One Day in the life of Europe.

Morning in Europe on Kreuzberg's Bergmannstrasse

One day in Europe: 25 April 2017

Warning, this post is laced with undercurrents of Jay's inherent optimism on life in general. Be forewarned.

Here is a recent day in Berlin.

Owing to our ongoing Europe-ification we started the day out with yogurt and meusli, hard boiled eggs and orange juice from organic and documented / pedigreed trees that grow on local farms in Brandenburg. Actually yes.

Filled up with produce and food from the country with the most researched and vetted food sources in Europe, we spring lightly down our 90 stairs of the Altbau (Old Construction) building to the bikes in the courtyard. Morning sunlight dapples on the walls and the big frosted windows are nearly stained-glass creations.

Landing #4

Jasper and I got on the bikes and pedalled two blocks over to a school-mates flat to collect him up for the 1 mile ride to school across our Schöneberg neighborhood. The route passes the old gothic church that anchors the area and along streets bristling with cafes, bakeries, pubs and at least four bike shops. In the morning Spring chill at 7:45 there is not much action aside of restaurant workers putting out chairs and tables for the day. 

A doorway reflects Springtime on Akazienstrasse, the main "cafe street" of our neighborhood.

The kids are into Pokemon and so Jasper and his bud spend the 1.5km ride negotiating auf Deutsch which card trades they will make at school and which creatures are megas or EX's or whatever. This is not news that he is an operator in German, but it still knocks me for a loop.

The international school is located next to a long ribbon of green space that extends a couple of kilometers through Wilmersdorf, a quiet residential neighborhood. Berlin has green spaces everywhere as a result of strangely forward-thinking city planners in the 1870's. They didn't want it to turn into another crowded and smog-choked London as industrialization pulled people into the cities, so they made the streets extra wide, planted trees everywhere and put in one huge park after another.

This particular park is packed with ponds, bike trails, and playgrounds that show-up my spartan metal monkey bar and sad grey jungle gym playgrounds of the 1970's. One of the playgrounds in Berlin has a two-storey dragon that you can climb up inside to peer out of his huge mouth. Another is a two-storey castle construction with towers linked by footbridges and enclosed netting tunnels. Ziplines are common, and easily hold adults.

At one end of this park ("Volkspark Wilmersdorf") sits a U-Bahn station festooned with Greek statuary and a carp pond. A long column of massive oak trees conceals a Biergarten next to a spraying fountain in the summertime. On the field nearby, people sometimes practice with their long curved alpine horns and it resembles a Ricola commercial minus the mountains. 

I've now been here long enough to have developed a highly distorted view of reality, because I am starting to believe that these kinds of things are relatively normal to see.

We take the corner around the Schöneberg Rathaus (Town Hall), the seat of government for West Berlin during the Wall years. Its main claim to historical fame came in 1963 when JFK visited and gave his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech from the front steps. It was an expression of US support for the suddenly beseiged population of West Berlin after the Wall went up.

The Rathaus from the Schöneberg U4 train station walkway.

In 15 minutes we arrive at school, which is a microcosm of Berlin's multi-cultural world in itself. It is one of three "international" schools in Berlin and they teach in a mix of English and German. Maths, Science and "life skills" is taught in German but they learn to read in English. The heated and intense Pokemon card trading sessions are all in German. 

Jasper's friends all come from all over. Many of the kids have well-travelled backgrounds since lots of parents work as diplomats or German foreign service officers. For them, a typical schedule could be: 3 years in Bahrain, 3 years in Berlin, 3 years in New York, 3 years in Caracas, then back to Berlin, then Capetown, etc etc. Jasper's potential first girlfriend is about to take off for Khartoum. You know, the Sudan.

As a result our friend group (through school) is a bunch of people with super interesting stories. It is a common occurrence to meet parents from two different countries, who met in a third country, and who have since lived in a couple other ones before ending up in Berlin. The kids are therefore immersed in an environment where many languages, viewpoints and backgrounds mash together. I remember when we first arrived we'd ride the U-Bahn and the kids would gape at other little ones their age who were speaking other languages. They don't gape anymore. They now flip between languages as easily as the others. They think it is also quite humorous that we don't speak as well as they do.

The important thing is that they are immersed in this environment which we hope is imprinting on them a tolerance and acceptance of others who not only look different than them, have different customs, but see the world differently.

And from our parent network standpoint, being around people who have stronger English skills has made it easier to make quicker friends than when we first arrived and both kids were in the German preschool, which had mostly local Germans and Turks who didn't speak as much English. So we're quite happy with the school situation.

After dropping Jasper and Adam at school, I ride up to the Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn station and lock the bike. Today I will take the U-Bahn train into work, but when the weather calls for it I will usually ride. Today, Cassandra will train back from work in the afternoon on this same line and grab the bike at Nollendorfplatz on her way to pickup Jasper. The train ride across town passes through one historical-epoch after another, as each neighborhood seems to be known for something. Nollendorfplatz's fame stems from its locus as Europe's decadent lifestyle capital between the world wars in the tolerant-yet-teetering Weimar Republic of the '20s. Marlene Dietrich, Christopher Isherwood and David Bowie all spent time here.

At Gleisdreieck, the line passes through a tidied-up parkland set in the wilderness of one of Europe's former largest railyards. It was chopped up by Allied bombs in the War and then left to atrophy into oblivion during the Wall years. The bomb-blasted front facade of the vast Anhalter Bahnhof stands at one end of the park, its bullet pockmarks still pooling shadows in the morning sun.

What's left of Anhalter Station.

The kids mesmerized by the skatepark.

At Schlesisches Tor (The Silesian Gate), the train pulls into the station after a ride through Kreuzberg, an open-air art museum of multi-story graffiti art and political slogans on ancient tenement buildings. One of Berlin's formerly-gritty and dangerous yet now slightly gentrifying immigrant neighborhoods, Kreuzberg was home to Turks after the War who came to rebuild the city. They were packed into this corner that ran right up against the course of the Berlin Wall and their descendants are still here, with a stronger claim to the title of "Berliner" than most other locals currently inhabiting the city.

The graffiti stops being threatening after you are here long enough. Then it turns into something you are happy to have since it colors up the city.

The cops here have a surprisingly live and let live approach to everything so there is no city wide effort to clean up the spray paint. Probably because much of it is basically art work. So they leave it.

"Schlesi" Bahnhof.

I get a cappuccino from a hole-in-the-wall coffee bar that looks questionable from outside, and is standing room-only once you tentatively enter, but serves the most amazing espresso of your life. Next door to it is a dingy and spray-painted armoured door hiding a techno club. It is 9am and you can still hear the beats behind it.

Club Entry, Kreuzberg

Schlesisches Tor was the last train station before the Berlin Wall, which cut across the track line right at the Spree River. The open grounds between the train station and the river have that "end of the line" feel that ends at the river, where the Oberbaumbrücke crosses. The rail lines and streets were severed here. One could walk to the water but the river was technically East Berlin territory, so if you wanted to go swimming you might be shot at for violating the border.

Pano shot of the park at the edge of Kreuzberg, the last bit of green before the river (and the Wall)

A major East-West crossing point operated at the Oberbaumbrücke. I stroll across it sometimes without even thinking what happened here. It is a popular place for tourist selfies. People are always filming something on the Oberbaum Bridge, so these guys with super expensive digital cameras are constantly stepping over the piles of bums, junkies and their dogs who yell at them in frayed and slurring German. Meanwhile, artists create murals over the bullet holes marring the ancient brick support columns.

The yellow building on right is "Watergate," one of Europe's legendary techno clubs. I tried unsuccessfully to enter once, but did not make it past Berlin's famously-strict/irrational club door staffers.

Travel S

Peering East into morning haze from the Oberbaumbrücke.

The Oberbaumbrücke frequently has pop-up art installations. Also, bums!

On the other side of the bridge the former course of the Berlin Wall continues. So our office is in "East Berlin," a fact that I have always found spooky and weird yet strangely thrilling. A watchtower on top of a former grain warehouse next to our office used to house East German guards who would shoot people trying to escape across the river here. A one mile stretch of the Wall itself still stands on this side of the river. It does not require much imagination to contemplate the ruthlessness of those who would turn an entire country into a prison.

Our office itself is a former warehouse used to unload and process river barge traffic coming into Berlin from the south. They've updated it repeatedly, but it still has the identical visual footprint it had when built in the early 1900's. I see it all the time in grainy war shots, tourism brochures and the backgrounds of Berlin-based movies such as Run Lola Run and The Lives of Others.

Warschauer Strasse U1 train bridge.

View from the office. Artificial jetty was part of the Wall infrastructure and had a guard tower at the right end of it.

It is my birthday, and in Germany that means you bring in the cake for everyone else. I am fortunate in that Cassandra made a chocolate masterpiece that people rave about. People flock over and it is a social moment. Everyone hugs you, even the guys. No one buys you presents. Luckily, you don't have to bring in presents for everyone in addition to bringing in the cake.

Tim (German) and Carl (Swedish) are the first ones to the cake.

A typical work occurrence: status calls.

Work involves manipulating intangible digital bits from one form into another. We have calls with clients to review what we think the bits are telling them. If they are happy, they will allocate more budget for us to create more bits. There is lots of coffee involved. People talk importantly about things like "measurement models" and "digital transformation." On Fridays they put out cold cereal that everyone happily eats during the staff meeting.

Soon it ends and at day's end I go back across the bridge to West Berlin. 

Lunch on the Spree. Oberbaumbrücke in background. Thomas and Tim.

Our building and the former barge-unloading docks.

Schlesisches Tor is a Prussian-era train station with tons of awesome exposed metal decks, brick walls and overhead track supports with huge rivets. Something about all this fat ironwork I find fascinating. Maybe because it clearly hails from a time when "work" actually meant building things with lasting effect, in contrast to what I spend all day doing.

I try to listen to my "Learn German"  app on the train rides. I can get through a couple lessons before I get home and with this language if you don't hit it every day you start losing it immediately. This is definitely one of the dominant dynamics of this whole experience: trying to get a 47 year-old brain to learn something as complex as a language. A fun yet spirit-crushing challenge in short.

Home. Up the 92 steps to our flat. Kids playing in the main room. Cassandra making dinner before she has to jump on conference calls later on with the US. My head is full of logistics on upcoming bike rides, travel weekends, and the puzzling question of where we should live when we get kicked out of our current place in a little over a month.

This weekend we meet a big group out at a biergarten to celebrate my birthday. At no point will a car be involved with any transport, which is such a boost to the quality of life. The other day I realized that I haven't taken a kid to an event or done pick-up at a school or daycare with an auto in over 2 years. We just go everywhere on bikes. So refreshing.

Kids to bed at 8:30pm, then we typically are on the laptops until 11:30 doing trip planning, catch-up work, John Oliver, and the inevitable FB scrolling.

The Green Tunnel at Görlitzer Park. One of the best bike path stretches in the city.