Berlin ist Geil! (look it up)

Shenee and I at our corner cafe, Tirree,
where we discovered the wonders of Berlin espresso,
and received lessons in German every morning

Shenee met me at Tegel airport in Berlin on Monday. The famous German efficiency had my bag waiting for me the moment I stepped past customs. Everything moved so seamlessly that I was out in the terminal before Shenee got there. Several hypothetical scenarios of abandonment and catastrophe later, she came speeding up the terminal into my arms. We caught a bus to Moabit, walked to Wilhemshavener Strasse, where we spent our 5 days in Berlin, and settled in.

For the first two nights we stayed with Shenee’s friend from her au pair days in Marseille, Kathrin. She’s a student of Jewish history and culture at a local university, currently working (although not much while we were there) on her undergraduate thesis.

Shenee and Kathrin in the U-bahn after a
late night party (before I got to Berlin). Yes,
that's booze they're imbibing, and yes,
it's legal in Berlin.

Coincidentally, and bizarrely, the apartment we rented is next door to Kathrin, a completely arbitrary stroke of luck and convenience (she told us which neighborhood to rent in but we didn’t know her address until after we rented the place). When she came over for dinner on our first night in the apartment (I made mujuddara), she went out her front door, hung a right, walked 10 steps, and rang our bell. Amazing.

That first day was long and a bit hazy, although getting in at 08:00 helped me to adjust faster I think. First I needed coffee, so Shenee took me to the place on the corner, called Tirrée. The espresso in Berlin in incredible. And although we came to know Berlin service workers as generally pretty grumpy, the baristas at this little café were exceptionally nice and helpful. One of them, the owner I think, even practiced German with us every morning (yes, we went there, and then to the Bäckerei across the street, every morning, our first real Berlin tradition).

After a nap (the coffee was no match for very little sleep and a 16 hour travel day), we got the U-bahn (subway) and headed for the Victory Column, a very tall, ornately muraled and bas-reliefed homage to Prussia’s victory over France in 1870. There are some interesting vignettes carved into the foundation:

He's very happy they won! I don't know
about the other guy.

I’ll just go ahead and say it now: Berlin is my favorite city. I can’t explain it perfectly, but it has something to do with having everything I love about LA (a young, creative, vibrant, diverse population) and oodles and oodles of history and beauty and convenience that LA doesn’t have. It’s like NYC too, but cheaper, less self-consciously, ironically “cool,” and still a little gritty. It’s slower paced and unbelievably bike friendly too. And they have great falafel. And coffee. And breads. And if you know where to look (Turkish markets), hummus. And you can drink your can of beer on the street or the U-Bahn or wherever. We also discovered spatzele (shpetz-uh-luh), a traditionally Bavarian noodle dish, similar to gnocchi but in more noodley form, and covered in a variety of different sauces or cheeses or vegetables or meat or a combination of some or all of these. We ate spatzele last night, so I’m getting ahead of myself.

After the Victory Column we headed for Berlin’s answer to a California burrito joint. I must say, it was good. Not exactly what you’d expect in LA or SD, but good. They were huge, too, which I’ll never complain about.

A "California" burrito place

Kathrin had work to do, or not do, at home, so we parted ways at the Zoologischer Garten. Shenee and I headed up the street a bit to a popular, and many decades old, 24-hr gathering place for the local intelligentsia, artists, and political dissidents (at least formerly) called Schwarzes Café. Now you mostly see the ubiquitous young Berliners eating lovely looking entrees and sipping Waldmeister from a straw, or drinking beer or coffee and smoking in the garden (one mark against Berlin: lots of smokers). Our waiter was Vietnamese, but a native German, and there were many different faces and accents filling in the background, what came to be a pretty typical Berlin scene. Shenee enjoyed her glass of Waldmeister, a traditional Bavarian beer and weird-green-syrup mixture that is apparently very Berlin.

A Waldmeiste

It’s sweet but not terribly so. The bitterness of the beer is complemented by the sugars in the syrup. A little saccharine for my palate, but I can see the attraction. Luckily it only looks radioactive. They also serve a “Lebowski” there. It’s pretty much just a White Russian.

After an espresso, we called it a night, which turned out to be by far the earlier night we had in Berlin (asleep by 12).

The next morning, we practiced German with our barista at Tirree, grabbed a couple of croissants covered in sesame seeds from the Backerie, and got on the U-bahn at Berkenstrasse heading for the Jewish Museum.