/51/ Christmas at Home

Please excuse the high number of phone-photos. My DSLR was tired.

Christmas was a quiet affair this year – exactly what I needed after an increasingly hectic and claustrophobic final few weeks in Berlin. The night is always darkest before the dawn, or so they say.In this instance, it was Christmas which dawned, and it did it beautifully. The only really sad thing was that my li’l brother Niall couldn’t make it home, and had to stay in Germany (though I hear he lived it up with our fantastic cousin Alice!). This was our second Christmas where the whole family wasn’t together, but last time it was me who was the missing link.

The two weeks were full of familiar places. On one day, I grabbed my good school friend Lola and we headed to Oxford to pick my room for next year. While there, we actually bumped into a university friend of mine who had graduated in summer, and I ended up getting the room which coincidentally happened to be his old one. I’m very happy with it – it’s not the prettiest room per se, but has the best view! I took this picture back in January when it was actually snowy, and yeah it’s kind of magical.

Christmas was in danger of getting a bit too quiet, so on Christmas Eve, my mother and I bought some last minute tickets to the only show that still had seats in London on boxing day – namely, The Mousetrap. It’s an old Agatha Christine that has been running in the same theatre for decades. It wasn’t high literature but it was entertaining, and with a perfect twist at the end.

 

On the walk to and from the theatre, we passed through Covent Garden and its proliferation of oversized Christmas decorations.

 

Most important, of course, was a trip to the pub. Our pub: The Red Lion in Upper Basildon (à la Basildon Park). It’s not our local – in fact it’s a half hour drive away from where we live - but it is our regular (not dissimilar to how I am with my favourite Berlin cafe, Factory Girl).

 

There are many reasons to love the Red Lion, but surely this will sell it to you. The women's loo features a 360-degree panorama painting featuring a row boat, the rolling English countryside and Mr Darcy. I sometimes excuse myself just so I can sit and have a chat with him. He’s an incredible listener.

Regensburg Cathedral

See here for my general post about my visit to Regensburg.

The High Gothic architecture of the Dom St Peter in Regensburg is almost one-of-a-kind in Bavaria, where even in the Gothic period, bricks were usually used over stone, leading to the development of the Brick Gothic style which can be seen in churches in Nürnberg and Landshut.

The spire of the Regensburg Cathedral is over 100m high, making it higher than the Sacre-Coeur in Paris, the United States Capital in Washington DC, and Big Ben in London. The building is roughly 750 years old and is part of the UNESCO-protected Regensburg town centre.

The windows are only a little younger, coming in at 800 to 900 years. Stained glass windows were so hugely important in medieval churches because most of the congregation would not have been able to understand Latin, the language in which the services were delivered. As a result, the colourful and vibrant images- depicting the lives of saints, biblical stories, the gospels, heaven and hell - were a fundamental cornerstone of the development of the Christian faith amongst the populace.
 
Even for an agnostic such as myself, cathedrals and churches can be places of wonder. Christianity may not be precisely my faith but it is indisputably my culture, and I see these structures as monuments to the extent of human love, inspiration and devotion.

 

/46/ Hanging out in Schöneberg

If my last post was about my not-so-local “local” in my favourite part of town, then this is going to be the complement to that. I’m going to talk about my actual neck of the woods. And it’s not half bad.

Outside my flat in Summer and Winter

Schöneberg (literally “beautiful mountain”, which is baffling because Berlin is as flat as my butt), is where I live in a four-doored apartment with an ER doctor, looking out onto a courtyard. It’s not a tourist hot-spot by any means. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a tourist here. The neighbourhood (or more accurately, Kiez, which is the Berlin word for a part of town) is a little further out than the more regularly frequented Prenzlauer Berg, Kreuzberg, Mitte and Friedrichshain, and frankly has far less to offer a tourist, with no museums and no real sights to see. But it has a lot to offer the people who live here.

 

I live right by Akazienstraße. It’s always bustling with life and forms the heart of the neighbourhood. The buildings are beautiful and ornate in the old Berlin style, and the shops are filled with typically middle-class businesses like a chocolaterie, an organic market, a cafe where the brunches are named after fairytales, or a knick-knack shop selling everything from side tables to fur coats. I really like this area. It feels like the centre of a small town (and considering that Berlin is better off being described as many villages squished into a small space than a city in its own right, that fits perfectly), with a primary school nearby, a supermarket just down the road, an impressive church around the corner and a landscaped park – a runner’s heaven – not fifteen minutes away.

 

I always feel this guilt that I really don’t take advantage enough of all the cafes and shops here, though when I recently tried to write about the area for my internship I found myself running out of space quite quickly. And it’s happening again here – I somehow can’t seem to fit into words how this ostensibly unexciting part of town nevertheless feels so comfortable and easy that I’m relieved every evening to step out of the U-Bahn and be met by the redbrick Sankt Paulus Kirche.

I really recommend you see my blog post about the Akazienkiez over on Berlin&I. That might go some way to conveying my joy at living in this area of Berlin. For a small-town girl in a big city, this is the closest I can get to being part of a smaller, more contained community. If Schöneberg were surrounded by fields and lakes rather than train tracks and high-rise buildings, I might even consider staying.

/45/ At home in Auguststraße

In a city as big and scattered as Berlin, and which doesn’t readily offer itself up to feeling at home, it’s worth going out of your way to find your sweet spot, the automatic place where you head when you have a free hour, or no specific plans.

Mine is Auguststrasse. It’s a bit out of the way for me – about a half an hour from home if the S-Bahn is in a good mood – but it’s not too far from University, and located near most of my friends – Chicca and Charlie, Wouter, and Doug. If you’ve heard of Clärchens Ballhaus (an old and grand dancing hall), the Stolpersteine (literally “stumbling stones”, these are small, cobblestone-sized memorials to victims of the Holocaust, embedded in the pavement) or the beautiful New Synagogue then you’re in the right part of town here.

   

At my internship, we did a feature on Auguststrasse so I’ll try not to copy that too blatantly. For more detail on what you can actually find on the street (hint: it’s mainly galleries and cafes) head over there, because I’m just going to focus in on Factory Girl. This coffee shop is not only my favourite in Berlin, but also my happy place in the concrete jungle, and my “regular”, if not my “local”.

In the (carefully composed) grunge-chic interior, there are lots of plants, staples of 70s and 90s aesthetics and an enormous range of delicious cakes, as well as their own kind of yoghurt-crème dessert called Magnolia. I spend a lot of time sitting in a round table by the window, chatting with friends, having a language exchange with my Norwegian language buddy, reading a book, or just watching people walk by.

My friends often take the piss out of me for always being there, but I think it’s one of the things which keeps me happy and sane. Some of the staff there have begun to recognise me, say hi, and give me winks and discounts. That always makes me feel so welcome - no easy feat in a city like Berlin, at least not for me.

/40/ Szczecin

One of the best things about Berlin is its proximity. Not it’s proximity to anything in particular, just the fact that within just an hour or two you can be in Copenhagen, or Amsterdam, or Munich, or Prague – or Stettin (Polish: Szsczecin) in Poland, which is where I headed along with some friends who work at a Museum in central Berlin.

Einer der besten Sachen über das Leben in der Stadt Berlin ist ihre Nähe – nicht zu irgendetwas genauem, aber eher die Tatsache, dass man in nur ein oder zwei Stunden in Kopenhagen, Amsterdam, München oder Prague sein kann. Oder auch Stettin (Szczecin auf Polnisch) in Polen, und genau dorthin sind wir (ich und ein paar Freunde, die in einem Berliner Museum arbeiten) am Wochenende gefahren.

 

After arriving in the town, which features in Effi Briest, a book we studied in first year, we followed a red line around the town, which guided us through the most interesting parts, from a restaurant where we ate dumplings, through someone else’s baptism (whoops!), to the spire of a Church which had an incredible view.

Nachdem wir in der Stadt, die in Effi Briest, ein Buch, das wir im ersten Unijahr studiert haben, vorkommt, angekommen waren, folgten wir einem roten Pfad, der uns durch die interessantesten Stadtteile führte, von einem Restaurant, wo wir Klöse gegessen haben, durch die Taufe von einem fremden Baby (oops!), zu einem hohen Kirchturm mit wunderbarer Aussicht.

     

It was my first time in Poland. It will not be my last.

Das war mein erstes Mal in Polen – es wird nicht mein letztes sein.