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The Visit of OMG 1.75: Goodbye to Berlin!
Sep. 20th, 2007 01:44 amSo, a Brit, an American and a Canadian walk into a Chicago Starbucks...
...and get charged ten dollars for a cup of coffee, and no, it’s not an episode of due South!
Which is my way of saying, into every life a little OMG must fall, and damn, I’m glad that it does. This was OMG 1.75, because as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
likethesun2 assures me, we should only allow OMGs where all three members are present to bear integer values – which indicates that Chicago was, as is right and proper, OMG 1, New York (otherwise known was OMG: the Broadway Musical!) was 1.5 and this, therefore, was OMG 1.75.
As for whether another two-person OMG would be OMG 1.875, my powers for geeky rather expire at this point.
Anyway, before I bore you all to death, Berlin, oh, Berlin. I flew out from Liverpool on Friday morning, on easyJet, which are the worst airline I’ve ever travelled on with the sole exception of pre-perestroika Aeroflot, and was bumped through the sky for two hours to Berlin. I landed at Schonefeld only mildly disgruntled, because the sun was shining and the buildings were gleaming and everything looked full of promise. Right, I said to myself, this is where I go out into a country where I speak exactly three words of the language (ja, nein and zeitgeist, for the curious) and attempt to get myself from point A to point B without major disaster.
Point B was some unspecified point on the S-bahn, and I had a fistful of euros, a handful of maps with names on them I couldn’t pronounce, and pretty soon, a newfound appreciation for the Roman alphabet. Once I’d got the right platform, or thought I had, I figured I’d ask, and with the use of liberal hand gestures, managed to explain myself to an elderly German woman travelling with a group of friends. Before I knew what was quite happening, I’d been adopted. These four old ladies kept on an eye on me all the way in, assuring me I hadn’t missed my stop, feeding me sweets, telling me I’d love Berlin. I had no German, they didn’t have much English, it seemed to make no difference.
Actually, that was the defining feature of this trip – the many kindnesses of strangers. What a wonderful city.
( gingerbread houses and pizza, and curling )
So pizza was had. And so was vast more quantities of conversation, and then I asked one too many questions about curling and we watched Men With Brooms. Oddly enough,likethesun2 - who is, for those playing along at home, the third member of the OMG trio – told me to watch it a few days ago on the grounds it was like Slings & Arrows, “only with curling instead of theatre. And computer-generated beavers.”
Choking a bit on my coffee, I set out to get hold of it, but I’d only watched the first five minutes, so we went back to the beginning and watched it all, and heee. It’s lovely. Ridiculous and charming and it has Paul Gross in it. This is all I need from my entertainment.
This, though, led to a conversation about what would be required in the perfect television programme, at least from the fannish perspective, and our conclusions were, I think, probably spot-on due to the awesomeness that is OMG. ( wild and wacky adventures )
And, eventually, it was morning, except not, because I didn’t actually see the light of day till gone twelve. And then I opened my eyes and had a brief, disconcerting moment of oh my god where the hell am I, which resolved into oh, gingerbread house with chickens in Berlin, and then: omg.
OMG, indeed. Saturday was our day for actually seeing Berlin, and, well. I would like to point out for the record that one day we’ll do OMG in a city that one of us knows, and then we will not FAIL, but in the meantime it was the city of Berlin, its inhabitants and environs, versus me, Meredith and the good people at Lonely Planet, and we, understandably, came off worst. (All weekend, we went around with three books: the LP guide to Berlin, a pocket German-English dictionary and the Oxford Very Short Introduction to the Cold War. It seemed sufficient.)
But. We did not get lost on the U-Bahn, and we did not get poisoned by pastries, and I said I wanted to see Checkpoint Charlie and we got there. We went to the point itself at first, were somewhat wide-eyed at the sight of a Starbucks at the gateway to East Berlin and a bunch of guys selling fake Communist memorabilia (furry hats, anyone?), and then we went to the museum, which I loved. It’s like an attic in which they’ve just thrown everything possible to do with the division and the reunification of the city, and I actually found some bits of it really upsetting, particularly the sight of a tiny, size-of-my-outstretched-arms aircraft.
( in which I talk about disused underground stations )
Anyway. I was very glad we went. And afterwards we escaped from the coming cold, retreated to a café and started plotting fic. I think we’d been idly plotting it from the beginning, ever since Meredith showed me a magazine detailing what Berlin has to offer in the way of experimental theatre, but that was the point she got out her notebook and we started in earnest to writeFive Several Ways In Which Darren Nichols Failed At Berlin. Any resemblance said story may have to any way in which two people in particular failed at Berlin over the weekend of September 15th/16th is purely coincidental.
It was cold. Very cold, considering I’d blithely left the house on Friday in the same pair of sandals I’ve been wearing since April. But I didn’t mind exactly; it was bright and sunny as we wandered around Friedrichstrasse and Under den Linden and, at length, discovered an English-language bookshop where we proceeded to spend vast quantities of time bouncing books off each other. I very nearly bought Life of Pi, but didn’t, and Meredith did buy Salmon Fishing in the Yemen after some persuasion from yours truly. (If you haven’t read it, go and read it now. It’s the best book I’ve read this year. Briefly described, it’s about a dull, boring, vaguely unhappy fisheries scientist, a Yemeni sheikh who believes in fishing the way other people believe in God, a crisis of faith and yeah, a lot of fish. It’s ludicrous and beautiful and haunting.)
This was also the evening that we tried to find somewhere to eat, and mostly failed pretty spectacularly – we wandered round and around trying to find somewhere, mistranslating and getting confused and walking into a place only for them to close at the sight of us – and once we’d found somewhere, we then had the fun of translating our way through the menu. It was fun. No, it was! I ordered something described as “vegetable-mouth-pockets”, and they were in fact very tasty.
( in which I avert a minor family disaster )
Speaking of Meredith’s landlady, it was about half eleven at this point and I was feeling horribly guilty for waking everyone up. Meredith let me in, and I shuffled contritely inside feeling like a juvenile delinquent. We went upstairs in the dark, with me still slightly bemused by the whole gingerbread-house thing, and suddenly I was aware it was my last night in Berlin. Meredith is teaching at a primary school, so she had an early start, and I was due to fly out around lunchtime, and this is always the problem, but the time is never enough. I mean, the first time we did this we were only all together for about eight hours, and from that perspective a three-day weekend is luxury, but – waaah. Not enough time, never enough time.
So we stayed up and talked some more. It was inevitable, really – this time we seemed to be talking about family, probably because of my fairly tense evening, and about school, and at length, I have no idea how, about how one swears in Canadian French. I found the whole topic hilarious, so Meredith showed me some scenes from a movie - Bon Cop, Bad Cop - in which one of the characters instructs another in just that. I giggled embarrassingly – apparently in Canada, French speakers swear on chalices and tabernacles – and realised all at once that I don’t know how to swear in Hindi. I feel very innocent and chaste now.
The closing thought, as we finally went to sleep at about three in the morning, was not something I can clearly remember, but I dreamed about the sea – the real ocean, the grey Atlantic you see from aircraft – so I think it must have been about OMG in general. How awesome is it that we can do this, you guys? How much my life has changed in five years, that I can set out to a place I’ve never been and have everything come out so right?
The morning was not fun. I don’t like goodbyes. It wasn’t a goodbye, of course, because we’re doing this again, but I’m having my comedown regardless. I loved Berlin so much, so there was leaving that, too, and on the world’s worst airline at that, and I arrived in Liverpool to find everything grey.
Today I borrowed Goodbye to Berlin from the bookshop. Summer’s over.
...and get charged ten dollars for a cup of coffee, and no, it’s not an episode of due South!
Which is my way of saying, into every life a little OMG must fall, and damn, I’m glad that it does. This was OMG 1.75, because as
likethesun2 assures me, we should only allow OMGs where all three members are present to bear integer values – which indicates that Chicago was, as is right and proper, OMG 1, New York (otherwise known was OMG: the Broadway Musical!) was 1.5 and this, therefore, was OMG 1.75. As for whether another two-person OMG would be OMG 1.875, my powers for geeky rather expire at this point.
Anyway, before I bore you all to death, Berlin, oh, Berlin. I flew out from Liverpool on Friday morning, on easyJet, which are the worst airline I’ve ever travelled on with the sole exception of pre-perestroika Aeroflot, and was bumped through the sky for two hours to Berlin. I landed at Schonefeld only mildly disgruntled, because the sun was shining and the buildings were gleaming and everything looked full of promise. Right, I said to myself, this is where I go out into a country where I speak exactly three words of the language (ja, nein and zeitgeist, for the curious) and attempt to get myself from point A to point B without major disaster.
Point B was some unspecified point on the S-bahn, and I had a fistful of euros, a handful of maps with names on them I couldn’t pronounce, and pretty soon, a newfound appreciation for the Roman alphabet. Once I’d got the right platform, or thought I had, I figured I’d ask, and with the use of liberal hand gestures, managed to explain myself to an elderly German woman travelling with a group of friends. Before I knew what was quite happening, I’d been adopted. These four old ladies kept on an eye on me all the way in, assuring me I hadn’t missed my stop, feeding me sweets, telling me I’d love Berlin. I had no German, they didn’t have much English, it seemed to make no difference.
Actually, that was the defining feature of this trip – the many kindnesses of strangers. What a wonderful city.
( gingerbread houses and pizza, and curling )
So pizza was had. And so was vast more quantities of conversation, and then I asked one too many questions about curling and we watched Men With Brooms. Oddly enough,
likethesun2 - who is, for those playing along at home, the third member of the OMG trio – told me to watch it a few days ago on the grounds it was like Slings & Arrows, “only with curling instead of theatre. And computer-generated beavers.”Choking a bit on my coffee, I set out to get hold of it, but I’d only watched the first five minutes, so we went back to the beginning and watched it all, and heee. It’s lovely. Ridiculous and charming and it has Paul Gross in it. This is all I need from my entertainment.
This, though, led to a conversation about what would be required in the perfect television programme, at least from the fannish perspective, and our conclusions were, I think, probably spot-on due to the awesomeness that is OMG. ( wild and wacky adventures )
And, eventually, it was morning, except not, because I didn’t actually see the light of day till gone twelve. And then I opened my eyes and had a brief, disconcerting moment of oh my god where the hell am I, which resolved into oh, gingerbread house with chickens in Berlin, and then: omg.
OMG, indeed. Saturday was our day for actually seeing Berlin, and, well. I would like to point out for the record that one day we’ll do OMG in a city that one of us knows, and then we will not FAIL, but in the meantime it was the city of Berlin, its inhabitants and environs, versus me, Meredith and the good people at Lonely Planet, and we, understandably, came off worst. (All weekend, we went around with three books: the LP guide to Berlin, a pocket German-English dictionary and the Oxford Very Short Introduction to the Cold War. It seemed sufficient.)
But. We did not get lost on the U-Bahn, and we did not get poisoned by pastries, and I said I wanted to see Checkpoint Charlie and we got there. We went to the point itself at first, were somewhat wide-eyed at the sight of a Starbucks at the gateway to East Berlin and a bunch of guys selling fake Communist memorabilia (furry hats, anyone?), and then we went to the museum, which I loved. It’s like an attic in which they’ve just thrown everything possible to do with the division and the reunification of the city, and I actually found some bits of it really upsetting, particularly the sight of a tiny, size-of-my-outstretched-arms aircraft.
( in which I talk about disused underground stations )
Anyway. I was very glad we went. And afterwards we escaped from the coming cold, retreated to a café and started plotting fic. I think we’d been idly plotting it from the beginning, ever since Meredith showed me a magazine detailing what Berlin has to offer in the way of experimental theatre, but that was the point she got out her notebook and we started in earnest to write
It was cold. Very cold, considering I’d blithely left the house on Friday in the same pair of sandals I’ve been wearing since April. But I didn’t mind exactly; it was bright and sunny as we wandered around Friedrichstrasse and Under den Linden and, at length, discovered an English-language bookshop where we proceeded to spend vast quantities of time bouncing books off each other. I very nearly bought Life of Pi, but didn’t, and Meredith did buy Salmon Fishing in the Yemen after some persuasion from yours truly. (If you haven’t read it, go and read it now. It’s the best book I’ve read this year. Briefly described, it’s about a dull, boring, vaguely unhappy fisheries scientist, a Yemeni sheikh who believes in fishing the way other people believe in God, a crisis of faith and yeah, a lot of fish. It’s ludicrous and beautiful and haunting.)
This was also the evening that we tried to find somewhere to eat, and mostly failed pretty spectacularly – we wandered round and around trying to find somewhere, mistranslating and getting confused and walking into a place only for them to close at the sight of us – and once we’d found somewhere, we then had the fun of translating our way through the menu. It was fun. No, it was! I ordered something described as “vegetable-mouth-pockets”, and they were in fact very tasty.
( in which I avert a minor family disaster )
Speaking of Meredith’s landlady, it was about half eleven at this point and I was feeling horribly guilty for waking everyone up. Meredith let me in, and I shuffled contritely inside feeling like a juvenile delinquent. We went upstairs in the dark, with me still slightly bemused by the whole gingerbread-house thing, and suddenly I was aware it was my last night in Berlin. Meredith is teaching at a primary school, so she had an early start, and I was due to fly out around lunchtime, and this is always the problem, but the time is never enough. I mean, the first time we did this we were only all together for about eight hours, and from that perspective a three-day weekend is luxury, but – waaah. Not enough time, never enough time.
So we stayed up and talked some more. It was inevitable, really – this time we seemed to be talking about family, probably because of my fairly tense evening, and about school, and at length, I have no idea how, about how one swears in Canadian French. I found the whole topic hilarious, so Meredith showed me some scenes from a movie - Bon Cop, Bad Cop - in which one of the characters instructs another in just that. I giggled embarrassingly – apparently in Canada, French speakers swear on chalices and tabernacles – and realised all at once that I don’t know how to swear in Hindi. I feel very innocent and chaste now.
The closing thought, as we finally went to sleep at about three in the morning, was not something I can clearly remember, but I dreamed about the sea – the real ocean, the grey Atlantic you see from aircraft – so I think it must have been about OMG in general. How awesome is it that we can do this, you guys? How much my life has changed in five years, that I can set out to a place I’ve never been and have everything come out so right?
The morning was not fun. I don’t like goodbyes. It wasn’t a goodbye, of course, because we’re doing this again, but I’m having my comedown regardless. I loved Berlin so much, so there was leaving that, too, and on the world’s worst airline at that, and I arrived in Liverpool to find everything grey.
Today I borrowed Goodbye to Berlin from the bookshop. Summer’s over.
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