Switzerland: land of milk can honey. I am back and the milk from the Bioladen is fresh and sweet and creamy. Honey-coloured cattle browse along the path flicking fat mosquitoes with paint-brush tails. It’s all pretty: even the oversized Lego industrial landscapes. Life is orderly and a little prim. A church on every hillside: Catholic and Protestant (they don’t speak). The building of minarets on mosques is now forbidden here, it contravenes the Constitution. The snarling sprawl of Berlin overgrown between upright German houses, climate chaos and poverty seem very far from shore.
Tag: food
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rodney the radish
I found a radish! Just sitting in the middle of the road all by itself. It looked a little bruised and chipped. Poor little radish.
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crisp & pale
Today I’m having ale and potato chips for lunch. Last night, ice cream for dinner. I was planning a little ice-cream-shop crawl but the first (pistachio with hazelnuts) was so rich and creamy it did me in. In between there were pancakes for breakfast. A snack ‘n’ dessert weekend.
I love how the real ale movement has been belatedly followed by an awakening in the handmade chips guild: Oi! We can’t be doing with that! Those beers deserve better bowlsful!
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pearl-sheaves
Ran across the same little punk dog we’d met with last week, a scruffy little dude with green dye in his hair. His name is Schnitzel. I know this because he came scampering up the street and this long knotted rope of a woman, with five colours in her hair and a goodly stomp on her, came bawling after him, “Schnitzel! Schnit-ZEL!!” “Typical punker name,” my friend told me, casually. Really? Schnitzel?
We went to a new place, new to me, for a breakfast roll. “Let’s go to the Greek place,” he said. It’s a spacious, cool, shadowy deli, like an old-fashioned larder keeping its cool via the stone walls and not through the agency of frigid, piped gas. The proprietor Yannis has large colour photos of himself all over the walls, photos he says his customers have taken. Yannis frowning, Yannis carving meat, Yannis folding his arms. He has a wall of certificates for his olive oils. He sells spicy sauces brewed in this neighbourhood, and handmade Greek products with beautiful packaging: a tea made from ginger, mint, saffron, and licorice root. Watching him tenderly sloshing fresh, grassy-green olive oil on our bread and shaving a flapping slice of ham from the hock in his glass cabinet I feel filled with optimism and a sense of slow, rising well-being. Surely we can support small adventurous businesses whose response to a troubled economy is: I will make teas. Surely we can eat fresher, walk on the grass until we find a shady spot to sit, live longer. A dozen dogs tumble and writhe in the unkempt park whose waving dandelions and delicate pearl-sheaves of grass seed remind my lounging friend of “a punk hairstyle. This is how you can see this city has no money.” “It’s even green,” I say, remembering the little scamp Schnitzel. The arse of my dungarees slowly dampens on the dark, damp soil. It rained yesterday. The sun comes and goes like bees. Possibly wind sifting through high trees is my most beloved sound on this half-paved green earth. Wind in the trees, sun in a twitching lace like glass-slippered waves, waving green grasses and the white clouds still passing.
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feeding the swains
Yesterday I saw two people having a very cute picnic in a park. They were sitting side by side on one of the benches facing in to the path and had a card table set up with checkered blue and white tablecloth, two glasses, an open bottle, bowls of nibblies, real napkins… the whole nine yards. Which is about how many Brisbane backyards would have fit in this skimpy narrow green strip that provided space for a few lovely trees to grow between the six-storey apartment houses. The picnickers were in their fifties and looked to have dressed for the occasion, she had on make up and sparkly earrings and he had on his good jeans. They looked so happy. They saluted me with raised glasses when I smiled at them. Ten minutes earlier I’d passed a man feeding a swan, by the river, he sat cross-legged on a large tree stump with his own glass of wine, paper parcel of food, and the swan bent its elegant neck to fetch things from his hand. First sunny day in a while and the greensward was littered with revellers – revellers and their bicycles – room enough to sit but not to lie down. Plenty of swans foraging the riverbank in hopes of crumbs and morsels. My German-speaking friend calls them ‘swains.’
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dochdach, dochdach
Back in Berlin for a few days: what a strange feeling. Now there is no snow on the ground and the trees have appeared from nowhere, they are green, green, green. We ate at a Turkish grillhouse where you sit around a glass-cased cooktop fired with coals, onto which four brawny and frankly handsome men in white shirts loaded blade after blade of minced meat, chicken wings, lamb ribs, skewer after skewer of whole, red tomatoes and prongs of scarlet peppers like jewels. They scoop the heat together in a bottomless tin of blackened aluminium. Everything stinks of cookstove fuel. We drank several copper tumblers apiece of ayran, the salty fresh yoghurt drink, eyeing the mirrored cabinet of meats: a tray of kidneys, maroon and flecked with gristly white, a tray of ribs ready to be sliced and grilled, a tray of chops, a tray of wings. Afterwards a long, long bicycle ride through the city forest which leads in from a smurfish village of cutesy summer houses with adorable, tiny gardens. The sign at the side gate says “Freiheit” but the “Freiheit” gate is locked. Everything as pretty as a thousand words and worth a picture. A young waiter smoking on the gingerbread verandah of his Black Forest-styled Gasthaus told us, using the informal “you”, “you can’t get out that way.”
Drank a beer, one of those long German beers, on board a boat on the river which has a wooden cabin built on it, housing the kitchen and bar. There is grass growing on the roof. Grass, and little purple flowers. I stood in front of it blocking the way with my bike saying over and over and over, “It has grass! On the roof!” I had never seen that before: grass! on the roof! I am tired from travelling and the temperature has dropped ten degrees. When Berlin’s petticoat woods tilted up to meet the plane I felt a rush of unaccustomed homesickness: Australia, be less far away. Australia, be less vast. I miss you though I had almost forgotten, persuaded myself I had forgotten. This big city is not my city and that river is not my river. Doch.
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coffee breathe
I was in a strange city recently, got lost, felt overwhelmed momentarily, & needed comfort. Ducked inside a Guitar Shop to touch all the guitars. You pluck one string and wait for it slowly to come into stillness. At the back a man in a fisherman’s cap was playing a song of his own, I think, for the politely-smiling Guitar Shop man… they sat on matching, facing stools and one leaned in and one leaned back. Leaving the shop I felt just that bit more tuned in to sounds and to music, the traffic seemed rhythmic and spare, I kept hearing in the street the repeated curve-notes of a wolf whistle from somewhere high, or far away. Five times, six times, seven times, eight: was it a nerdy, somewhat serious guy who having gotten up the courage to catcall was now determined the object of his passing affection would not walk by without learning how beautiful he found her? Actually it was two college girls, leaning out of a fifth-storey window wolf-whistling their friend who was unlocking her bike oblivious in a stand of bikes downstairs, her hair wrapping itself around her in the wind. Wit-wheel! Wit-wheel! is how my ex used to spell it (and say it): Wit-wheel!
I went into a crowded little food boutique that had a whole wall of small-brew beers. They had beautiful, grotesque, weird, colourful labels. They were honey-coloured, molasses-coloured, golden, greenish, dark. I bought a chocolate wrapped in sardine-printed foil for a friend who is overcoming a phobia of fish. I went to the back of the store and picked up the brown-paper packages of whole coffee beans and held them to my face and breathed in.
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a jeans under it
An elderly couple pedalling uphill on a tandem bike: the Swiss are awesome! Casual bigotry in the marketplace: the Swiss are awful! These thoughts freewheeling through my head: generalizations are stupid! Yes: all of them.
Decades back I was here and asked somebody, a travelled, educated person, what was the population of Switzerland. His lip curled. “Four million. And *one million* foreigners!” He was speaking of Italians. Now you see black faces in the street which then was not the case.
Today I cycled to a nearby town in search of summer garments. Coming back to Berlin for winter I was only planning on three months, it was minus fifteen, I brought thick, fuzzy, woolly stuff and ugg boots. Now it is finally hot. The trees are blooming. In every shop I asked, Is there a second-hand shop in town somewhere? Maybe… the Red Cross? People not only looked blank, they sneered. I kept looking and finally on a back street found a merry collection of shoes, cheap suits, and household tat, with three African women presiding.
They invited me to try stuff on in the kitchen and over their cups of tea offered encouraging remarks: Nice colour that one! If you don’t have a jeans under it, this fits great! A white man in his seventies came in and the conversation instantly dampened. I went foraging among the racks and when I came back, he had sat himself next to the youngest, prettiest one and slung an arm casually round the back of her chair. She was just standing up as I came in. She went and stood in the far corner of the kitchen with her back to the inner door.
But you can’t keep a happy woman down and they kept talking around him, about a local woman who comes in causing trouble and pulling things off the shelves. “Police give me a card,” said the stout lady, reaching under the sink for her handbag to show it. I was pulling my sneakers back on, on the floor. The conversation between them was in a kind of pidgin, English and French with some German words, or is it a creole that people evolve when they are from different language groups and fetch up in the same place together? I think, creole. They were so kind and interesting and the atmosphere so pragmatic and humane, I too I would have liked to put my arms around them. I would have liked to stay on uninvited and bask in their presence all the afternoon long. I could understand his longing. His sleaziness, not so much.
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sardines
Chic girl in the sunny gardens by the duck pond, at an outdoor cafe where we had lunch, cutting her toenails at the table while her companions ate their bowls of sardines.