Southbound Train

Seasonality – or how I learned to love my coat

It is clearly fall here now, slip sliding into winter, and if I had any doubt that I’d left California behind, it has now been solidly proven that Toto, we’re not in LA anymore. I’ve always listed “fall” as my favorite season, but that’s been for the idea of fall: new school year, new books, Halloween and the promise of more holidays. The few cool and crispy days southern California sees somewhere in the warm lead up to Christmas have always been, for me, the most delicious. Visions of baked apples and squash and soups dance in my head the minute October rolls around, roasts and casseroles and cozy food for a cold night. Never mind that my “cold nights” have been, on average, warmer than my sunny days here for the past week – I thought I needed good warming fall cuisine.

Cold night? It was 30° on my screened porch last night at 10pm. T.H.I.R.T.Y. Our little weather station was flashing its ice warning when I stepped outside to see just how thirty felt. Mike’s bare feet said it wasn’t worth more than about ten seconds, but I was slightly more prepared and a lingered longer, feeling the cold slap against my cheeks, resisting my presence and finding all the weak spots in my clothes. Air here has more personality than I’ve ever experienced. It caresses in the spring, bear hugs in the summer and now here it is slapping me like I’ve done something wrong. I have done something wrong, honestly – I’ve been failing to wear my coat.

It isn’t like I don’t want to be warm. I like my coat(s) – buying them, and resurrecting the few second layers that I do own has been fun. My coat closet in LA was mostly decorative, occasionally called into use when I wanted to wear a really light shirt in February, or knew I’d be by the beach after dark, or when my mom was visiting. This coat closet is twice the size, and thank goodness, because I’m in there every day – or trying to be.  Good grief, if isn’t like I don’t have things to keep me warm. The current tally stands:

• 2x soccer hoodies from Europe (the bright orange Netherlands one winning me approving nods from locals who think the orange is for the Vols)
• 2x ankle length overcoats
• 1x triple lined with hood heavy REI-type raincoat (with decorative Japanese kitsch hanging from every zipper)
• 1x sweater coat
• 1x knee length overcoat (so much easier to walk and get in and out of cars in than the long ones)
• 1x lightly lined trench coat
• 1x lightweight fleece
• 2x denim jackets (haaaaaaaaaaa)
• 1x knit poncho (double haaaaaaaaa)
• 1x Patagonia barn coat from high school
• 1x standard San Francisco during the dot com boom black leather jacket
• 1x rain shell
• 1x mid weight fuzzy jacket for wearing under rain shell
• 4x scarves

… and that doesn’t include anything belonging to Mike. If you’re planning a visit in winter, never fear, I’ve got your outdoor needs covered. The thing is, I consistently leave the house without any of these cleverly designed warmth devices – or with the inappropriate ones. Last month we were driving around enjoying the comfortable early fall with the top down when we spotted a sign for a “Haunted Woods” near Leiper’s Fork. Haunted Woods are not around every bend in LA and I was intrigued so we went that evening. I thought I was so clever, wearing heavy weight cargo pants, a thin sweater and a light fleece. I had a scarf, but no socks. The line to get into the woods was over an hour long – and it was 43°. It had been such a pleasant and mild afternoon (much like California) that it never occurred to me that it might get, oh, COLD once the sun went down. By the time we actually got into the haunted woods (which were quite haunted and a good scare) I could barely feel the ends of my fingers.

We’ve been driving around looking at the fall colored trees – what I thought was fall color a month ago was just a warm up for the real color we’ve had in the last two weeks – and the sun generally shines, tricking me into thinking that I don’t need a coat. I look out the window of the house, see sun, assume sixties and hop into the car. Then we get where we’re going and I open the door to a burst of bracing air and shiver. Inevitably, the days I take a coat I barely need one, and the days I forget I pay the price with shivering and cold that ends with me swearing at the seat heaters to hurry up and get warm faster, damnit.

Our CSA held an end of season party at the farm two Sundays ago, and we were the picture of California incompetence. It had been a chilly day, in the high 40’s and low 50’s and it was cloudy. We drove to the farm wondering if we’d be cold, wearing only two layers. I had a trench coat and a scarf – Mike had what amounted to a flannel hoodie. He pretty quickly took my scarf and when we walked up to the bonfire, roaring away at 5pm and doing only a marginal job at spreading warmth and light in the gathering gloom of a cloudy evening we knew we had been outclassed by the weather yet again. The other party-goers were in heavy coats. Hats. Ear muffs. Gloves. We made it an hour before our feeble excuse for outerwear gave up, suffocated by the smoke and completely defeated by the sub 40° evening. We slunk home with the heater on full blast and lamented that yet again, we had completely underestimated the cold.

The stupid thing is that when we travel in cold places, we’re prepared. Christmas markets in Germany? We’re good. St. Louis in January? We did ok. October in Berlin saw us overdressed for what turned out to be a mild weekend… but our own home? We’re woefully stupid about what we need to stay warm when we leave the house.  Having never lived anywhere with real cold, we both assume that long sleeves are enough, and that the distance between the car and the store can’t  be long enough (or cold enough) to warrant an outer layer. Very funny, these assumptions, and we all know what happens when we assume.  We’re going to have to improve, because I’m pretty sure the temperature is going to continue to drop. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to head out to the garden – I have about 200 bulbs left to plant and the sun is shining – the temp has climbed past 40° and I’d better take advantage of it. My coat? Nah, I don’t need it today, I’m sure…

Ich Liebe Berlin

I have a confession: I was afraid I wouldn’t like Berlin. Worse, I was afraid I would actively dislike Berlin, that the three days we spent there would be cold and gray and tedious, marked by desperate attempts to stay warm and find something we liked enough to brave the cold for. I kept remembering being frozen and sick in Paris, searching to find the magic that so many people told me was there and coming up wanting. I could hear my friend from college who spent her study abroad time in Berlin lamenting the gray, the concrete, the cold and the depressing facts of what had happened there. Friends of the family who lived there similarly named it depressing. Gray. When I told people we were going, they got that glazed over sound to their voices, mumbled “how nice” but didn’t mean it. Worst of all, there was Daniel,  President of the I love Berlin club of America. I didn’t want to disappoint him, I didn’t want to have to come up with nice things to say, be vague, skirt the topic. Disliking Berlin would be horrible. My fear was, I would.

Sometimes being proven absolutely stupidly wrong is wonderful.

I feel like I should write about all the things that we saw – true to form, we crammed in most of the big ticket items. Jewish Museum? Check. Brandenburg Gate? Check. Reichstag? Check, at least from the outside. Impressive streets, impressive churches, impressive shopping, check, check and check. Art, architecture, history, modern, Prussian – we even managed a visit to Knut, the famous and very cheeky polar bear star of the Berlin Zoo. I could talk about all of these places and more in detail, describe the fabulously modern buildings at Potsdamer Platz or the thoughtful Liebskind building housing the Jewish Museum. I could geek out over the DDR museum, complete with a furnished apartment and a sit in Trabi. Checkpoint Charlie and the museum about the wall and the Topography of Terror exhibit displayed on the rubble foundations of the Gestapo HQ – all deserve devoted discussion. The problem is, all I want to do is talk about Berlin.

For a city with immense history, Berlin doesn’t spend much time looking backward. Certainly, it says, I understand why you think you’ve come here. Please, be my guest: consider my past glory, revel in my Prussian beauty, mourn my scars – and when you’re done with all that, come talk to me and I’ll show you what really matters.  Because what matters in Berlin is what it IS, not what it was.

It isn’t that the past isn’t here – it is. Oh, how it is. I was overcome with the immensity of many of the places we walked. I braved the crowds and made Mike take my picture in front of the Brandenburg Gate, and if you could zoom in enough, you’d see that my eyes are suspiciously shiny. I was actually choked up walking down Unter den Linden and I told Mike, voice shaky, that I didn’t realize how geeked out I would be by actually being in Berlin. I marveled at how Prussian it was, and how different that was from the Bavarian Germany that I knew. So much German history has never fit for me with the towns I’ve visited near Munich but here, in the capital of capitals, I finally understood the history I had learned years ago to be true.

History was everywhere I looked – especially recent history. In my lifetime, the streets I was casually strolling have been off limits, the city itself carved in two, amputated. Each side must have been constantly aware of its phantom limb, itching and aching in the middle of the night. Amazingly, today, there is little way to note what was where and belonged to whom unless you carry a pre ’89 map in your head. The wall is mostly gone, preserved in a few places behind protective fences; all that remains is a double line of cobblestones meandering oddly through the streets. Photographs of Potsdamer Platz left me openmouthed, amazed at the transformation of bare no man’s land to modern city in such a short time. I remember when the wall fell: photographs and video of people climbing the it, knocking it down, celebrating its demise. I remember the time before, the fear and apprehension, the us versus them, and then, amazingly, I remember the time after when, for all its momentous import, the fall ceased to be thought of at all, as though the wall had never been there. Walking those streets, seeing people who lived through the change, perhaps on the fabled “other side,” seeing the places in the old West that were developed to replace what was walled off, I felt my feet itch. I was there. It was amazing. I’d never considered that recent history could be as exciting as the far past, and I’m grateful to Berlin for teaching me that lesson.

I feel like I’ve contradicted myself, spending paragraphs talking about history after asserting that is isn’t what makes Berlin. The thing is, it isn’t – but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. Instead, it makes Berlin that much more impressive, because with as much as has happened there, Berlin could, like so many cities, rest on its laurels. People would come just for what happened, and the center could be a tourist area, and no one would be the wiser, but Berlin manages to transcend. More than anywhere else I’ve been in Europe, Berlin far exceeds the sum of its parts. All of those wonderful things we saw – they aren’t Berlin. All the history that I soaked up like a greedy sponge – it isn’t Berlin either. You could visit every museum, see every monument, read every posted sign, and if that’s all you saw, if that’s all you came to see –you’d leave having missed the entire place. That sort of tourism works fine in a city like Rome, where what you are there to see is obvious, or Salzburg where you walk through the mountain and into a theme park, but Berlin is vital now, its spirit and continuing evolution trumping its statues and grand buildings. Seeing it has to become interactive; you have to be open to the idea that drinking outside with a space heater and a lap blanket and a bunch of locals is as important as the Kulturforum, perhaps (blasphemy) more.

I get the sense that people actually live in Berlin, not just at the edges but right in the center, shopping at KaDeWe and seeing movies at Sony Center, feeding the seals at the zoo and drinking by the Spree as it flows past the Dom and the museums. The monuments and major buildings were lit up while we were there for a Festival of Lights, and people, very obviously Berliners, not tourists, were clustered in front of every building we saw, watching the light show and seriously setting up cameras to take photos. I liked the levity it takes to turn historical buildings magenta and neon green; yes, it says, these are historical buildings and they should be appreciated, but we are here, today, now, and we’re going to dress them up twenty-first century style.

I wouldn’t send someone to Berlin for their first trip to Europe, or maybe even their fifth. I can imagine that if I had gone there before I’d been to other cities that fit more with what tourists think of as “European” I’ve have been disappointed. There isn’t time travel in Berlin the way there is in Rome – hell, the Nikolaiviertel, a quaint, medieval quarter by the river full of shops and restaurants isn’t old – it was built by the DDR in 1987. My InsideOut guide, printed when the Euro was new, was missing huge chunks of what I saw. Berlin is not static. Instead of waking up in the past, visiting Berlin is waking up in the now, taking part in the daily living of a city that knows how to live well. The city is changing around your ears as you walk, mixing in some new with some old, some east with west, tossing outside influence in for good measure and yet still remaining, somehow, essentially German in a way that I didn’t understand until I was there. I arrived virtually blind, armed with my studies of history and a list from Daniel but a complete lack of understanding about what I would find. I left in love with a city, and I can’t wait to return.

see what I saw ... Berlin