Sun, 27 May 2012
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Float down a leafy path in Berlin's Tiergarten, climb with your children to the top of the Siegesauele, read A Quiet Flame, muses South African writer Charlotte Otter.You can spend time with friends, with old friends, who because you haven't seen them for so long, seem like new friends, and with new friends, who because you feel so strangely at one with them, seem like old friends. You can drink wine with them in the afternoon, share your kids with them, wander new streets with them, and make extravagant promises to babysit their kids, once they have some.
You can spend an entire afternoon in Berlin looking for the perfect dress. You can look fo
r something whimsical and ‘floaty', with tea roses and cleavage, that looks like Jane Austen wore it to a party where there was croquet and Indian tea, but finally buy a twenty-first century dress, a little edgy, a little sharp, but with its curves in the right places--also with cleavage.
You can drive long distances, to places you never dreamt of visiting, take trains where your children press their noses against the windows, ride bikes around the city of your dreams, bump into pedestrians and mutter sorry in two languages. You can float down a river, or down a leafy path in the Tiergarten, and hear the white wolves howl at the daylight in the Zoo.
You can read A Quiet Flame and imagine the encroaching horror of Nazism in Thirties' Berlin, and then read No one belongs here more than you and be swept away into an imagination and a sensibility that leaves you shell-shocked, war-wounded, but glad to be alive.
You can eat the best ice-cream outside of Elba in a glass palace of shops and elegance, merguez sausages and couscous in a leafy beer-garden, white asparagus with hollandaise sauce in an achingly hip urban square and the best rhubarb cake you can imagine in the courtyard of an Italian restaurant where you are introduced to the chef and the hostess by name.
You can climb with your children to the top of the Siegesauele, admire them hanging upside down and learning to swing and slide by themselves in playgrounds, watch them falling in love with your friends and weeping when they part, and see them take part in their lives with such spirit and joy that you want to shed tears of your own.
Instead of weeping, you shout, "Who loves Berlin?" and hear them yelling back, "Me Mummy! I love Berlin! I love it! I do!"
'Charlotte Otter is a South African freelance writer and apprentice novelist who has lived in Germany for 12 years. She has written a crime novel set in her homeland and has plans for a series. Charlotte blogs about writing, reading and living in Germany at Charlotte's Web (www.charlotteotter.wordpress.com)'
Charlotte's blog, 10 things I love about Germany, was one of the three blogs shortlisted for Expatica Germany's best blog 2010/2011 award.
I would love to do all of those things, but you've shared them so vividly i almost feel I have!
I would love to do all of those things, but you've shared them so vividly i almost feel I have!
Want to move to Germany but haven’t figured out the details? Check out Expatica’s overview of the German permit system.
In part one of our two part series, we cover the driving culture in Berlin, where to park and buy gas and, most importantly, the laws.
Our comprehensive guide includes information on how to find work, recruitment agencies, employment contracts and labour law.
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