Berlin FAQ Blog

The big news going around the net today is that a huge earwig has been sighted on satellite photos in a field in Germany. You can see the beastie for yourself here and read about it e.g. here or here.

The good news is: it's in Baden-Württemberg near a town called Aalen and facing southwest, i.e. away from Berlin. I do find it slightly worrying however that this is the first time I've heard news of this freak insect: smacks of a cover-up by the authorities. Let's just hope there aren't any more out there waiting to be discovered, or if there are, that the Bundeswehr's elite giant insect SWAT team are on their toes.

Just a quick "heads up" for everyone out there who, like myself, always gets caught out by these things:

Sunday October 1st is a verkaufsoffener Sonntag in Berlin, i.e. shops are allowed to open, but only between noon and 5pm. From experience this means the large shopping centres, department stores and many but not all shops along the main shopping streets will be open; most smaller ones won't.

Tuesday, October 3rd is Tag der Einheit, aka "Unification Day", which is a Public Holiday and all shops, banks etc. will be closed (except for the usual suspects at stations etc).

Well, I've done it again. The bath's plug hole thingy has been gunging up for a while now (Mrs Penguin estimates "many months"), so that while not bearing any risk of inundating the neighbours below, during a shower one tends to end up with permanently wet feet, if you see what I mean. Vigourous exercise with a plunger has only apparently (I can only guess at what goes on down there) succeeded in rearranging the gunge, or during one particularly energetic session, causing it to spray out of the overflow hole and creating avant-garde designs on my T-shirt.

I have been putting off the application of chemical weaponry, partly because it involves coordinating being in a shop and remembering to look out for something suitable, a feat which neither I nor Mrs. Penguin appear to have success at; and also I still can't understand how the acid or whatever it is knows how to only go at the gunge and not say the pipe or the rubber sealant, and you know how embarrassing it is when you finally get to know your downstairs neighbours after about five years and they casually mention this stubborn problem they've been having with stains in their bathroom ceiling, or find out you've been contributing to a freak environmental disaster whereby all the excess chemicals have been eating their way out of Berlin's sewers down into the Earth's core.

Anyway, I was availing myself of a shower earlier this evening and to my surprise there was a burping and gurgling and the pool of water around my feet suddenly appeared to remember an important appointment in a downwards direction and hey presto, another problem "solved".

Yup, that's right. The station between Semesterwirtin and Brauner Rest on the U8. If you're still not sure what I'm talking about, that's the U-Bahn line which passes through Tarzan Delle Pax. Doesn't ring a bell? Well, they're all on this map here.

Wow, this is getting uncanny. An ISP I used until about 2003 owes me the princely sum of 64 Euros, which I'd been putting off tracking down for the last three years, just phoned me up out of the blue to check I'm still alive and said they'd be transferring it to my account ASAP, which I presume means sometime before Christmas. I am obviously getting good at this procrastination business.

You know they say there's no such thing as a free lunch - well, this is it. Provided at great expense by the German taxpayer to myself and Mrs. Penguin in Bitterfeld, some time in 2003.

A few weeks back an Austrian girl, Natascha Kampusch, escaped from the clutches of a kidnapper who had kept her imprisoned mainly within a cellar under his house for the last eight years, since she was aged 10. You may have heard about the incident - it was splashed across the headlines of all the reputable newspapers such as Bild, while the more serious ones went in for in-depth voyeurstic analyses. (If you haven't heard about it you may want to check that you're not living in a cellar yourself).

One thing that struck me was that her spoken German sounded slightly stilted, as if she was reading from a book or practising to be a radio announcer, an odd way of speaking for a teenager. Apparently that's a result of growing up with mainly books and radio for company.

To my knowledge I haven't been held hostage in a cellar for any significant length of time, but living permanently in foreign climes is having a not too dissimilar effect on my English. I don't mean the odd lapse into a bizarre non-English syntax ("I became a cake for my birthday"), more that my colloquial knowledge of the language as it is spake on England's green and sceptered shores (?) is stuck in a late 80's timewarp.

Recently I learnt from this thread that there's this word "mullet" - which means not only a kind of fish but also has significance in a hairstyling context, describing what is known in Germany as vokuhila (vorne kurz, hinten lang). If it was around in the UK in common usage before about 1990 it certainly wasn't known in my (direly provincial) neck of the woods, and as I was at school at the time, and as there were several characters (both pupils and staff) with very mullet-like hairstyles, the existence of a word with such delightfully derogatory connotations would have been seized upon with glee by the troglodyte pupils of Mr. Slaphead's class. Maybe I should write to the OED, they have people who like to keep track of this kind of thing. (My Concise Oxford from about 1990 lists "mullet" only in its marine lifeform sense).

And then there's chav, a word I vaguely assumed from the context I read it in to be associated with upper-class twits on Majorca, but when I got round to looking it up it turns out that's not quite the case.

Completely lost am I when it comes to Little Britain references, apparently that's a very popular programme on British TV which everyone loves to imitate, but because all I've ever seen is the odd Christmas special the context generally escapes me completely. Come to think of it the only British TV I'm up to date with is Top Gear, which BBC World, bless them, have sneaked in among their otherwise dire broadcasting lineup ("Golf – Inside The PGA Tour" anyone?). Disclaimer: though certifiably male I seem to be missing the automobile gene and hence fall into a vacant stare whenever conversation turns to subjects such as how much torque the latest Toyota Mondeo can put up its camshaft, and I know I it's the done thing to despise Jeremy Clarkson, but TopGear is not so much about macho car things but more three blokes taking the piss out of each other and also French car makers, and occasionally blowing up caravans, and is good for a laugh when the only alternative is Greatest Hits of Bavarian Volksmusik on ARD. And now they have a dog too.

Anyway, maybe I should pootle off back to the UK for a few months before I end up, in my old age, as a linguistic dinosaur serving as a living resource for pre-1990s language researchers.

As of about 18:03 yesterday evening it's all over for another couple of years, bar the shouting and the TV talk shows (yawn). If my memory serves me correctly, the next elections will be for the European Parliament in 2008, so it'll be a while before the lampposts of this fair city will be graced with the attractive visages of the political classes.

Why 18:03? Well, the polling stations close at 6pm and about three minutes after that the first Hochrechnung - exit poll - is announced, and generally they're spot on within a percentage point or so, so unless it's particularly close (like it was at the last Bundestag elections, when SPD and CDU were neck-and-neck) you can switch the telly off and go and do something more interesting, because the final results won't be that much different. None of the excitement of a British election, with the full extent of the swing and the future of governments hanging on a recount in Nether Bumbleby (South) and that kind of thing. The only sliver of excitement was whether the Greens (who made large gains) would get a higher proportion of the vote than the Linke.PDS (the SPD's current coalition partner, who lost out partly because of the splinter leftwing party WASG) - as it stands at the time of writing, Linke.PDS has 13.4%, the Greens 13.1%. So it looks like the SPD will be talking to the Linke.PDS first about continuing their "red-red coalition".

The CDU, by the way, under the leadership of their joke candidate Friedbert Pflüger, crashed in with their worst results ever. The Adolf fan boys didn't make it into the Berlin parliament but do seem to be represented in three or four of the outer eastern district councils. The "other" parties (i.e. those not among the "big 5" currently represented in Berlin's parliament"), ranging from the jackbooted wankers via the senior citizens party "Grey Panthers" through to the "Anarchistic Pogo Party" scored a record 13.8% of the vote between them - not enough for any one party to jump the 5% barrier, but an indication of how disillusioned voters are with the "established" parties. Turnout was down from about 70% in 2001 to just under 60%.

I did my patriotic? citizenly? person-with-migration-backgroundly? duty and went along and cast my own vote at the local Kindergarten. The polling station was a bit of a signposting disaster. The Kindergarten has, it turned out, two entrances, and the Wahlraum for my address district was in the other one, but no-one had thought to put up signs informing of this fact, and it looked like the electoral helpers were spending half their time directing voters from one entrance to the other. When I found the right place the bloke on the desk reacted to my proffered Wahlbenachrichtigungsschein with the words "oh, an orange one!". This was evidently because the big orange square printed on it was a sign that I was a non-German voter and thus only eligible for the orange BVV ballot paper. Having done the usual rigmarole of establishing my identity (one of my forenames constantly causes consternation in German-speaking countries - "That's really your name!? Wow!") I was given my ballot paper and marched off in the direction indicated by the sign "Wahlraum" and where I could see voting booths, only to be barked at by the lady guarding the ballot box with words to the effect that she thought I was trying to steal the ballot paper. Turned out on closer observation that the Wahlraum signposted was the other polling station housed in this part of the Kindergarten, but hey, I'm only a stupid voter, I should have known better.

The Berlin Statistic Office has an colour-coded interactive map with the results as they stand.


Update: the NPD has made it onto district councils (BVV) in Marzahn-Hellersdorf, Lichtenberg, and Treptow-Köpenick (all east) and Neukölln (west), while the Republikaner are represented in Pankow (east). Yuck.

I was wandering randomly (no, not drunkenly) through Mitte the other day and came upon the Nikolaikirche, which is holding an exhibition of Berlin city models. Fascinating stuff, especially the model of East Berlin as it was in 1988 (at the start of the 90's it used to be in the tourist office under the Fernsehturm, but disappeared somewhere for many years). I would have loved to have had some kind of small video camera on a long stick, then I could have made my own aerial tour of Berlin, cunningly recreating some of the scenes from Goodbye Lenin.

More photos below.

My local shopping centre, the ineffably slightly-less-naff-than-most-of-the-others Schönhauser Allee Arcaden is hosting an exhibition called Flieg, Johanna, flieg ... Eine Reise durch die Werbewelt der DDR. Judging by the marketing banner strung across the entrance, the former GDR's world of advertising was a more exciting place than one might think, if Johanna's enthusiastic embrace with this pink objet - ostensibly a tube of washing liquid - is anything to go by. (And before you think I have a dirty mind: it was my wife who pointed it out to me).