Berlin, Grr

Well, we're back. And in my experience there's nothing more annoying than people ranting on their blogs about how great their holidays were, so I have decided to tell you all about The Edited Lowlights Of My Trip To Berlin:

1. My boyfriend forgot my birthday

Well, this isn't strictly true. He didn't actually forget it, he just didn't get me anything (except a card). He was planning to get me something while we were in Berlin, but since we spent the entire time together, in the end I found something I really liked (the world's most excellent umbrella, perfect for both sun and rain) and then he bought it for me. Which was nice and all, but it takes the excitement out of the whole birthday thing, frankly.

2. I mangled my feet

For some reason I didn't bring any summery shoes with me when I came to Switzerland. Apparently I was assuming that I would have broken up with Reto and moved back to Australia before the weather got too warm. As it turns out I was wrong, so I have been stumbling around in sneakers for the last month or so while it has been hot hot hot. In Berlin I bought some fairly excellent Birkenstocks, which look nice but seem to be intent on ripping my feet to shreds. In the end my feet were bandaided up like mummies.

3. It was stupidly hot

It wasn't so bad for the first few days, but the last few were relentlessly sunny and over 30 degrees. I hate summer. Thank god for my fantastic sonnenschirm (umbrella).

4. I was laughed at by bogans

In general the whole of Berlin loved my sonnenschirm (I'm calling it that because it seems less poxy than parasol, less ungainly than sun-umbrella and more truthful than umbrella). Within 10 minutes of buying it, someone had yelled at me from her car how excellent she thought it was. A man manning a book stall said he thought it was totally eccentric (which I took as a compliment). A woman at the zoo thought it was fantastic. I overheard heaps of people talking about it in complimentary terms. This came to a dramatic halt when we went to a distant suburb of Berlin, or possibly a separate town entirely (Oranienburg). Everyone there thought it was the stupidest thing ever. I was goggled at by pregnant teenagers, openly laughed at by some woman in a cafe, who (possibly to her credit) tried at least to stifle her guffawing until I had walked past (although she did not try very hard, and I was only about a step past her when she started bellowing like a wounded buffalo), and I was stared at by countless others. Is it really that startling?

5. We went to see Inland Empire

.. which is the latest David Lynch movie. As anyone who has ever seen any of his movies will know, they are always fairly incomprehensible, but this one really takes the cake, and even more so than you might imagine because all the bits of it that were in polish language were subtitled into german only (as you might expect in Germany, I guess). What a waste of three long hours of my life. Even Reto agrees, and he is David Lynch's biggest fan. The one good point was when a Daddo appeared briefly on the screen, which raised a snicker of surprise from me and also from one other person in the audience (undoubtedly another Australian).

6. We queued for ages to see a dirty bear

Yes, Knut the adorable eisbär (aka "ice bear", which is officially what I am calling polar bears lately because it's just so cute. Which is not a concept you usually associate with german, so you should make the most of it when you can). We went to the zoo because Reto has a bizarre fondness for them, and of course we had to go and see Knut while we were there, and foolishly, we joined the back of the queue like civilised people, instead of just pushing in like everyone else. What a waste of 45 minutes. He was adorably cute though, and much cleaner (as pictured) after he went for an adorably cute swim.

7. I was forced to drink horrible coffee all the time

Apparently Germans are really into putting a lot of milk into their coffee, to the point where it is so weak as to be almost unrecognisable as coffee (and the names of the types of coffee seem to mean different things from one cafe to the next. I never knew what I would get). And even worse, one day at the cafe where we were having brekky the coffee machine was broken so I couldn't have any at all!

8. We spent 20 hours on trains getting there and back

In a bid to be vaguely environmentally aware, we got the train there and back instead of flying. We caught the night train on the way up, which left Basel at 9pm-ish and arrived in Berlin at 7.30am-ish. I slept badly. The carriage we were in looked like some sort of 1980s idea of a prison on a space ship, where everyone in it is in some sort of suspended animation cryogenic deep freeze type thing, and then the ship is attacked by aliens or something and the only survivors are a small child and a wrongly-accused woman and the scariest murderer ever known and they have to work together, never quite trusting each other, in order to survive and get back to earth. And then in the end, just before they land back on earth, the psycho murderer guy brutally slaughters the woman and child, and makes it look like self defense. That's how grim this train was. The way back was slightly better, but there's still no denying it was another 9 hours on a train (half of which was spent travelling backwards).

All in all it was the most excellent holiday I have been on in ages, though. Berlin is fantastic.