Mit Senf

The Germans have quite taken the concept of the sausage as a snack and refined it to an art-form. These are not shrivelled sangers that have sat for hours, rotating in the rear of a stale display-cabinet. No, these are proud, bulky bratwurst, and they glisten with fat as the woman serving me drowns them in tomato sauce and finishes with a dusting of curry powder. She’s not done yet though, and she gestures at the board behind her and offers me the choice of additional sides: fries with mustard, fries with mayonnaise or either of the previous with beer. I feel my heart palpitating involuntarily as I consider the health ramifications. Fuck it, I’m on holiday, right?

I’m perched in the corner of a converted metro car hiked up on concrete blocks a few streets from the budget terminal of Berlin airport. I’m hiding from the biting minus-ten wind while I wait to see if Nick is on the next flight from Riga, or Budapest, or wherever. Email isn’t particularly easy to get your hands on in Eastern Europe and our method for meeting up in Berlin was as simple as “Meet you on Tuesday at the airport?”

Now, faced with the grim reality of being stuck in this car eating Currywurst until I die of a heart attack, I consider the downsides to our plan: we have not considered that Berlin may have several airports, I have no idea what city, or country, Nick is coming from and thus no idea what carrier or arrival time is to be expected, and our only means of contacting each other is by email. I order another beer.

I’m the only non-German in here, and I listen. My German is even worse than I expected – I’ve forgotten so much in the years since I spent my Saturdays vor die Schulbank. Painstakingly memorised tenses, cases and verb tables forgone for simple words. As I find out later, near everyone in the centre speaks English and there’s little chance to practice. I’d love to come back and spend a couple of months here: jumping from rural village to rural village. I think in future any European trips will be country by country rather than trying to fit an entire continent in a few short weeks, which is just madness.

A few hours later, when I’m camped on my pack in departures, and beginning to toy with the idea of scoping ahead for a hostel, Nick shows up and we run for the next bus to the Metro. It all feels so safe and normal that it’s easy to forget we’re on the other side of the world from when we last spoke. He tells me how he spent the previous night sleeping in a bus shelter, and I have to laugh when I imagine him suited up and entangled by the firm back in Perth.

It’s late, but the centre is brightly lit. A hint of ice in the corners of the windows, but not yet snowing, and above everything Alexanderplatz looms like some doomed vision of a constructionist future, one where architects learn by smashing huge geometric blocks into each other until they fit.

Posted in Travel on Monday July 7, 2008.