Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: honey

  • zwiebelchen?

    On the markets I passed a tourist with an American accent who was saying to his companion, “Jeez. So much amazing stuff to eat and drink!” Inexplicably he managed this in a tone of complaint. Jet lag? For how, I wondered, can you possibly turn that into a sense of personal injury. Woe is you. I bought a jar of honey; local honey is relatively flavourless because the Linden trees in Berlin have a very mild scent. I bought sweet potato at the potato stall where you can spend half an hour reading her scribbled handmade signs. She extols the nutritional benefits of orange vs purple sweet potatoes and sells fourteen kinds of spud. When I buy a bag of root vegetables she always pops a tiny round golden onion in the top, saying sweetly, “Zwiebelchen?” which means more or less ‘And may I offer you a tiny baby onion… an onionette?’ She’s so cute with it. What’s particularly cute is that she has clearly trained her husband to do this and he clearly doesn’t get it: when I buy from him he’s all blokey and dismal, ticking off the requirements almost visibly in his head: paper bag, turn down the top like a lunch pail, “Oh yes, the onion! Sorry – here, have an onion.” Muttering to himself that he almost forgot to throw that in. My eyes meet hers over the back of his head and we share a moment of feminine protectiveness and love.

    The potato lady is an old punk and always has some raddled spud which has started to send out its purplish tendrils, turned upside down for hair and with eye holes nicked in its face with a toothpick. Generally these guys will be carrying a flag or dressed in a scrap of fabric, propped up in front of middlemost bucket. I skirted the Turkish stall holders who sing their wares and scold their customers and fronted up at the endmost cheese stall, where some of the cheeses are eight years old. She also has butter, far younger, in fact churned yesterday. The woman in front of me was buying a slab of butter and as I sometimes do I composed the German sentence in my head while I was waiting. “Auch so ein Stück Butter, bitte.” Ie ‘I’ll have another such slice of butter, please.’ One of my greatest difficulties on the market is I don’t know the words for piece, slice, bunch, punnet – the collective nouns. When I came home with my basket over my arm, my friend was stretching up over her bicycle’s rump to pull my doorbell again. I told her of my triumph and we hugged each other gleefully. We are veterans of Germany’s indefatigably formal and prolonged migration processes, where ordinary German seems to acquire a top hat and a moustache. You see, I told her as we mounted the stairs to eat the Dutch pepper cake I baked this morning: I performed three distinct linguistic somersaults in a row, to get out that sentence intact. First there’s the two different Ks: auch, and Stück. The two different Us, ü and u. Then the two different but similar words, Butter which ends in a dry R, and bitte which ends in the kind of disdainful e we rarely use in Australian English. Out it came flawless. I somersaulted home.

  • pearl-sheaves

    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.

    H2O HoL berliner spass