Easter fun and interesting coffee culture

searching the apartment for easter eggs!

making lentil burgers for our picnic! 

fantastic Greek chocolates supplied by Johanna mum in Greece!

on the train - Jeremy, me, Thanos and Johanna

Easter fun and Interesting coffee culture 

 

Please pardon the delayed posting of the festive event and all things interesting about German coffee and food, I wrote a draft while we were without internet but seem to have lost my USB (v. tragic) and hence need to rewrite it!!

So what’s German Easter about?  One word: Lindt!! Everywhere and soooooooo many varieties! Quite enjoyable it was browsing the supermarket Easter chocolate sections.

Aside from the great chocolate, for our Easter celebration we decided to team up with our other friends and have a picnic in one of the many lovely parks in Berlin. So this is how our Easter long weekend (they have Friday to Monday free like at home too) panned out.

Friday – realised we didn’t have any toilet paper left in the temporary apartment we’d moved into the night before. Meeting in Friedrichshain with friends at 11pm, move around at a few bars and arrange the food shopping appointment for Saturday.

 

Saturday – bleary eyed and clutching handbags stuffed with plastic shopping bags (you have to pay for plastic bags at supermarkets) we brainstormed a wicked picnic menu and a shopping list while sipping tea and coffee at a grand old pub/café then hit the supermarket. We spent the rest of the day at Johanna’s beautiful temporary residence at a friend’s apartment in Charlottenburg and prepared lentil burgers, potato salads, garden salad, tzatziki (how could we not have tzatziki with 3 Greeks attending!) and beef burgers for the next day in the sun.

 

Sunday! – Jeremy and I staged a bit of an Easter egg hunt through the gorgeous apartment we were staying in. Check out the photos – Jeremy was a bit cunning!

We headed to Görlitzer Park in Kreuzberg, around the corner to where we were staying, and found a lovely spot for everyone in between the other festive parties utilising mobile BBQs and foil coal packets. As you can imagine there was a lot of ‘cooking’ smoke but the atmosphere was great as there were just sooooooo many people together enjoying the gorgeous weather and fabulous oddities that compromise German picnic/BBQ or ‘Grilling’ culture. One such oddity was the DJ table that set up in one of the little valleys in the park and despite attracting the attention of 3 ‘Polizei’ vehicles which drove at a crawling pace through the thick crowds of revellers, the desk stayed til late in the evening and different DJs jumped on and off. We joined the party later in the afternoon and there was a mass of people dancing and drinking and soaking up the sun.

 

COFFEE!

You may know that I’m not much of a coffee drinker, but having many friends addicted to the drug, or just being a law student is enough really at Monash, I have observed much of Australian coffee culture and tend to think I know what’s going to be presented to a friend when they order a variation of long, short, black, white, tall, grandé, skinny, soy, whatever. So. I’ve really enjoyed being surprised and even stifling a laugh at some of the fabulous concoctions that have been served up for my coffee-drinking friends here. I have a few photos to show, but they really just scrape the surface. 

Basically we’ve observed that the first rule to trying to figure out what shape your variation of a coffee will take is to observe which part of Berlin you are in. Secondly, what type of café, bar, side of the road van is it? Thirdly, what does it cost.

These three rules will give you a bit of an idea. For example – at uni

1. You’re at Uni – there’s maybe one café in the whole outer Berlin suburb that actually has a real coffee machine (espresso machine) the rest just press a button for ‘machine fresh’ mixed stuff.
2. You’re probably in the mensa which means you have to press the button YOURSELF and the sup is likely only to get half full
3. It costs about 85 euro cents – don’t expect much. 

Super trains, back pain and bewildering shopping hours

The train network here is just fantastic! While I was here last time on exchange I mostly took the main lines through the city on the rural service from my town. But this time we’re going all out, jumping on and off all over the place because we CAN! Maybe I should show you what the underground map looks like. For someone who spent many hours cursing Connex and their reliably late trains that often picked parts of the line to stop where there was no station, the system here is sadly quite exciting!
At the moment we’re living close to ‘Gesundbrunnen’ station. You most probably can´t see where that is, no matter.

So super train networks aside, my back really isn´t doing too well. It´s probably because of the crappy beds and pillows i´ve been sleeping on, so hopefully when we settle into a routine at uni in a few weeks it should feel better. When i can unload my suitcase and aren´t constantly bending down to get stuff out of it, my back might get a bit of a rest.

Due to the horribly low 20 Kilo limit coming here on the plane Jeremy and I both left many things at home with the expectation that we could pick up lots of things here. That we have done. Jeremy found a nice warm jacket, I some pants and so on. However, one thing that has been a bit confusing to navigate around are the strange seemingly random hours that many shops are open. If we were to rely on the old 9-5pm opening times, then we definately wouldn´t have got very far!

Supermarkets seem to be the easiest to navigate around, they seem to be mostly open 8am to 8pm monday to friday, saturday is all over the place and sunday, well about 4 supermarkets in the whole city seem to be open on sundays.

Clothing and shoe shops are the most bewildering. it seems to depend upon the area that you´re in. Monday to friday they´re open mostly 12-8pm with 5-7pm seemingly being the ´busy´shopping period of the day. Saturday I don´t really get yet and Sunday only a few of the Big Big department stores are open from about 1-6pm.

Bakeries and Flower shops seem to be the only things constantly open. But really, who needs flowers that often?

In other news we´ve been going on nice long discovery walks and here are a few pictures from our wanderings.

Jeremy with his mates Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the fathers of Communism. Suffice to say this park, a homage to them both, is in the old east, i.e. communist, Berlin

The Berlin Cathedral, right in the main Tourist precinct in the city - look at all the bare trees!! so cold!

looking around in the nice park

The famous TV tower that can be seen from most parts of the city, in Alexander Platz

Jeremy in new jacket and pants!

Audi, Audi and a few mercs…

Every time I go to dash across a road in this City an Audi sweeps by.
Whenever my innards start to cringe at the increasingly louder thump, thump, thump indicating a big man in his BIG ride is going to drive past I turn to see a road-hugging, tiny little Audi crawl past. The driver inside nodding along to his street cruising ‘musik’. No more cruising commodores for me.
When the familiar roaring purr of a 4-wheel-drive barges its way into the tiny ‘smart car’ city traffic, the small circular Mercedes sign glints along with it. This time the driver glares out the tinted windows, defying anyone to question why the hell they’re driving a 4-wheel-drive in the middle of the city when the nearest hill is about 300km away somewhere in Poland. I guess if you’re going to have any such ridiculously sized cars in a city centre nice black mercs would top the list.
Then there’s the cute little VW police cars that zip along. If they weren’t icky green and white coloured (German police colours) then they might be my favourite.
As it stands though, if you exclude the millions of bikes charging all over the place, threatening to run you down if you walk on their side of the pavement (yes it’s split in two) which is hard to figure out mind you when there aren’t any little bike pictures painted on either side, I think the super mini ‘Smart’ cars that squeeze into spots you didn’t know were for parking are the types of cars I like here best.

Jeremy enjoying a snooze with melissa, our sausage dog, in the hostel room

A cozy little space at Circus Hostel.

If you look closely you can see me taking the photo in the reflection. Only a few trains on this line, the U2 i think, have these little mini Brandenburg gate pictures all over the windows.

Cute!