An Introduction : Berlin…Is That Outside Zone 6?
My name is Rocío Rødtjer, and until last month, London was my home. Sure, I wasn’t born within the sound of ‘Bow Bells, but neither was Vinnie Jones. And I have never addressed anybody as a ‘guvnor’, but neither has Vinnie Jones outside a Guy Ritchie film.
A London wardrobe staple: the raincoat.
After a decade in the capital though, I too was convinced that a cuppa was a solution to all life’s ills, and was rarely seen leaving my glorified North London shoebox without my trusty 5 quid Boots umbrella, replaced within a month, alas, after disappearing down the great umbrella vortex known as the tube. And when the tube would, inescapably, become a victim to yet another ‘signal failure’, I would exchange sympathetic glances with my fellow passengers (only time when interaction was allowed) and would inwardly curse Transport for London, and not London Transport. This discontent would later be vocalized by an Evening Standard board, that would make up for the complete absence of verbs with nouns. MANY nouns (Black Monday Tube Chaos: Commuters Horrible Ordeal). For a collection of the Standard’s finest apocalyptic verbless visions see:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lmg/sets/69593/
And yet I’m typing these words in Schöneberg. Just west of Mitte, this Berlin neighbourhood, was the setting of Isherwood’s ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ (of ‘Cabaret’ fame), as well as being the place where Kennedy later gave his famous ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech. And in between these two, Goebbel delivered his infamous ‘Total War’ on Postdammer Strasse, 15 min down the road from our house.
My current hood: Schöneberg
How did I end here, you might ask? Well, about three months ago my better half got offered a position at Nokia’s Social Location Department. Which just happens to be in Berlin. The thought of leaving zone 2 horrified us at first, but then we slowly began to warm to the idea. The ability to be able to swing a cat in your living room without having to move to Kent, or to east Croydon for that matter, where I’ve been told that a cross cat is the least of your problems, greatly appealed to us. All those shiny carpet-free continental square meters waiting for us for the price of an Islington bedsit (in Holloway prison). Also, having grown up in Copenhaguen and northern Spain, I was seduced by the prospect of experiencing seasonal weather once more, instead of spending 9 months of the year in opaque tights and a raincoat.
London was my home though. I had come to love its strange and idiosyncratic ways. I had even developed a penchant for Marmite, despite fighting the inescapable feeling that this is how it must feel to lick on a battery. I spoke the language, even when I arrived ten years ago, when my vocabulary was more limited and my accent would swing between Spanish and Danish, depending on the mood.
I don’t speak German, hence the title of my blog ‘Wie bitte?’. I believe the gist of it is ‘sorry, could you repeat that?’…. Or in my case ‘I have no idea what’s going on, I’m trying to get to Alexanderplatz but I no longer know if I’m east or west, and I can’t even say “I don’t speak German” although my completely ignorance of your most august language should be quite obvious by now. But I’m nice. See? I’m smiling. Where’s Alexanderplatz again?’
Or something to that effect.
Wie bitte?
Becoming _vaguely_ conversational is definitely one of my chief aims during our stay. Although so far my pronunciation of ‘Ich’ has been described as belonging to the Hamburg dialect. And the seemingly innocuous ‘Wie geht’s dir?’ had people in stitches and elicited the comment ‘You sound like a Bavarian!!!’. Which I don’t think is meant as a compliment in Berlin. With my luck, I’m sure I’ll sound like a Berliner in Bavaria.
