The Visit of OMG 1.75: Goodbye to Berlin!

[raven]

So, 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 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.

So without getting lost at all, I washed up at the British Council and was met by the_acrobat, and it was so unbelievably awesome to see her. It had been a year and a week since OMG 1. Considering the three of sat around in O’Hare and moped that it might literally be years until we saw each other again, I think we’re doing well. We decided to go back to her place, dump my stuff and maybe think about dinner, and on the way – three different U-bahn trains, as she lives in a southern suburb with kids on bikes and picket fences, quite far from Berlin proper – we’d catch up.

Well, that’s the thing, really. We sort of started chatting then, and we had breaks for sleeping, eating, and for me to resolve a minor family crisis (on which more anon), but basically, we chatted non-stop for the next four days. It was awesome. I remember some of the things we talked about, but not all, because basically we talked about everything. Really, everything: I spent hours curled around a pillow, talking and talking about family and Germany and school and communism and curling and buried treasure. Meredith lives in a gingerbread house with sloping roofs and hanging flowers and a flock of chickens in the back garden. Such a cliché, but it really does look like something out of a fairy tale and means all my memories have a slightly hallucinatory quality.

Anyway, where was I? After a bit we tramped out for dinner. I’m not vegetarian, but I don’t eat beef – and by extension, any part of a cow – and I don’t eat much meat anyway, but, I said to myself, I will not subscribe to common British prejudices about German food, I will give it a fair chance. So Meredith and I stood outside a vaguely authentic-looking establishment and peered at the menu with dictionary in hand. The first word we translated?

Liver.

“Er, shall we head for pizza?” Meredith said, and I concurred.

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. To be truly perfect, the perfect TV show requires:

-Paul Gross. Duh. And his character is crazy and sees dead people. Notably a dead WW2 sea captain who was the original owner of the ship..
-David Hewlett. Playing a whiny Canadian arsehole who pisses off everyone else on the ship because he won’t stop whining.
-Alan Rickman. Being all British and aloof, and de facto captain of the ship.
-what bloody ship, you might be asking by now. The ship. Because our heroes are all misfits and have been thrown out of society for being geeky mad eccentrics, and have thus banded together, commandeered a ship and are now looking for BURIED TREASURE.
-along with various other characters, all with various problems – a guy who’s worried himself into neurosis over his carbon footprint, Meredith suggested; a mortician who’s developed a late-in-life allergy to formaldehyde, I suggested – they sail the seas looking for treasure, and Paul Gross is crazy and explains about global warming to a ghost only he can see, and they have WILD AND WACKY ADVENTURES.

It’d be awesome and you know it.

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.

No, I don’t quite get it either. I guess it was just the idea of it, that people were so desperate to leave, so desperate and so ingenious, that they built an aircraft out of a book, out of junk and salvaged Trabant parts, and gave up everything to fly the hell out. At one point Meredith and I found ourselves reassuring each other that if such a thing were to ever happen, we’d be okay – we’ve got brains and books and the will to live. And I know why that is – because it seems immediate, somehow. I was taught about German history up to 1949, and the Berlin Airlift is interesting history, but it’s still something that happened fifty-eight years ago. Whereas – when the wall fell, I was alive. I don’t remember it, but Pedar was in Berlin at the time and brought me a piece of the Wall – a piece of history, he said – that I could hold, you know? I had toys growing up that were marked “Made in W.Germany”. It happened in my lifetime.

Of course, it’s terrible practice to make everything in your view of history about you, but I’m not an academic (and, as I begin to realise, never will be: I’m not scholarly enough, not focused enough, not enough enough). I can only tell you how reading about it affected me. And the other thing I found extraordinary was – predictably, oh, I am so predictable – was what Wikipedia informs me are known in German as Geisterbahnhöfe, or ghost stations. These are the stations that were geographically in East Berlin, but served by West Berlin trains – so these trains passed right through them. They were inaccessible from above or below, frozen just as they were in 1961. Is it just me who finds that thought fascinating and creepy in equal proportions? If you ever want to be really, really bored, ask me what I know about disused stations on the London Underground. (Answer: faaar too much.) I have a thing about disused underground stations. It is weird, I know.

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 Five 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.

At this point, a long and at first sight, entirely unrelated digression. I have an uncle. Well, he’s not my uncle. Well, he’s my mother’s father’s youngest brother’s youngest son, and there is more to it than that but that wouldn’t be a digression, it’d be a novel, so yes, his name’s Chintu. I first met him when he was sixteen and I was six. It was a long, hot Delhi summer and we became fast friends. After that, he went to Arizona and then to San Francisco, and I didn’t see him again until I was fourteen and he was getting married. Oddly enough, we were still fast friends. It was another long season, and I met his friends and he took me everywhere and we stayed up to watch Frasier and TNG on English-language TV. After that I didn’t see him until July, when he arrived back in India for the first time since. He’s doing his PhD at Stanford now, and his wife, whom I liked when I met her six years ago, has become something of a nut – she’s got this seemingly endless wellspring of hate for his entire family, which unsurprisingly puts him in a horrid position, and also means that despite the fact he’s a year and a half old, not one of us has seen Chintu’s baby son.

So when he said he was going to live in Berlin for a couple of months, my ears pricked up a wee bit. We flew out on the same day – me to Dubai, he to Berlin – and I said I’d see him soon. Easier said than done. How to meet him, when his wife hates me, Berlin defeats me and T-Mobile ends everyone? But somehow or other, I tried to make plans. And so, on Sunday, Meredith and I once again missed the entire morning, spent the afternoon chatting about, well, everything, and in the evening headed back into the city.

(By the way, Meredith is one of my favourite people in the entire world. This is probably already apparent, but we had so much fun together, and we didn’t do anything but chat. We made the same journey into the city forwards and backwards about five times, and I can’t remember a single boring moment.)

I met Chintu at Hackescher Markt, and it seemed to go quite well. It was great to see him, despite the tension of his being with his wife, and I did, at last, get to see the baby. His name is Arya and he’s adorable – very serious and wide-eyed, and at the age of eighteen months, already emphatically bilingual. I’d brought him gifts - The Cat in the Hat and a cuddly wolf named Diefenbaker – which he received with due solemnity. Because of the genealogical tangle, no one is sure what relation I am to him. I think we’ll leave figuring it out for when he can ask.

We’d been wandering around for about twenty minutes when Chintu’s phone rang. “I bet you anything you like,” I said, grimacing, “that that’s my mother.”

He answered the phone, went rabbit-in-headlights and blurted out, “Bordi!”

We caught each other’s eyes and burst into laughter. My mum, tinny in the distance, was clearly audible: “Why don’t you CALL Chintu what is WRONG with you and IONA IS JUST AS BAD are you EATING PROPERLY hai Bhagwan you could BOTH BE DEAD IN GERMANY…”

I think at this point we were both just howling with laughter. “I’m thirty years old!” he said, after she’d gone. “I have a son! And a PhD!””

“I know,” I said. “Believe me, I know.”

We had dinner, and walked around looking at jugglers and fire-eaters, but there was still that undercurrent of tension. It wasn’t after we’d deposited his family in their apartment and he’d come with me to the end of the U-Bahn line that I really relaxed. I delivered the token protests – you don’t have to take me, really – but I was glad that he did, especially as I got slightly lost retracing my steps without Meredith. It was really cold then, so you could see your breath misting beneath the sky, and it was dark, too, so I ended up apologising quite extensively for dragging him out with me. To which he replied, “Here I am, in deepest suburbia, in the freezing cold and dark, in Germany, and I’m with you!”

I’ve seen him three times in sixteen years, always in broiling hot Delhi summers, and put like that it seemed hilarious. The last I saw of him, he was outside Meredith’s landlady’s front gate, being savaged by what looked like next door’s poodle, and damn, I love that guy.

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.

Comments

[singer-d.livejournal.com]

I have an uncle. Well, he's not my uncle. Well, hes my mother's father's youngest brother's youngest son
Chintu is your first cousin once removed, Arya is your second cousin.

Because of the genealogical tangle, no one is sure what relation I am to him.
Diefenbaker is Arya's brother which makes him also your second cousin, although that is a bit of a tangle since he was a gift from you. You are wise to wait to explain this until he's old enough to ask. *g*

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Chintu is your first cousin once removed, Arya is your second cousin.

Yes, but, well... no. My mother's father died in 1979, when she was in medical school. She moved to Delhi shortly after, where her uncle, Chintu's father, was her local guardian and took on the role, basically, of her father. Hindu wedding ceremonies have a significant role for the bride's parents, and her uncle and aunt took on this role, too, which sort of solemnised it, and now if you ask Dadu - my great-uncle - how many children he has, he'll say three, even though technically he has two biological children, plus my mother, who's his niece - but my mum's siblings aren't as close to him as she is, so they stay as nieces and nephews. Similarly, he claims two grandchildren - Arya and me, despite the fact we're twenty years apart in age.

So Chintu is my uncle, and something else too: but there is no Hindi/Bengali wrod for cousin - the closest would be "brother", which is usually what we say but doesn't work in this case because we're a generation apart, technically.

Toldja it was a tangle. *g*

And as for Arya and Diefenbaker - heeee. Poor old Chintu, he said something like, "You're naming my son's toys after old Candian Prime Ministers?"

[singer-d.livejournal.com]

there is no Hindi/Bengali wrod for cousin
I admit to being a bit boggled by that. So in a Hindi/Bengali family, first cousins would all be considered each others' siblings?

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

It's because traditionally, there were joint families so siblings and their children lived in the same house. This isn't so common any more, but the terminology does persist. My cousins are my cousins, yes, but the ones who are younger than me add "-didi", sister, to my name as a mark of respect, and there are other echoes of it.

[likethesun2.livejournal.com]

*loves you both SO MUCH*

Oh, oh, oh. I want to see the fic, I want to see PICTURES (are there pictures?), I want to see Checkpoint Charlie, but most of all I want to see you guys.

*loves some more* It sounds like a wonderful time. I'm so glad.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

She's writing the fic! I'm doing the pictures! It's a ficapalooza!

I forgot my camera, because I am a MORON. The only picture in existence of this trip is one Meredith took of me failing at mineral water. (don't ask. it was EPIC FAIL.)

And, omg, we missed you! OMG 2 cannot come soon enough! We kept on talking about stuff we'd do on it - notably, hitchhiking across Europe and seeing a production of Hamlet in every city - and argh, we missed you. *loves loves loves*

[tmpe5t.livejournal.com]

I really like reading your journal. The perfect fannish TV show would be based on the meanderings of a geeky fannish extremely clever person wandering around looking at stuff and making geeky references. Kind of like farscape without the leather and shooting and muppets.

So what do you know about disused underground stations? I've been intrigued by tunnels under cities ever since i used to watch a programme with her out of terminator and a bloke who looked a bit like a lion who lived under New York....

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Heee! I'm glad you like.

I know a loooooot about them. I can tell you what most of them are called, why they were closed, and what they've been used for since. I can tell you that only Aldwych station remains open to the public in any capacity, and that the abandoned British Museum station is supposed to be haunted, and that Epping wasn't always the easternmost point of the Central Line. I can tell you that parts of the disused stations were used as secret headquarters in the Second World War. I rapidly get very dull.

[tmpe5t.livejournal.com]

See, that it actually interesting..! I want to go and look, they should run tours.

There are people in other cities (and probably there too) who ride mountain bikes with massive headlights on through abandoned tunnels and sewers... Sounds like fun...

[biascut.livejournal.com]

You went to Berlin! Berlin Berlin! OMG so jealous!

And yes, everything you said about Checkpoint Charlie and the history of the Berlin Wall. I love that museum. It's so random, and kind of naïve: it's not really curated, in the way that museums that important usually are, it's just a huge collection of stuff preserved and presented that hasn't changed for ten years. It's completely fascinating. And it's such a weird thing to do to a city, to cut it in half and then stick it back together after fifty years of two completely different lives, and then there's all the way that the different bits of Berlin have had different histories over the past fifteen years too, the techno kids and the artists and the squatters and the drunks and the Turkish immigrants and the students and the punks and the Neo-Nazis (HATE) and AntiFa and the government and the state investment and Mitte being hipster and Friedrichshain being full of twenty-one-year-olds and Prenzlauerberg just ridiculously amounts of thirtysomethings with puchchairs and Kreuzberg being Kreuzberg and all just LOVE. So jealous!

And you're dead right to avoid German food. Two summers ago when my parents came to stay, we went and had dinner in the Fernsehturm, and it was all vinegary salad and picked fish, and I realised that we hadn't been a traditional German restaurant for six whole months, just Turkish and North African and Japanese and pizza places and vegetarian hippy places and stuff. Ha!

I'll stop now, promise. But I'm so glad you liked it, and so sorry you didn't make it over when I was there! Showing people Berlin is awesome.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I'm jealous of YOU! You got to live there! *g* I really wish I could've got out there last year. I also wish I spoke even a little German, because it would have been very useful.

It must be said, I now totally get your love for the city. It was just wonderful.

[rosariotijeras.livejournal.com]

Do not buy Life of Pi. I know it is a very fashionable and popular and well-talked-about book right now and I'm definitely in the minority, but oh for the love of Diefenbaker pleasepleasepleaseplease DO NOT BUY THAT WRETCHED MEANDERING OVERHYPED DRECK OF A FORMER TREE.

And, uh, don't read it, either.

(omg, that sounds like a really freakin' awesome visit!)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*grins* I bought it, I read it, I disliked it quite considerably. The beginning is lovely, and authentic, too, but the minute he reaches the Pacific it starts to flag.

(it was a really awesome visit! I had such a great time!)

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

Your TV show idea does, indeed, sound Made Of Awesome. As are disused stations, incidentally.

And hoorah for meeting up with good friends that one hardly ever sees.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*grins* Disused stations are one of my geekier interests, it must be said. And hoorah, indeed!

[msilverstar]

Sounds like a wonderful mad adventure, and I'm enjoying them vicariously. Thanks for sharing.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! Glad you liked. :)

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

I LOVE the Wall museum. I hope it never changes. Ever. It is how all museums should be.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*grins* It was great fun. I wish I spoke German, though!