The Dong Xuan Center lives on the eastern outskirts of Berlin, just shy of the Germo-Vietnamese border. Three huge hangars house hundreds of vendors hawking every oddball item you never realized you needed, along with some excellent viet-food.  You will be immediately bowled over by the scope and scale of odd, seemingly useless stuff for sale. These products make you feel very close to the sweatshop–as if perhaps in order to cut costs, some vital voice of reason has been eliminated from the value chain, leaving the misguided factory bosses to churn out thousands of wildly inappropriate statuettes, insane toys and eccentric clothes. Between the fake flower stalls and nail salon supplier shops there are a couple of fine supermarkets with huge tanks of leaping carp that splash passers by. After having your mind blown, and perhaps picking up a musical-LED–birdcage-lighter, be sure to settle in at one of the Dong Xuan’s excellent restaurants for one of the best dishes in Berlin: Bún Thịt Nướng (marinated barbecued pork with rice noodles and vietnamese-style sweet and sour sauce).

Dong Xuan Center‎

I thought I’d share my review of Herr Lehmann, an entertaining German film I might never have discovered were it not for my classes at Deutsch Akademie.Der Film Herr Lehmann von Leander Haussmann öffnet ein Fenster zu der Welt Berlin Kreuzberg vor dem Mauerfall. Christian Ulmen spielt überzeugend den melancholischen bier-süchtigen Herr Lehmann der versucht die chaotischen, bunten Leute und Situationen seines Boheme-Lebens. Aber der echte Hauptschauspieler des Films ist die Stadt-selbst. Wir sehen viele gut entworfene Szenen der grauen Berliner Strassen wie es im Jahre 1989 war. Diese Strassen, wie Herr Lehmann-selbst, scheinen zwischen der alten und neuer Welt verloren, aber Veränderung bestimmt.

Going to the lost-and-found in Berlin is quite a trip. To begin with, the office is located in a corner of the now closed Tempelhof airport – a giant structure which once satisfied the Nazis’ desire for Monumentalism.  

At the front door, you are welcomed by this sign.  It says:

Due to the “new flu” we will refrain from shaking your hand!

Interesting – until now, I was not aware that shaking hands was customary in such a situation. Obviously, I’ve missed my chances here, but maybe I’ll try it the next time I go to the post office or bank.Once you pass through two heavy double doors you find yourself in a swimming pool-like hallway. Behind three different doors lie three different types of lost objects.Number 1:  General objects (including bags, clothes, glasses and instruments) and special objectsNumber 2:  Keys and vehicles (including bikes, scooters, boats and strollers)

Number 3:  Valuables and electronic equipment

After you have figured out behind which of the three counters you might find your lost object please ring the bell one time, one time only, and someone will crawl from the depths of lost articles eager to help you find your valuable. Pah! They have had it with people losing their things.  So don’t bother showing up unless you have exactly what it is they require as evidence that the thing you are trying to pick up actually belongs to you. Anything that you would consider evidence enough will not be accepted.

Most likely, you will return home empty handed, but one Berlin experience richer.

I’ve always understood granola to be a more or less healthy type of breakfast cereal rather than a brand. “Choc-Blop”, by contrast, is like a generic term of derogation my parents might have improvised in the supermarket aisle. As in, “I’m not buying you any ‘Tootie Frooties’, or ‘Choc-Bloppers’, or ‘Count Flatula’. That stuff is junk.”Anyways, if I was a child of today you can bet I’d be referencing that Granola logo and imaginary quality award (Choc-Blop wins every year). Then I’d show my mom that the box is written in German on one side and Italian on the other, and explain that it’s really a question of cerebral enrichment.

Here is our local bulk wurst counter. The bold scent of sour pork permeates the entire market hall in which it is housed. The women running the place, who look like addled car hops, are normally either frazzlin’-out behind the counter (pictured above) or smoking cigarettes in front of it. Who can blame them for improving the wurstie air with tobacco smoke? If baristas come to despise the smell of their daily drudge, God save the wurst frauen.While the smell of the wurst counter is all too realistic, the iconography is anything but. Here we see a few scenes from the merry lives of meat products. This probably gives you a feeling like, “würstchen are not so different myself and other people I know”.True, the curvature of a wurst is similar to that of a jaunty human torso. Also true that the nub of cinched sausage casing bears an uncanny resemblance to a shock of hair, or some such thing. And of course the wurst hue is pretty much spot-on normal human color.However, this misses the whole point of the piece: wurst are not like us; they are not created equal.The top two sausages pictured above, while probably very nice, are clearly defective one-offs. No wonder the one at the top is so shy, he’s more orange than tan and his arms are completely white–likely the result of some chemical cover up for a lack of naturally occuring gloves. The next one down has shed his acoutrements altogether and gone completely AWOL. He’s not even trying to be eaten anymore and will most likely end up rotting in a crawlspace whenever he runs out of steam.But how about those dapper chaps down below? They reek of class. Their easy grins connote a bullion-backed confidence that is beyond reproach. You could hate on them, but why not instead commence a mutually rewarding consumer-consumee relationship with your new trusted friends?By the way, the hat-tipping wurst in the top picture walks just like Avon Barksdale from The Wire. Who’s gonna step to that?

Mo-Fr 9:3o – 2o.oo Uhr und Sa 9:3o – 2o.oo Uhr

Pinguin Club is my favorite 1950’s Americana-themed bar in Schöneberg. It also happens to double (in the warmer months) as an ice cream shop called des Pinguins Eisloch („the penguin’s ice-hole“).

This smoldering cyclops car is just one of the uncanny pieces of kitsch that make Pinguin special. The bartender controls the headlight. He is a good bartender partly because he seems to delight in things that must be old to him but are still new to others. Once he pulled out a toy penguin push-flipper for us to play with. Another time he bolted in the front door wearing an complete emperor penguin costume and dashed to the back of the bar. We knew it was him because there was no one behind the bar. He returned tussled. Leaning against the bar he said nothing.

I recommend the Pinguin Special–a nice Campari-gin concoction.

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