative tendency, albeit rich material for dark humour. So I am turning over a new organic-rubber-recycled mat in order to test my strength of character and my weak leg.

Living in Kreuzberg means living in the thick of things. As soon as the weather changes, Görlitzer park–just a block from our apartment, swarms with people. They congregate in groups on the dried out grass and engage in the following activities: smoking, drinking beer, playing bongos and/or acoustic guitar, throwing Frisbees, tanning in varying degrees of undress, making out in varying degrees of undress, grilling, and above all else–sprinkling the landscape with evidence of their existence. The smell of old trash and urine mingle with the dying embers of earlier barbecues and the trash-cans overflow with waste. On an aesthetic level, the park has a gritty loveliness to it. Those who frequent the park echo that aesthetic, and it’s hard not to enjoy the human zoo in all its summer glory. I can’t get too sanctimonious about nature because I find people watching equally, if not more fascinating but at some point the ongoing party of Kreuzberg becomes a little irritating.

So I was very pleased to discover that just over the canal from this legendary park, lies the sleepy bedroom community of Treptow. I have been to Treptow before but only to wander around the over priced flea market or to take my seasonal walk through the Soviet War Memorial (In my opinion a far more profound symbol of Berlin than the overrated Brandenburg gate). Today I ventured into the thick of Treptow and I was absolutely bowled over by its charm. For many years Treptow was a no man’s land where the wall lay thick and dumb as a dog’s tail. But after reunification, people slowly began to repopulate the area. The architecture of Treptow is very well preserved for Berlin. Walking up and down Harzer Strasse I saw beautifully detailed Victorian buildings nestled amongst the more common 20’s and 30’s style Bauhaus apartments. The area is very green and quiet. There are a good number of bus lines that run there but not that many subway lines.

Now, there are mostly older people living there, east Berliners who never moved and continue to live as they always have, but with a wider selection of pickles and tropical fruits. The other part of the population is made up of younger people priced out of Kreuzberg and this is the population that interests me. The area has the promise of something small and revolutionary beginning to happen. Along Karl-Kunger-Strasse strange little art galleries and a few fashion atelier’s were springing up. I ended up at a bar called Man’yo and had a dark beer on the patio out front. The great mix of old 70’s furniture that has begun to seem so predictable in Kreuzberg bars felt relaxed and chic in Treptow, probably because it wasn’t competing with 7 other bars that looked just like it. As I chatted with the bartender Moritz (in German–another plus about Treptow, people were not so quick to switch to English when they heard my terrible grammar) he told me about how nice it was to be raising his daughter in Treptow with its multiple parks and playgrounds, its close-knit community, and the budding independent business community. I was totally mesmerized by the whole atmosphere. I wanted to sign a lease, rent out restaurant space and make a life for myself there. It was merely 10 minutes away from my apartment but it felt like another world. Some people might describe it as boring, but in a city as charged as Berlin, finding a ‘boring’ nook to call your own sounds like paradise to me.