Ich Bin Ein Berliner

Pop quiz! 

Our trip to Berlin this past weekend was a glorious opportunity to: 

A) Visit the 2nd-largest food store in the world after 9 months in the food-retail wasteland called the Netherlands.

B) Dredge up wisps (in Autumn’s case) and clumps (in John’s case) of German speaking skills, then conquer the city in a largely incomprehensible pidgin of German, Dutch, and English.

C) Revel in the wonder and glory of German engineering, which in many cases goes beyond engineering and over that pretty line into insanity.  

Exibit 1: the chocolate-covered cookies served on the train that have a non-chocolate-covered section at the end so the chocolate does not melt onto one’s fingers while eating it.  

Exhibit 2: the train's emergency exit window with an unmistakable red dot showing exactly where you're supposed to hit the window with the emergency hammer.  Clearly, hitting the window with a hammer in some unspecified place would be inadequate. 

D) Eat sushi for the first time since — hmm, how can I write this in a way that will not sound worse than it actually is? — our trip to Poland. 

Ah, Berlin!  Only 6 hours from Nijmegen by train, and packed with all of the great things that I love in a city: cheap, delicious food; robust public transit; interesting buildings; fringey neighborhoods; and tons of music and art. 

Even the German language, of which I have less-than-fond memories from our time studying abroad in Vienna, felt easier than I expected it to be.  My knowledge of it being fortified, of course, with Dutch vocabulary words that are spelled differently but contain the same general idea.  

This doesn’t mean that I actually spoke any German other than please, thank you and tea with milk.  Which, as it turns out, are three critical phrases that get one further in the world than one might imagine!

But I could at least understand most of the signs and even some of the announcements.  

(Having said all of that, I really enjoyed my enormous sense of relief when we came back to the Netherlands and I could stop pointing and miming.)

Not to take anything away from Berlin, but I think part of my glow is that I just like cities in general.  

I've never really thought of myself as a city person, but life just seems that much more interesting when you can be walking along a street lined with tiny, weird art galleries and tattoo parlors and look up at an old, decrepit church, only to see Gary Coleman’s smiling visage staring down at you.

On Friday, we spent the late afternoon on a pilgrimage to a tiny, weird art gallery called Zozoville, which is owned by two artists whose work we really like. 

On Saturday, we made a pilgrimage to KaDeWe, a department store that contains the aforementioned 2nd-largest food store. 

The only sense of scale I can give here requires previous residence in the state of Wisconsin, so apologies in advance to my non-Wisconsonian brethren and sistren:

Imagine attaching Madison’s East Side Woodmans to Madison’s West Side Woodmans in a calamitous grocery store Big Bang, then sucking all of the combined contents into a black hole and replacing them with high-priced, fancy-shmance, utterly delicious, largely European specialty food items.  

KaDeWe also has an American food section, to the tune of: 

• Crisco
  
• Oh Henry! bars (I have to ask: do those even exist in the U.S. anymore, or are they being imported from some Hershey’s Cold War-era stockpile in eastern Lithuania?)
  
• Karo Corn Syrup
  
• Jiffy Pop
  
• Diet Doctor Pepper
  
• Cheese in a squeeze bottle
  
• Marshmallow Fluff
  
• Jif Peanut Butter
  
• Duncan-Hines brownie mix, and 
  
• Mike & Ike 
  

I felt a little bitter about the Karo.  Just last week, I had been looking for corn syrup in order to make caramel sauce for a chocolate souffle.  

(Note that something about the recent change in weather from lovely summer to cold, rainy fall has put me in the mood to make nesty, warm things like chocolate desserts baked in ramekins).  

After not finding any at my local Albert Heijn, I then sought counsel from the Internets and made my own corn syrup by boiling water, sugar and cream of tartar in a manner that, at least when performed by me, was at best dangerous and at worst a quick and easy way to ruin John’s favorite professional-grade sauce pan.  Eek!

But, we managed to escape from KaDeWe without any Marshmallow Fluff, and we recovered from our smorgasbord of food shopping with a Berlin-style currywurst: a hot dog-like substance (Exhibit 3: it was cut into coins by a specially-engineered hot dog cutter) covered with curry powder and a healthy portion of barbeque sauce. 

Healthy in the large sense of healthy, not in the healthy sense of healthy. 

Currywurst was not the only irresistible thing we found that afternoon.  

We also spotted a store called Kang Fu Supermarkt, which turned out to be an insane amalgamation of Chinese-themed clothing and accessories, Chinese calligraphy supplies, notebooks bearing titles like, "Happy Eggs; Feel My Cups", Berlin souvenir pins, mystery CDs, and two full aisles of hard-to-find imported food.  Like noodles for Bun Bo Hue and real brown sugar.  

And off-brand Pinda Kaas, which was too scary to buy but not too scary to flirt with for a few moments in the dark basement of the store.