So, as August draws to a close and the weather becomes colder, I am signing off as your blogger. I have really enjoyed describing my experiences in Berlin this month, and writing them in this blog. I will miss my classmates from Deutsch Akademie, and am jealous of the students from my class who will continue on to the next level. I know that their German will continue to improve very quickly as they practice every day and learn new grammatical rules and how to apply them in fun and memorable ways.

I will be away from Germany for the next few months, but will try to find a course to keep up my level, but I won’t be able to make the time commitment to study every day. However, I know that my experience this summer has had a huge impact on my language skills, and I do hope that as I continue to live in Germany, my German will continue to improve.

In a week, I will fly back to Canada. I know it will be strange to be in an environment where German isn’t spoken every day. I am only going for a week, though, just long enough to say Danke to confused cashiers when I pay for my groceries, and entschuldigung when I bump into people, only then to come back to Germany thoroughly confused, and speak French to the cashiers here in Berlin.

Bis Bald! and Danke!

Yesterday was ANOTHER birthday in our class! We had cupcakes and cookies, and again we lit candles. Somebody played Happy Birthday in German from their phone, and we took photos together with the cake!

After class I went to a print shop in my neighbourhood to scan and print some documents. I had brought my dog with me, since I tend to bring her with me wherever I go. The man who helped me remembered me and my dog from the last time I had been there – in early July, when I had just barely begun Deutschlernen. This time I was able to communicate much more with him. I gave him instructions about the scan quality, about the purpose of the scan, and the file format. He told my my dog was his TraumHund, and I said she was also mine, and that we were Aus Kanada. He had some treats that he gave her, and while he was helping me, my dog was speaking a bit, because she wanted more treats. When I got to the cash the woman asked why my dog had been speaking, and asked if she was impatient. I explained to her that she wanted more treats – in German! – and the girl commented that my German is so much improved since the last time I had been there. Success! This made me very proud. Small victories in German make a big difference to my daily outlook.

And, today was the last class – sniff!

It is so sad to say goodbye to my new friends, to the people I have grown accustomed to seeing four days a week three hours a day. We have our dynamic, our ongoing jokes, our games. We have started sharing food together, and our German is getting good enough to actually communicate some interesting things about ourselves. It is sad to know that we will now disperse and fade from each others‘ memory. I really enjoyed the class and my teacher, and am so proud of how my German has improved this summer.

Park am Gleisdreieck is where I usually go every morning to walk, or run, with my dog. She loves the open green fields, and I like all the different activity stations. I am really happy that I love so close to such a big and beautiful park.

The park itself is quite new, and I believe that parts of it are still under construction, but there are still so many options for things to do! Some of the new playgrounds are really cool, with great designs and materials that I have never seen used before in such a setting. There is a balance course, with various moving footholds and some rocking or shifting springs underneath to test your ability to adjust your weight. There is an incredible skate park, where I see kids – and adults – doing impressive tricks on skateboards and with small bmx bikes.

My favourite part of the park is the overhead train tracks. At night the yellow U2 and U1 lines stand out against the purple backdrop of the sunset, and I feel like I’m in a commercial for something fancy and aesthetic. Or a music video. It’s that striking.

My boyfriend looked up the history of the area on wikipedia, and he found that the name Gleisdreieck comes from the fact that the U-bahn lines were originally built to meet at Gleisdreieck in the shape of a triangle – a drei – eck – three corners! – however there was a horrible accident and two trains collided and fell partially off the raised tracks. As a result, the station was rebuilt, and now is more properly a Gleiskreuz, but, well, wasn’t renamed.

The park also crosses over Yorckstraße, and extends through some forested area towards Monumentinstr. Here the forest is growing over some older train tracks, and the crumbling ruins of some brick train stations. I believe that these tracks are the remains of the old Amrumer bhf, that was one of the main stations from which deportations from Berlin were conducted. As I walk or jog over these tracks, I am aware of this other history and my own incredible privilege by comparison.

Yesterday was the birthday of one of my friends from Deutsch Akademie! He turned 22.

It was really adorable in class, because since it’s the last week, we have started sharing treats during the break, and one of our colleagues is leaving today, so he brought chocolates in thanks for the last class. But then on the break, without telling anyone, two of the students in our class went next door to the Kaiser’s and bought an ice cream cake and candles and napkins and forks, and then came back and surprised us! It was so beautiful and sweet.

Then we shared the cake around and continued with the lesson. It’s sad that this is the last week – a month is too short!

Yesterday my friend and I went to see the Avant Garde exhibition at the Kunstbibliothek. I have seen posters around the city all summer, and I am very interested in the topic, so am happy we finally made and kept plans to see the show.

The whole Kulturforum at Potsdamer Platz is architecturally quite fantastic. The Mies Van de Rohe Neues National Galerie – an art gallery in which the art without visual isolation between inside and outside, and the Hans Scharoun-designed Staats Bibliothek and Philharmonie. My friend said the Philharmonie reminds him of a ship with all of its‘ porthole-like elements and the boat-shaped angled of the building. I mentioned how this cultural complex was built up in the West after the wall went up, since all of Berlin’s cultural institutions were annexed by the wall for the GDR. The West had to build new museums, galleries, etc. which is why the Kulturforum exists, but also why the architecture is so daring – since it was made as an expression of Western „freedom“ of choice – interpreted as freedom of aesthetic expression. What remains after reunification is a city within which several of the institutional functions are doubled.

Anyways, we met at the Kunstbibliothek and went in to see the show. Given the centennial of World War One – 1914 – several of the museums and cultural institutions around Berlin have coordinated exhibits around this event. The Avant Garde exhibition is a part of this larger initiative. I was completely surprised, however, by the exhibit. I had expected much more of the usual suspects – Dada collages, Futurist paintings, some Expressionist paintings, some Surrealism, some strange musical experimentation. But there was in fact very little of this on display.

The lower gallery contained a series of collected publications by various small-presses. The publication Der Sturm was featured quite significantly, as it seems like the publisher was bringing together all of the avant-garde artistic experimentation across Europe. Der Sturm included the French-Viennese Dada, the German der Blaue Reiter, and Italian Futurists. Der Sturm was published here in Berlin, and so the library has a good collection of their publications.

Also very charming was a series of portraits of the contributors to Der Sturm, including Kokoschka, Kandinsky, and many others. These were printed as postcards, and used both as promotional materials and clearly for correspondence. The parallels between small experimental publishing today and its originators 100 years ago is really remarkable. I think many people are still doing this very work.

Another small press was called Der Rote Hahn, which I believe was a more politicized collection – considering that anything Rote is most likely connected to the Communist movement.

In the centre of the gallery one of the pillars had some loudspeakers mounted within which played a sound track featuring recitals of some of the texts, including the very famous Futurist nonsense poem Zang Tumb Tumb.

At this point my friend and I talked a bit about the intersection between Avant Garde artistic practice and revolutionary politics. The Futurists were very much in favour of war, destruction, and embraced new technology as a means to destroy everything old and to make way for the future. They were politically allied with Fascism and supporters of war. This surprises some people (like my mother) who believe that all departures from Conservatism – both political and aesthetic – must agree. I think it is impossible for aesthetic experimentation to coincide with any political movement. But the history of the intersection of artistic avant-garde movements and political revolutionary movements is really interesting.

Anyhow, the upper gallery contained a beautiful collection of framed advertisements that were designed in the period. These were visually amazing, and stylistically bold, but I have never considered this type of work to be at all connected to the Avant Garde. I would love to know who curated this exhibit and what motivated the decision to show period advertising in a show titled Avant Garde. Considering the various Avant Garde movements‘ anti-commercial motivation, pairing their work with the purely commercial and functional forms of advertisements is unexpected, to say the least. All-in-all, though, this was a very cultural afternoon, and we finished it off with beer in the Tiergarten. Tschuss!

Today I woke up very early to go to the Auslanderbehörde to submit my residency application.

This was the culmination of a very long process of accumulating paperwork, and interpreting somewhat unclear bureaucratic requirements. As an artist, I was applying for the Freiberüf visa, which meant that I needed to show proof of independent income, and to show that I had adequate medical insurance. Some people told me I needed to show a bank statement with a balance of at least 8,000 € – which would be impossible in my current situation – or even to open a special state-held bank account in which that amount would be frozen to secure my ability to be financially autonomous. These stories made me incredibly nervous.

Last night I checked over the whole dossier, wrote up a document stating my finanz plan for next year, printed out insurances, contracts, airplane tickets, and copied my anmeldbestätigung. Then I checked over the route to get to the office, since I didn’t want to get lost.

My alarm rang at 5:45am today and after a groggy coffee and a quick pee for my dog, my boyfriend and I bundled up against the cold(?) and we hopped on our bikes. I knew there was a maybe a shorter route, but I opted for the route I was familiar with, having previously lived in Moabit, and being familiar with a one particular way. My bike, which I bought two months earlier, was acting up: the rear fender had come loose, and was occasionally catching on the wheel when I went over some particularly rough cobblestones. This slowed me down and made me feel anxious. I knew that if I was late for my appointment, that I would miss it, and the appointment I had now I had booked five weeks ago.

We arrived with ten minutes to spare, to navigate buildings and offices and hallways to find the correct waiting room. It wasn’t a pretty building, and the long walkway past the iron gates looked foreboding. The crying children, the harried adults, my own disheveled just-woken-up state all added to my anxiety. We sat and waited, reading powerpoint news displays that were at least 6 months out of date. I worried that I had forgotten something important, such as perhaps my passport or some other essential piece of paperwork.

When my number was finally called, I nervously popped along the hallway to the correct office. We knocked on the office door, and the woman gestured to us to take a seat. Thank god for my boyfriend! I was far too nervous to express myself in German, and fumbled everything I was asked. First the officer asked what I was there for, and I just sort of stared bug-eyed between her and my boyfriend. I handed over first my application form. She looked at it and then said Versicherung? I handed her a paperclipped sheaf of insurance contracts and an outline of my insurance coverage. Then she asked for my work contracts and my CV. No facial expression, no extra words. Then she told us to go back out to wait. I felt like I would puke.

About twenty minutes later, during which time I was convinced that she had forgotten about us, or maybe died, or definitely rejected my application, we were called back in. She handed me my passport with a new visa pasted in the pages, and all my paperwork, and an electronic card with which I could pay 50 € for the visa fee. I got the visa!! I said, „Danke, das war viel spaß! Ich liebe bureaucratie“. She smiled, and I said „Gute Morgen“, which made my boyfriend and her laugh, since apparently I was supposed to say that as a greeting, not as a goodbye. Oh well, I was, and am, pretty happy with the situation. So hello Berlin! I am here for at least another year!

So, in honour of my boyfriend getting a ticket for biking across an intersection on a red light, I want to talk a bit about the cultural differences between Montreal and Berlin, as expressed through jay-walking.

Basically, it seems in Berlin that one only need cross the street against the light to demonstrate one’s auslander status. No Germans ever disobey the ampelmann. (Except, apparently, my boyfriend – I must be having a bad influence on him!). In Montreal, NOBODY waits for the lights to change. If you don’t see any cars coming, you cross. And if you stand and wait for the pedestrian signal light to change to ‚walk‘, you are kind of an idiot, or an auslander! Who has time to obey the law down to the letter? In Montreal we have a very subjective relationship to these ‚lesser‘ forms of social control… Which is actually quite funny, because drivers also play a bit fast and loose with the ‚law‘, and driving is really on the unsafe side. Even New Yorkers are shocked by how aggressive Montreal drivers can be!

But… Germans seem bound to the calm obedience of waiting for the light to change!

When I came to Berlin I was rather bemused by this, since as I said, waiting for the light is a fool’s game in Montreal. So, I crossed on my own terms, gathering a few shocked or even angry glances from the better German pedestrians as I made my way into the (nonexistent, but potential) oncoming traffic at empty intersections. Until one day in Kreuzberg, walking along Oranienstraße, minding my own business, paying no heed to the pedestrian crossing, suddenly I hear a police siren hooting at me from a nearby police car. And then a voice comes over the loudspeaker… in German… and everybody on the sidewalk turns to look at me. I don’t know what was said, in German, but it was obviously a severe reprimand. A pedestrian turned to me and roughly translated that they were telling me I should not cross against the light, but that they were sort of joking. I was fully and completely humiliated. But I wait for the light now. Most of the time.

pie! pie! pie!

Last weekend I met up with a friend for a walk in the Park am Gleisdreieck. This park is near to where I live and is a very well-designed and well-used urban park. There’s a lot to do here, including many playgrounds, basketball courts, a skate park, and an outdoor volleyball area.

There is also an area for garden houses, which I love, and which I had never seen before but apparently are all over Europe. These are plots of land side by side which also have small cabins. Apparently some people even chose to live in their Garden Houses all summer! I saw people with little fires grilling and listening to music. You can grow all sorts of seasonal produce on the land, too! Really charming and amazing.

My friend and I walked across the bridge over Yorckstraße, to the end of the park at Monumentstraße. We sat and talked for a while, and then we got PIE!!

There’s a really great spot on Yorckstraße that I had my eye on for a while called Mr Minsch. The pie looked amazing there, and I wasn’t at all mistaken. We got one slice of blaubeer-Mascarpone and one of SauerKirsch-Macadamia. Holy moly was it good!

I have talked about my dog before, but this post is dedicated to my experience in this beautiful city with my beautiful dog.

As many people will tell you, Berlin is a wonderful place to have a dog. The local dogs are impeccably behaved, and I often see dogs running beside someone on a bike, or riding the metro without any leash. This is remarkable to me.

The best things about having a dog in Berlin is how accustomed people are to seeing dogs in the city and how accommodating most establishments are to dog-companions. I can usually sit in a bar or a restaurant with my dog – something that would be unheard of in Canada. And, best of all, I can travel with her on the metro and the train. All of this makes my life – and hers – so much easier!

As well, there are so many green spaces, parks, fields, forests, and even lakes that I can access by bahn. I know for certain that my dog is happier in Berlin (because she gets to spend more time with me), and I am happier in Berlin because I don’t have to leave my dog outside or at home when I am doing things away from home.

My dog’s favourite excursion is the dog beach -there is a dog beach here!- near Grünewald. We have been several times this summer, and it’s so much fun watching all the dogs make a beeline for the water as soon as they are let off their leads. My dog too heads straight for the lake to stand in the water and cool off. Then she runs around after the other dogs until she has burned off some energy. It is guaranteed to tire her out and bring home enough dirt that will be vacuuming for the next couple days.

Another favourite of hers is a place near Schloss Bellevue, on the Spree, where there are some steps down into the water. There is a platform just below the steps submerged beneath the water where my dog likes to go to cool off on hot days. She will just climb down the stairs until she is in the water up to her hips, and then stand there in the cold water. We will just watch the tourist boats go by for a few minutes, until she is ready to go. Then we walk back through the Tiergarten, where she tries to hunt all the bunnies and maulworfen (she hasn’t caught any).