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.