With me its not good cherry eating
// May 10th, 2010 // Theories
I’ve been a Berliner for a mere four weeks and already I’m noticing several slight behavioural kinks not found in my native Leipzigers. If I can borrow just a small moment of your time I’d like to tell you about them, lets begin…..
1. The inner voice need not stay inner
We all have an inner voice, its what keeps us company in the lonely hours. Mine likes to distract me by shouting things like “kill the donkey”, “or with me its not good cherry eating” or the more seductive “hello pretty boy come sit on my knee” when I’m trying to concentrate on important tasks like eating chocolate.
The inner voice is where are thoughts first manifest themselves, from there they run through the feedback loop that is our sanity and if deemed worthy, become the things we speak, or write or do. Think of it like a big production line, down which our earliest ideas travel. At the end is a filtering mechanism I imagine to be a big giant crusher ball, known as ‘sanity’. This swings back and forth crushing to a pulp all of our stupid ideas and thoughts before they can go anywhere dangerous. The best ideas dodge the crusher and come flying out through our mouths, or hands in the case of this here blog post. Usually. Usually…… For if you walk the fine graffiti filled streets of Berlin you’ll see that there are a very high population of people with no internal crusher. Anything can come out at any time, no need to hold back. You’ll spot them easily, on most streets at most times, they’ll be someone just wandering around muttering to himself incoherently. Sometimes a whisper can be directly followed by a SHOUT of nonsense, there are no rules when there is no crusher.
In short, Berlin is base hq of the mental.
2. Customer service is the responsibility of the customer
Germans don’t have a reputation for being the cuddliest of soft bunnies. However retrospectively I see that I was spoilt in Leipzig by the mild indifference I received by the service professionals I encountered. Berlin?! Customer service is an abstract concept still resting in a lost suggestion box somewhere in the town hall. It’s not that people are unfriendly as such, to me that implies that they make the effort to be hostile. Here its more a complete disinterest. Like when a bill you’ve been expecting arrives in the post and you hide it under a pizza box in the hope that if you don’t acknowledge it exists it might go away.
3. Everywhere in Berlin is the new hottest place in Berlin.
Berliners seem to have an overly healthy interested in indentifying where is the current “hottest place in Berlin” at any one particular moment in time. So far I’d say they are doing this without much consensus since everyone keeps telling me a different place is the hottest place. If I were to take the large blue suitcase under my bed, put an ikea lamp in it, spray it in graffiti, break the zip so it didn’t close properly, throw it up a tree in the Treptow park and then put it on immobilien scout as provision frei, casually mentioning that its located in “the new hottest place in berlin”, it’d be rented for 600eur by the end of that very day by a skinny green jeans wearing hipstery in big red plastic sunglasses (assuming the tree was in 1km of a good bio cafe).
Possibly related, hopefully entertaining other posts:
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Daniel Weber
