I bought these things in secret because it’s not like me to buy things. I am supposed to be Carefree Katie. I am Go-With-The-Flow Girl. I am from Colorado and my feathers don’t get ruffled when the wind blows. But I’ve been in California for too long and now I can’t deal with things like jet lag or mediocre sandwiches or bad internet connections or air colder than 50 degrees.
It’s a slippery slope down to neurosis. On the morning of my departure, I was struck with a sudden wave of paranoia about dropping my rent check in a mailbox. At line in the post office behind a dozen or more tardy taxpayers (it had not occurred to me that April 15th would not be a normal day at the USPO), I literally started tapping my foot in a nervous twitch. Normal Katie would not have batted an eyelash about running twenty minutes behind schedule. The only items left on my pre-departure checklist were 1. Assemble plane snacks (two minutes max), 2. Remove toenail polish (optional) and 3. Research best practices for taking Xanax (which I could do from my phone while waiting in line). But OCD Katie could only see a clock arm ticking dangerously close to 10:45 which was the time I needed to leave my house in order to arrive at the airport one hour before boarding. (I decided the two-hour rule for international flights didn’t apply to me since I’ve been TSA prescreened.)
Of course, as Normal Katie would have known, everything worked out fine. Despite checking in at the wrong airline (“Lufthansa flight 730 is operated by United, ma’am”), leaving my passport in the self-check kiosk scanner, having the wrong name on my ticket (“I’m sorry miss, the reservation is under Katie but your ID says Kathryn”), and getting bounced from the TSA prescreen line (“If the stamp isn’t on your boarding pass, they won’t let you through”), I still managed to board the plane before takeoff. And despite not sleeping on the plane (neck pillows and Xanax be damned!), I still managed to feel relatively normal upon arriving in Berlin at 11:00am. And despite not having the exact address of my AirBnB host or any way of contacting her without internet access, I still managed to serendipitously run into her just as she was leaving the building.
Despite still having chipped nail polish on my toes, everything was going to be just fine.
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Lucy, my host, has a bob cut and wears a jean miniskirt bunched up over leggings that tuck right into the lace-up boots whose heels barely touch the ground when she walks with a slight duck-footed bounce. I wanted us to be friends but the tone in her voice when she asked me if I had any questions told me she’d be keeping our relationship professional. She offered me a cup tea and then headed out for the night.
The house was cold. I made another cup of tea. Then another. I poured more cups until the leaves in teaball were blanched and I was just drinking hot water. After fidgeting with the knob on the radiator in my room, googling "How to turn on german heater", and pushing all the buttons on a mysterious box in the kitchen, I decided to cook some pasta. Lucy had technically said “Help yourself to whatever” but I could tell she only said it to be nice and didn’t actually want me rifling through her cupboards. But I didn’t have any Euros yet and I was descending into a manic state of cold and hunger. I would have stolen a secret slice of her birthday cake if there would have been one in the fridge. I felt like Lucy owed it to me for abandoning me in her ice house. But the pantry was all pots and jars of tea leaves and dried beans and one half bag of rotini noodles, of which I stole one cup. I held the warm pot to my body and stood over the stove, which I left on even after the pasta was done.
When Lucy got home around midnight, she explained that the central heat for the building never comes on in April so there is no way to turn on the radiators. Perhaps she felt guilty about sending me to sleep in a room with an unsealed window because she offered me some of the egg scramble she was cooking. We ate together and had a lovely conversation -- at least I enjoyed it. I can’t speak for Lucy because once she finished eating she said, “Well you must be very tired...”
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Other than the lack of space-heaters, Berlin seems to be the perfect city. To me, it is Goldilocks’s middle bowl between my other two favorite places: Bogotá and San Francisco. The street vendors and jabbering pedestrians and third-world chaos that give Bogotá its charm can also make it impossibly dysfunctional at times. On the other end of the spectrum, San Francisco’s efficiency-obsessed tech fever is sexy and exciting and famous… and solipsistic to a sometimes nauseating degree. Berlin has the urban hum, it has the hipster-hating hipsters whining about gentrifying neighborhoods, it has the cultural hodgepodge that makes it tricky to pick out tourists from locals. It works without trying too hard.
Being a foreigner here is neither exotic nor cliché, which is quite relaxing. However, for the first time in my life I am in a place where I cannot ask for directions from just anyone on the street. I, the Queen of Eyelash-Batting for Favors from Strangers, have been quitted of my most resourceful superpower. Thankfully, universal human sign language has been sufficient so far. That is to say, sufficient enough for me to walk into the Turkish pastry shop and point to the baklava behind the glass and hold up all my fingers to indicate “I would like all the baklava, please.”
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