gin + gelato

Berlin's Bahns & Buses: Gesundbrunnen

2012-01-22T17:38:00.000-08:00

Quite honestly, the biggest train station in northern Berlin is rather boring. In fact, there's not really even much of a station here, just lots of tracks and platforms and a big flat area where the station probably should be. Nevertheless, you can board long distance and regional trains here to just about anywhere, as well as the U-8 and the Ring-Bahn and the S1.

If the station itself isn't so great, the area around it is worth exploring. My favorite Berlin park, Humboldthain (along with its ghosts), is just across the way. The Berlin Wall ran very close to here, and the Bösebrücke is just up the tracks. A flood of people streamed across that bridge, which marked the division between East and West, when the wall came down. Leading right out of the station is Badstrasse, a wild street full of colors and smells and Turkish grocers singing their produce-selling songs. There's a great Lebanese restaurant a couple blocks down from the station, along with some great Turkish bakeries.

Berlin's Bahns & Buses: Olympia Stadion

2012-01-17T19:23:00.000-08:00

It was a dark, cold, damp day in mid-January when I arrived at the Olympia Stadion S-Bahn station. The train was almost empty. The train platforms -- there are many of them, to accommodate the crowds during big soccer games or other events -- were absolutely empty. I suppose it's like this in the middle of a week day in winter, when nothing is happening at the stadium. Still, it was creepy.

Even more creepy were the stadium grounds themselves. They were overwhelming in scale, and overwhelming in their barrenness -- a blank slate on which my imagination could run wild, transposing Leni Riefenstahl images all over the place. The only thing that seemed alive, that escaped the blank rationality of it all was that gnarled tree growing up as if from stone and concrete, all crooked and mysterious. That tree made me feel better.

Even the U-Bahn station was deserted and dark, as if forgotten. I waited there and looked up at the security camera. It glared back at me. When the train came, it was empty, as if it were a ghost from another time.

For my other Berlin's Bahns & Buses posts and photos: Overview & video, Feuerbachstrasse, Deutsche Oper, Westhafen.

Berlin's Bahns & Buses: Westhafen

2012-01-15T02:52:00.000-08:00

S- & U-Bahnhof Westhafen isn't exactly one of Berlin's iconic stations. It's perhaps best known as one of the stops you're likely to use when going to the Ausländerbehörde, an experience most folks would like to forget. Westhafen's on the border of Wedding and Moabit, and in the middle of a major industrial zone: It's in the shadow of a big coal power plant, and next to Berlin's big port, Westhafen, on the Spree River.

But it's got some things going for it, aside from the opportunity to go up on a neighboring bridge and watch big machines make mincemeat of scrap metal over at the port. For one thing, it's right next to one of the coolest Kleingartenkolonies in town, a narrow row of cottages and gardens surrounded on both sides by railroad tracks and utter industrialization. And then there's the art, mostly comprised of letters on tiles in the station. At first, the letters seem to be random. But then one realizes that they tell a story of Heinrich Heine and how he lost his name when he fled to France. The rest of the letters -- in a typeface rejected by the Nazis -- spell out the Declaration of Human Rights. The project was done by artists Françoise Schein and Barbara Reiter in 2000, and the story is nicely told in this video.

Westhafen's Kleingartenkolonie, sandwiched between tracks and tracks.

Berlin's Bahns & Buses: Deutsche Oper

2012-01-12T23:31:00.000-08:00

During my time in Berlin this winter, while my kids and wife were in school and I was supposed to be doing some real work, I got a bit obsessed with expressing my infatuation with the city's public transportation system. I wrote a sort of love letter and video to the U-Bahns, S-Bahns and buses. During the time, I also found myself drawn to the train stations, themselves. So, for my last few days here, I've been riding the rails and taking photos of various Bahnhofs.

Today's feature is the Deutsche Opera (German Opera) stop on the U-2, one of the older lines that cuts right through the center of town going east/west. The stop is in Charlottenburg, in West Berlin, and opens up to the opera itself -- one of three major opera houses currently running in Berlin. I had never been to a real opera before moving to Germany in the summer of 2010. Then, that winter, my family and I made up for it, attending a half-dozen performances in the Deutsche Oper, the Schiller Theatre (filling in for the old, grand Staatsoper, which is being renovated) and the Komische Oper.

My favorite venue is actually the Schiller (just down the street from the Deutsche Oper). It's rather humdrum, and lacks the slick modernity of the Deutsche Oper, or the opulence of the Komisch. But I just like the way the seats are set up at such a steep angle that you're always looking down at the stage. I also like the fact that, in our experience, the most expensive seats in the house didn't all sell, which means they were available to those cheapskates (us) who show up for discount tickets 30 minutes before the show. At the Schiller, we often had some of the best seats in the house for a pittance.

The opera is just another one of those things that the government subsidizes here because it believes that art and culture are necessities. Not only can the average citizen get a cheap ticket at a world-class performance, but the unemployed can pick up an opera ticket for about $4.50. Yes, you read that right. Socialism? If so, socialism is a beautiful thing.

But back to the Bahnhof. This is one of the classic stations in Berlin, with nice tile mosaics, cool font for the signs, and separate mosaics for various composers in the hallway upstairs. For my video/essay about the transport system, go here. For more Berlin Bahn photos: here and there.

Berlin's Trams, Buses and Bahns, Oh my!

2012-01-11T11:58:00.000-08:00

Owning a car sucks. I mean, really: You've got to pay for gas, insurance, oil changes, tires, maintenance. You've got to worry about crashing it. You've got to fret about driving in adverse conditions (traffic). So, it was with great cathartic relief that we sold our car, along with most of our other possessions, when we moved from rural Colorado to Berlin a couple of years ago. After we got here, we had a brief moment during which we thought we needed to buy a car. It passed.

No one needs to own a car in Berlin. A thick and complex public transportation net stretches from one end of the city to the other, so that no matter where you might be, a U-Bahn, S-Bahn, tram or bus is no more than a few blocks and a 10 minute wait away. And once you're in the net, you can get within a few blocks of wherever it is you might want to go. Add to that the fact that Berlin is bike-friendly, with plenty of bike paths and lanes and its lack of topography (making a ride from one side of the city to the other, even on an old Communist-era one-speed, a rather quick and not-too-grueling endeavor), and you've got a city in which cars are superfluous.

Since I don't like cars, I like Berlin. But the public transportation is more than just a car substitute. It's a great medium through which one can see and experience a dynamic, diverse and rather spread out city. At least Joseph Roth thought so. A newspaper columnist in 1920s Berlin, he was one of the greatest chroniclers of the city. In his 1922 column, "The Ride Past the Houses," Roth wrote:

The S-Bahn line goes right past the houses, affording its passengers many curious and interesting sights... Sometimes a ride on the S-Bahn is more instructive than a voyage to distant lands. Experienced travelers will confirm that it is sufficient to see a single lilac shrub in a dusty city courtyard to understand the deep sadness of all the hidden lilac trees anywhere in the world.

Which is why I return from a ride on the S-Bahn full of many sad and beautiful impressions, and when I navigate a little bit of the city, I feel as proud as if I had circumnavigated the globe.

Of course, that was nearly a century ago. Now, with trains, trams and buses going everywhere, it's even more true. Aside from walking, riding buses and trains is the best way to see Berlin, and it's a lot quicker. If you want the typical tourist sights, just hop on Bus 100 at Alexanderplatz, climb up to the top-floor (it's a double-decker, just like the 15 Euro-a-pop sightseeing buses) and relax as you glide past the Brandenburg Gate, the Siegessäule, the Reichstag and Bellevue Palace, embassy alley. And the round trip costs just 2,30 Euro, or about $3; spend four Euros more, and you can spend the whole day riding buses and rails, through every part of the city imaginable. I've been known to do the entire Ring Bahn loop, just to see some of the city's fringe, a stunning view of the Spree near Ostkreuz and a good glimpse of wild street art and abandoned industrial areas.

Yes, and there are the people, too. Berlin trains are nowhere near as animated as, say, those in Naples -- Germans are a bit more zurückhaltend, or restrained. But the trains are packed with humanity of all sorts -- rich and poor, workers in suits and coveralls, old and young. They chat, they stare out at the landscape slipping by, old German ladies lecture parents about their kids' behavior and they read. Yes, read, not stare transfixed at electronic devices. Mostly they read newspapers -- I credit the public transportation system for the success of Germany's print periodicals -- and a few magazines. Also books. It's not crazy to see, in one day, different people reading Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Adorno and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

With all those people in small spaces, it's inevitable that love will eventually blossom. Which is why the BVG, which operates the transportation net, has its own "missed connections" page on its website. Make some meaningful eye contact with someone on the U-1 but were too shy to introduce yourself? Just go to Meine Augenblicke page and post an ad. Here's a rough translation of one from today:

I found you beautiful.
M41
Date: 10/01/2012 16:00
Posted: 10/01/2012 22:15
From: slacker
You (female, brunette, brown wool cap, nose piercing, striped fleece jacket, black boots) rode with me (male, blond, blue parka, gray scarf) in the M41 direction of Sonnenallee S-Bahn station. We stood side by side and I gazed at you often. You gave me looks, too. If I wasn't imagining things, it would be nice if you would contact me so that we can go mini golfing sometime.

Mini golfing? Really? So sweet. The point is, riding the Berlin Bahns isn't just a commute, it's an adventure. It's life. And it's a huge part of life that most of the United States is simply missing out on. Instead, we doom ourselves to sitting for hours in our sealed little steel bubbles, in traffic on some placeless freeway between the suburbs and the strip mall. Too bad.

I wanted to capture the experience of Berlin's public transportation, so I made this video. It's a bit long, and for that I apologize. But just think of it as a 12 minute meditative break (the music, after you get through the intro, facilitates deep thought). Every shot is either of, or from, Berlin's public transportation. Most are from trains or buses, with a bit from trams. The Hauptbahnhof -- a grand, modern station full of shiny steel and glass -- plays a leading role. The gritty Warschaustrasse station in the east gets a small part, as do a few passengers and even a woman plucking her eyebrows in her apartment window, directly across from the S-Bahn station.

Feuerbachstrasse S-Bahn

2012-01-11T07:13:00.000-08:00

I like this station because it's round. And because the font on the sign is very cool. And because the name is translated, roughly, as "fire brook street."

Berlin Bahns: Images

2012-01-09T07:39:00.000-08:00

I'm working on a video -- just for fun -- about Berlin from a train, bus and tram's-eye-view, and so I've been spending a lot of time on the public transportation, which I really enjoy. Here's a few of the images. Video coming to this blog soon.

View of Berlin from the platform of the Hauptbahnhof (main train station)

Crazy trees and church near U-Bahn Friedrich-Wilhelm-Platz

Empty U-Bahn car, U-1.

Berlin New Year Pyrotechnic Orgy

2012-01-03T03:04:00.000-08:00

I used to think American towns on Fourth of July were kind of crazy, r.e. fireworks. But as this video shows, even our "quiet" Berlin neighborhood becomes rather explosive on New Years Eve, or Silvester. High-powered fireworks are sold everywhere leading up to the holiday, and they can be set off with impunity and do. For hours on end. The music in the video -- a bit of sacred to go with the profane -- is by the Tudor Consort.

Quis non posset (The Tudor Consort) / CC BY 3.0

A letter to the CEO of United Airlines

2011-12-14T04:38:00.000-08:00

Jeff Smisek
CEO, Continental/United Airlines
77 West Wacker
Chicago, IL

Dear Mr. Smisek

I recently flew with your company on a trip from Denver to Frankfurt. It was the big leg of a trip I often make, from Boulder, Colo., to Berlin, where my family lives. Usually I fly with Lufthansa, but this time I opted for the home-grown firm, and I thought you might like to hear about one of your customer’s experiences.

First off, let me give a hearty and sincere “Thank You!” for getting me across the Atlantic Ocean in one piece. I do realize things could have turned out a lot worse, and I’m grateful that your pilots kept the plane in the air. They are to be commended.

I wish I could go on to say how you put your German counterparts to shame in other departments. I cannot.

In hindsight, I’d have to say that my problems began in Denver, while I waited to board and one of your employees asked that passengers volunteer to check their carry-on luggage. Since only a few of my compatriots stepped up, I decided I should pitch in. It worried me a bit, because my carry-on had all my clothes for the next five weeks in it, including my only winter coat (it’s cold in Berlin) and a brand-new camera. But I figured if you could get a multi-million dollar jet over the ocean, you should be able to do the same with my bag. Besides, I was less than enthusiastic about participating in the battle for the overhead bins, which almost never ends well.

The Denver to Dulles leg went splendidly, thank you. And the movie wasn’t even half bad, despite the fact that the censors dubbed “jackhole” in the place of “a#@hole,” which really doesn’t work well. I did have a fairly tight connection, so I got a nice jog in through the Dulles terminal -- always nice to stretch the legs during such a trip -- arriving at the gate just in time to board the flight to Frankfurt. I settled into my seat, and prepared for the long ride. Then I noticed that everyone else was watching movies on their video monitors. I also noticed my monitor was producing a never-ending stream of gobbledygook. At first, I figured it would fix itself as soon as we took off. Except we never took off.

After we had waited for about 45 minutes, the pilot announced that there were mechanical problems with the plane and we would have to wait another hour before takeoff. I’m 100 percent in favor of fixing mechanical problems before takeoff, even if it means a bit of a wait. After all, a few days earlier, one of your planes had an emergency landing in Grand Junction on its way from Denver to L.A. because of a bad engine. Such a landing in the ocean or on a Greenland glacier would be decidedly less pleasant, especially since I did not have access to my aforementioned winter coat. My building anxiety (flying scares me in the best conditions) would have been eased had I been able to watch a movie or, even better, have a nice, stiff drink. Yet my video monitor was still on the fritz (everyone else’s still worked fine), and the only alcohol flowing was among the plutocrats in first class. I pushed my flight-attendant call button repeatedly, to no avail. Finally, after the hour was up, the plane was fixed and we were getting ready (again) for takeoff, I hailed a passing flight attendant. He looked at my monitor and said, “Well, it might work later.” I explained that it hadn’t worked for over an hour. “Okay,” he said, already a bit impatient, “I’ll try to reset it.” He did. It worked, and I got to see the first part of Contagion, a movie I have been wanting to see, even if it is a questionable choice on an overseas flight filled with germ-carriers.

Or at least it worked until the PA sparked up with another announcement: The problem with the pressurization/air-conditioning was not fixed, after all. The wait would continue. I tried to get back to the movie, but my video monitor was broken again. I flagged down another flight attendant. She reset the monitor. Back to Contagion and a now-building anxiety, on many fronts. Instead of handing out free cocktails, as they should have done after we had sat in the plane for nearly two hours, the flight attendants handed out free pretzels.

The PA kept kicking in to tell us that we would have to continue to wait, sending my video monitor into gobbledygook each time. Finally, after we had been on the plane for approximately three hours, we were told that we were switching planes. We de-boarded. We waited at our new gate for another hour and a half. We were told we had to board very orderly, and quickly, or else the flight would be cancelled. Yet we were also forced to wait until all the first class folks leisurely made their way onto the plane. We took off, a mere 4.5 hours late. This time my video monitor worked, but Contagion, the movie I had made it halfway through, was not a choice. I did note, with relief, that the delay gave the baggage folks plenty of time to get my luggage onto the correct plane.

I paid $1212 for this flight. Typically, I pay about the same for the Denver nonstop-to-Frankfurt (and then to Berlin) on Lufthansa. On Lufthansa, even those in the coach-class are offered warm, wet towels before meals to wash their hands and refresh their faces. Then the pre-dinner drinks -- including a variety of cocktails and wine -- come, free of charge. The food is airplane food, but it’s usually quite edible, even tasty. Wine is offered, free, during meals, and flight attendants are always happy to top off your glass. After dinner, they bring around Calvados and Bailey’s. Yes, it, too, is free, or rather, it’s included in the price of the ticket.

On United, I received a meal that would have violated the Eighth Amendment had it been served in a maximum security prison. The “pasta” was mushy, covered with some sort of pea and tomato sauce that could only have been concocted from the plate-scrapings of last month’s first class offerings. It was so lacking in flavor that I used my entire salt and pepper packets to make it edible, and even still I barely choked it down. The bread roll was styrofoam-white and cold; the “spread” some strange dairy/soy stuff that made margarine seem like a delicacy. I ordered a wine to try to wash it down, and to her credit, the flight attendant offered me one free glass (normally $7 for some cheap swill that pairs best with beans and weenies heated up in a can under a bridge) “because of the delay.” Now, I know it’s not easy to run an airline in these hard times, and you’re just cutting costs where you can. But I also know that you got paid $4.4 million last year; it just seems like maybe you could put, oh, I don’t know, $.1 million of that into coming up with at least quasi-edible food for your customers. Maybe?

My original plan had been to get to Frankfurt, collect my luggage and make it to the train -- where a first-class berth awaited me courtesy of a special online offer -- just in time to zip off to Berlin. I wanted to use the opportunity to use the aforementioned camera to shoot some video of the German landscape sliding by for a project I’m working on. I got to Frankfurt alright (4.5 hours late). The former-carry-on-but-checked-at-the-gate luggage, containing aforementioned camera, clothes and winter coat, did not.

I staggered out of the baggage claim (22 hours had passed since I embarked on my travels) and found a credit card pay-phone on which to call my wife to tell her how late I’d be. My repeated, very expensive attempts at the call (I had the wrong number) apparently alarmed my bank back home, which triggered the deactivation of said credit card. Not knowing that, I headed to the train ticket counter, where I was told that my special offer ticket was invalidated since I missed my train and I’d have to buy a new ticket, for 194 Euros. My sanity continued to falter, but I took hold of myself, made my way to the United counter, and begged the woman there to put me on a flight to Berlin. Not possible, she said, but United would reimburse me for my new train ticket at some later date. I’m still hopeful this will happen.

I went back to the train office, and told them to put me on the fastest train to Berlin. They ran my credit card. It was declined. I started to see blue spots everywhere I looked, and pressure built in the back of my skull. You see, I needed the credit card to pay for the phone call to my bank to get the credit card reactivated, yet the credit card, obviously, did not work.

Luckily, I had a few Euros left over from my last trip, and started stuffing them into a pay phone at a horrid rate while my bank put me on hold once, then again. Then I was cut off because I ran out of change. I went to a fast-food sausage joint for more coins, and on the next call the customer service rep hung up on me (perhaps because I sounded slightly dangerous at this point?). None of this is the direct fault of United, of course, but had I arrived in Frankfurt on time, none of it would have been necessary, either.

Finally, I reached the correct person, my credit card was fixed, and I got on the train, which turned out to be relaxing and quite enjoyable (and the light was perfect for video but, alas, I had no camera). I arrived in Berlin eight hours later than planned. Too bad they don't run trains from Denver to Frankfurt.

I do want to thank you for the bonus miles I received for my troubles. I am booked on another United flight next month to get back to the States (oh how I wish it were on Lufthansa again), and I thought that I could maybe use those miles -- in addition to others I have -- to upgrade to business class to make the trip tolerable. When I tried to use your website to make the upgrade, however, it told me that I don’t have any reservations (despite the fact that other parts of your website confirm that, yes, indeed, I do have reservations). I’m guessing that when I call, I’ll be told that my reservations aren’t the right kind to upgrade, which happened recently when a friend with a lot of miles tried to upgrade my ticket on the troubled flight I've been going on about.

In any event, I won’t be volunteering to check my luggage at the gate. Assuming I have any luggage that is -- though I'm hoping it's on its way, it remains lost, somewhere between Berlin and Denver. (UPDATE: The luggage arrived intact, 24 hours late!)

Thank you for listening.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Thompson

Return of the Corn (at Taos Pueblo)

2011-10-31T20:17:00.000-07:00

The roads that wind across the Taos Pueblo reservation pass through a cultural and environmental mosaic of a type common in the rural West, where natural beauty and human poverty overlap and sometimes blend. Here is a thicket of wild plums growing up along a lush irrigation ditch, the Sangre de Cristo mountains rising up as backdrop. Here is a tiny stuccoed house, accompanied by an old Chevy Chevelle that appears to be slowly melting into the shrubs and dirt. Nearby, a burned out, roofless shack sits undisturbed while a Rez dog, his thick fur dreadlocked with dirt and neglect, rambles in the dust alongside Deer Jaw road.

Occasionally, this intruder notices a shock of bright green. Each one is a cornfield, the maturing stalks emerald in the sunlight. It's surprising because after World War II many farmers in Taos Pueblo and in other parts of the West gave up traditional farming.

But farming, including corn growing, is slowly coming back to the Pueblo thanks to grassroots efforts that have sprouted over the last decade, such as the sustainable agriculture initiative and the Red Willow growers cooperative. Now, the return of the corn is also being helped along by a couple of guys who were looking for changes in their own lives, and by an old tractor named the Red Buffalo.

Read the rest of this post here.

Bats, bear poop and prairie dogs: A country boy meets the urban wild

2011-10-12T09:02:00.000-07:00

In the beginning was the bat. Roger, Isolde,* and I sipped margaritas on a warm August evening in their Boulder condo. Suddenly, Roger slammed down his drink, pointed to the ceiling and screamed, “Look out!” As a black, papery blur fluttered around the living room, I dived to the floor and slithered under the table. Roger, more experienced in such matters**, whacked the bat to the floor with his flip flop, trapped it in a bowl and relocated to the out of doors. After we determined that the house was clear, I crawled out from under the table and noticed a scratch on my arm that wasn’t there before. “Rabies is 100 percent fatal,” Roger said. Then he mixed another round.

The bat incident, which occurred just a few days after I moved to Boulder, was my initiation into the urban wild. I’ve spent most of my life in rural areas, and many days and nights exploring the depths of so-called wilderness. Yet my encounters with wildlife, especially potentially hazardous ones, have been fairly scantº. That is, until I moved here, to Colorado’s sprawling and heavily populated Front Range metropolitan area.

I knew Boulder was fraught with hazards, from yoga instructors, clad in curve-and-crevice-revealing spandex pants striking poses in upscale coffee shops, to guys in short shorts yammering on about body mass index, to the high-priced frozen yogurt treats that, only after you get through the checkout line, you realize are made for dogs. But wild animals? Yes. It turns out that whether I’m on a trail run or my daily commute, I’ve become a sort of suburban Craig Childs, with every bike path and cul de sac offering the neck-prickling danger of some animal encounter.

Read the rest at the High Country News Goat blog (where I'll be doing most of my posting while I'm here in Boulder).

Rain Bow meets Sun Flower

2011-08-21T13:01:00.000-07:00

Darkness and light in the North Fork

2011-08-21T12:25:00.000-07:00

Berlin to Boulder

2011-08-04T11:01:00.000-07:00

I've been back in the US of A for just over a month now, and the culture shock is waning. Kinda. After spending a year in Berlin, my wife, daughters and I came back for the summer. I'll be sticking around for another nine months, as a Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism Fellow at CU Boulder. I'm super excited about the opportunity; I'll be taking classes, reporting and writing, with a focus on environmental issues in the West.

Which is just what I focused on for several months while still in Berlin: I wrote a monster of a story for High Country News about global economic influences on the extractive industries of the West. It's some crazy stuff. Check out the story, and accompanying infographics here. I'll start posting here -- about being back in the US and other personal musings -- again in mid- to late August.

I come from the land of no history

2011-06-15T06:18:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, being the only American in the room can be a little, er, embarrassing. I find myself in that position quite often, especially in German class.

I've taken nearly five months of German classes since arriving in Berlin. Actually, I should call them integration courses, since that's the official name, and that's also the goal: integration. The German government wants to mold me and my fellow Auslanders (foreigners) into good Germans. So they require folks like me to take these courses in order to keep my residency permit. Mostly, the courses just focus on language, but they also sneak a bit of German culture, politics and history into the mix. Out of five different classes, each with 17 to 25 people, I've always been the lone American. As such, I've also been an object of curiosity in my classes.

Probably about 1/3 of my current classmates come from various parts of Africa, another third comes from Poland and other former Soviet-bloc countries, and the final third is a mix, with folks from China, Vietnam, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Brazil. And then there's me: The Newbie. I call myself that because I've only been in Germany for less than a year; most of my classmates have been here for at least three years, some as many as 23 years (Yes, 23 years, and they're still taking German classes. Whether this speaks to their language-learning abilities or to the difficulty of the German language, I can't say). I also call myself the Newbie because I come from the U.S., which is not only part of the "New World," but which also is sort of new, or maybe young, in other ways, which were impressed upon me in class recently.

We were reading a sketch in which a middle-aged guy looked back on his life in Germany, and remembered when the Berlin Wall was built, remembered seeing Kennedy during his visit, remembered the Wall coming down, etc. That prompted my teacher to ask the class what historic events we had witnessed. Everyone had a story: The Africans of Civil War and strife, the Poles of the end of Communism, the Pakistani of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. As one student after another told his story, I scanned my memory for something, anything, that would compare. 9/11? It was dramatic, sure, but I was thousands of miles away when it happened. I compiled a mental list of other big events, and as I did so, I realized that while I had indeed experienced a lot of history, I had mostly done so from some distance, i.e., via the television.

I started panicking. What was I going to say? Should I be honest and tell them about the really important moments of American history that I had witnessed? The revelation on television about our former President, his intern and a cigar? The invention of the iPhone? Or something even more critical to world history: The final episode of Seinfeld? Or Lost? Or the Sopranos?

Damn it's embarrassing to be an American sometimes. Luckily, thanks to someone's narrative about suffering under the hands of Slobodan Milosevic's terror, the conversation changed to: Who was your country's worst despot. I relaxed a little bit as a picture of Dick Cheney, riding in his wheelchair all Dr. Strangelove-like at Obama's inauguration, popped into my head. Finally, I was up. I opened my mouth to speak, but the rest of the class answered for me: "Bush!"

Berlin's temporary Thai-town

2011-06-05T09:03:00.000-07:00

Today, we went to Thai Park. This made me very happy.

When we first arrived in Berlin nearly a year ago, we simply expected that it would be filled with great foods from all over the world. After all, it's a big, hip, happening and perhaps even the coolest city on the planet. Therefore, we should be able to find some hole-in-the-wall, authentic-to-the-point-of-being-kinda-scary, Thai, Vietnamese or Indian food on every street corner. No?

No.

Berlin may be teeming with fantastic, cutting-edge art, dance, lectures, the opera, music and even -- as we experienced just a few weeks ago -- wild parties replete with Gypsy jazz in an abandoned insane asylum. But the food scene isn't quite up to par -- doesn't even touch Portland/SanFran/Berkeley/LA. Sure, we've found great Lebanese fare, and stumbled upon a sublime Italian restaurant not far from our house. But the offerings from Asia have disappointed. They are bland or overpriced or laden with so much MSG that Wendy slips into a hallucinogenic daze shortly after eating.

Dong Xuan Center.

So, last December we headed way out into the East and visited the Dong Xuan center. It's a cluster of kind of rough-looking warehouses nestled amidst the bigblock apartment buildings of the former DDR, and serves as Berlin's Vietnam-town. Even on the coldest day of the year, with snow piled everywhere, the place bustled. Long hallways are punctured with doorways leading into shops, some tiny, some huge, that sell wholesale clothing, nail salon supplies, cheap plastic items and groceries. A guy can buy a live carp and a cucumber-thingy that resembles extra-terrestrial genitalia, get a haircut and a manicure, and buy a Gucci knockoff, all in one building. And it has restaurants, too. Delicious. Authentic. Cheap. But soon after we began the long trek home, the MSG -- or something -- kicked in, and Wendy tried to pick a fight with a lamppost that she mistook for a Neo-Nazi.

If Dong Xuan was good, Thai Park was way better. We'd heard about it long ago: A park where a bunch of Thai people gather and sell food. I envisioned something like the local Turkish market, only with Thai food and goods sold out of kiosks and booths instead. But when we wandered into Preußenpark, we quickly realized that we were in for a brand new experience.

There are no booths or kiosks here. Instead, the vendors set up on blankets and under umbrellas on the ground, and operate out of minimalist camp kitchens that are at ground level (all the cooks are actually sitting on the ground, operating little charcoal or gas fired grills). It's totally illegal, I'm sure. And eating there during one of the worst food-related e-coli outbreaks ever might not have been completely wise. Still, since the source of e-coli is still a mystery, we could be infecting ourselves with our oatmeal each morning, so we figured we'd go for it.

Offerings ranged from a salty/sweet lime drink, to all kinds of alcoholic cocktails, to octopus on a stick, to what I suspect were fried bamboo worms. We got four pork satays, two rice puffers, two Thai iced coffees, three spring rolls, two bags full of fresh fruit, a bowl of pho-like soup with meatballs made out of what I think was beef offal, and a few other things. We spent no more than 20 Euros for the whole shebang, probably less, but as I was suffering from some weird infection of the eye, I was relegated to lying on the picnic blanket in a slightly feverish state, taking a bite now and then, and watching the surreal scene unfold before me, and didn't partake as much as I'd liked in the perusing and purchasing of the food.

Nor do I have any photographs, which is kind of too bad, but I'm fairly sure the dude who sold me the satay muttered something about the Thai mafia, my nostrils and live, flesh-eating worms if I were to somehow expose these open-air kitchens to the world.

So, instead of photos, I'll try to communicate what I saw while lying in the grass: The Thai folks sit in the shade of a rainbow of umbrellas or under the big trees, the light trickling down through the leaves. Out in the searing sun, the Germans lie out, one after another, offering their flesh up to the sun. Germans are always doing this, as though daring the skin cancer gods to punish them. The pungent aroma of marijuana smoke from somewhere nearby. When we arrive at noon, maybe 15 vendors are selling food. More and more arrive with each passing hour, including a group of kind of beady-eyed guys (see Mafia reference, previous paragraph) who quickly set up a square of folding tables encircled by folding chairs. It turns out to be some kind of gambling racket.

On the other side of us, a makeshift massage parlor has emerged as if from the dust and grass of the park. A Thai woman with cateye glasses vigorously rubs a nubile young German woman clad in a tiny bikini. My eye aches, and inexplicably, an epiphany: I should have become an accountant. The urge quickly disappears. Light trickles through the leaves, and the marijuana odor lingers.

Behind us, some older German folks have set up their own cooking operation, and they sit on parkbenches with TV tray things before them off of which they eat slabs of meat, very white bread, and potatoes smothered in a creamy white sauce. I'm not sure if this is an affront, or an effort to join in. A Thai woman walks urgently from blanket to blanket, carrying a big blue plastic trash bag. She's not collecting trash, but seems to be selling something from the bags. She doesn't stop at our blanket.

Ahhh, but the food. The food. Grilling, frying, boiling. Crispy, salty, sweet and sour. Meat and sprouts and electric-colored cocktails. I lie on the blanket and let the aromas waft over me. My eye hurts. But I am happy.

Bird in a Berlin Brick Wall (& other textures from this morning)

2011-03-09T07:16:00.000-08:00

Bird in brick wall that faces our apartment's kitchen window.

Graffiti in forgotten corner of vacant lot next to LIDL parking lot.

Corner, ExRotraprint building

Sign, Wiesenstrasse.

Sprechen Sie Deutsch! Linguistic bigotry on a Berlin bus

2011-03-01T08:07:00.000-08:00

On a recent Friday afternoon here in Berlin, the sun was shining and the temperature actually rose above freezing for once. It was enough to put Wendy and Elena and me into especially high spirits as we waited for the bus in well-heeled Zehlendorf, eating some treats from the nearby bakery. We talked about how the Germans have a talent not only for making good cake, but also for creating really healthy and tasty baked goods, like the sunflower-seed thing we were eating. As we were speaking amongst ourselves we were, naturally, speaking in English.

Apparently, that's an offensive act around these parts.

Also waiting for the bus was a lumbering woman, perhaps in her sixties, who looked as if she had eaten just a few too many cans of offal. She glared at us and, finally, as we were getting on the bus, she muttered to Wendy, in German: "When you are in Germany, you must speak German!"

"Entschuldigung?" Wendy asked. The Frau repeated herself more loudly. Before Wendy could react, we were hurried onto the bus and headed for the upper deck. The woman was physically incapable of making it up the steps, which is a good thing, because had she stayed near us, Wendy might just have decked her; she seethed for the rest of the day (as did I).

Don't get me wrong. No matter what country I'm in, I try to speak the native language when addressing shopkeepers, waiters or strangers, no matter how garbled my sentences are. I truly want to become bilingual, and have spent the last several months devoting my days to Deutsch classes, so that I can get through a meeting with a bureaucrat without my head imploding. But English is my mother tongue, and when I'm having a private conversation with my English-speaking family, even in a public place, I'm going to do it in English.

On the one hand, the grumpy woman's remark was probably nothing to get upset about: She was probably just having a bad day, upset that she had missed the special on 10 kilos of liverwurst -- and saw this happy American family as the perfect target for her bitterness. It was an isolated incident of rudeness, and one that we should just forget.

The problem is, it wasn't all that isolated.

Since the day we arrived in Berlin eight months ago, the language barrier has been more than just a matter of us speaking English while everyone else spoke German. The linguistic roadblock has been fortified by a sort of morality as well, an under and overtone of: Thou shalt speak German! It manifested itself in the immigration office, when the bureaucrats refused to acknowledge that they understood English (though it eventually became clear that they did). It even manifested itself when we were still in the U.S. When Wendy received her German citizenship (via a German law that gives citizenship to the descendants of those who were de-citizened by the Nazis), the secretary at the consulate in Denver was dumbfounded and clearly irritated by the fact that Wendy, now a German, didn't speak Deutsch. "Perhaps," we should have replied, "she would speak German had your grandparents not tried to exterminate hers." We held our tongues.

This linguistic bigotry isn't limited to us by any means. The big integration/multiculturalism/immigration debate in Germany and other parts of Europe, when it's not concerned with Muslim headscarves, is about outsiders learning and speaking the language. When Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave a speech in Germany recently, he urged Turkish immigrants here to learn Turkish first, then German, throwing the native politicians into a rage. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle responded by saying that integration is impossible without learning German and: "Children who grow up in Germany must learn German as the very first thing." T-Mobile, the telecommunications giant, was even taken to task last summer for using English in its marketing campaigns.

Turn on the television here and you can watch almost any ten-year-old, washed up American sitcom you want; and the movie theaters show all the Hollywood hits and then some. But if you're hoping to hear Seinfeld's slightly irritating voice tossing zingers at his friends, you can forget it: Television and films are all dubbed into German. No, not subtitled, dubbed, like 1950s-Godzilla-movies-dubbed. I'ver heard all kinds of reasons for this -- Germans don't like to read (Ha!), the dubbing industry is huge in Germany and abandoning it would crush the economy, etc. But the real reason is that dubbing allows Germans to digest plenty of foreign pop culture without hearing too much of a foreign language.

Germans, in other words, don't want their language to be diluted by foreign influences. They are striving for linguistic purity. Think about it for a minute, and this linguistic nationalism, as I call it, starts sounding rather sinister, especially here in the Vaterland.

Let me be clear: Germany as a society is hypersensitive to its role in 20th Century history. The country is collectively conscious of the fact that it perpetrated one of the worst atrocities in human history, and did so not so long ago, and it has taken great pains to atone for those sins. Its constitution, its laws, and much of day-to-day life has been fashioned with that in mind: Just this week, a Canadian tourist was jailed after doing the heil Hitler salute in front of the Reichstag. Toleranz is not only a buzzword thrown around by lefties, but also a part of the official jargon, and most Germans I've met are not only very tolerant, compassionate people, but also are multilingual and like to speak in English.

Yet, linguistic Intoleranz not only thrives here, but is widely accepted. My German classes have been filled with smart, skilled, well-educated people from all over the world. They are in professional fields where business is either conducted in English, or language only plays a small part (technical fields, electronic engineering, etc). They have been denied jobs here because their German -- though they are perfectly capable of carrying on intelligent conversations -- wasn't quite good enough. An Iraqi economist, who has been in Germany for 10 years and worked eight of those as a bike mechanic in another German city, can't get a job as a bike mechanic in Berlin until he gets a German language certificate (though he can speak day-to-day German just fine). It seems not to matter how adept one is at overhauling a bottom bracket or adjusting a derailleur, he's not getting a job 'til he gets all his ders, dies, and dases in line. He's yet another skilled immigrant who's unemployed because of linguistic discrimination.

Indeed, linguistic bigotry is considered by some to be "among the last legal forms of discrimination left to Western employers." And when immigrants without acceptable German can't get jobs, it naturally causes unemployment to be higher among immigrants. Anti-immigration forces can then hold up those numbers as proof that immigration is poisoning Germany and threatens the culture and quality of life of the natives.

I write all of this from a place of relative privilege: English, of course, is spoken everywhere, even if the bureaucrats want to try to deny it. The world of consumerism and business is saturated with English words; radio stations play almost all English-language music, most of it American "classic rock." And no, it's not dubbed. In spite of that, I'm still looked down upon for speaking my native language. Imagine what it must be like then if your mother tongue is Arabic, or Farsi.

Germany's not the only place this happens. Many American states have established English as the "official language." While proponents of the movement try on the one hand to paint it as a way to unify a disparate nation, they turn around and use alarmist, nationalistic and bigoted language to rile up their supporters. Official language laws may pertain only to official business, but they are often used as justification to prohibit people from speaking their own languages, even amongst themselves. And, aside from discriminating against immigrants, such laws are a slap in the face to Native Americans who are struggling to save their own languages. Still, it's hard to imagine even an ignoramus in some backward state walking up to a family speaking amongst themselves in German and excoriating them for not speaking English. If they did, the southern Utah/northern Arizona tourist industry would die a quick death, dependent as it is on Europeans who do not necessarily leave their native languages at home when they visit.

It's time for Germany to accept that it is part of the global culture, just as it's part of the global economy. Döner kebaps and falafel are more popular than Currywurst, and that's okay. Berlin's identity lies not in its nordic roots, nor in properly conjugating German verbs, but in diversity and cosmopolitanism; it's not about getting the articles right, it's about sitting in the subway and hearing conversations in Polish, Turkish, Arabic and Spanish and German, all at the same time.

And our poor antagonist, the woman who just couldn't stand to hear us speaking amongst ourselves in English, was subjected to just that. Just after the bus started rolling, a group of men sitting around the woman started an animated, loud conversation, audible even to us way up in the top deck. They spoke in a Slavic language, not German. As for me, I'm going to keep studying German in the hope that someday, that woman will scold us again. Then, I'll be able to tell her exactly what I think, in a way even she'll understand.

Like a Berlin cowboy...

2011-03-01T01:56:00.000-08:00

Today, while I was wandering around the African Quarter -- it's been called that forever, but in recent years it has actually become a magnet area for African immigrants -- I stumbled upon this place: Randy Rudd's Lucky Star Western Store. It wasn't open yet, but the guy across the street told me it had been in there for at least 30 years, and that people riding Harleys and great big cars shopped there (my rudimentary understanding of his mumbled German). Soon I'll go back and get the rest of the story.

Tulip dreams

2011-02-27T22:42:00.000-08:00

Winter's hanging on to Berlin with a vengeance. And all I have is this tulip on our windowsill that bloomed in the sun then faded two days later.

The Ghosts of Humboldthain

2011-02-22T03:16:00.000-08:00

Only when winter is here, and the sky is an ashen blanket pulled over the city, do I notice the way a green film covers the trunks of the trees. Only in winter, when the gnarled branches of those trees reach into the pallid mist, and the dead leaves are slowly rotting into the earth, do I notice the thick slab jutting out of the ground of Humboldthain Park. I had walked here before and seen the monolith, but had dismissed it as another piece of neglected landscape architecture. But this concrete wall -- yes I can see that now -- is six feet thick. On its face are old windows, bricked shut, with steel hinges each the size of my fist.

There’s only one thing this could be. I search for a sign, a plaque, the remnants of some Denkmal, or monument, or anything that might tell me what it is. But there is nothing. Only this artificial hill, built from the detritus of bombed out buildings, its foundation the old wall of a Nazi bunker that couldn’t be destroyed.

Humbholdthain Park is one of Berlin’s green-space gems. It’s about 2,000 feet long, and almost as wide. A big Sommerbad, or outdoor swimming pool, is tucked in among the trees, along with an elegant rose garden, a small soccer court, and plenty of space. The trees are so dense that even in the leafless winter, one cannot see halfway across the park. And, unlike most of Berlin, the park actually has varied topography: A sort of valley in the park’s center is shielded from the urban bustle by two hills on the park’s edges. For the month or so when a few inches of snow covers the ground, kids on sleds rip down the smaller of the hills; runners do laps up and down the wide, smooth trail of the larger hill.

Like all of Berlin, Humboldthain has its ghosts. Jutting out of the top of the bigger of two hills is a pair of identical concrete blocks that look, even from up close, like overbuilt observation platforms. In fact, this is the northern edge of a massive, World War II bunker. Anti-aircraft guns shot at Allied planes as their bombs laid waste to the city. The bunkers themselves, which were built under Hitler’s orders at the beginning of the war, could hold thousands of civilians during an air raid.

While the towers – or Flakturm – couldn’t save the city, the bunkers turned out to be virtually impenetrable. The invading Russians, after their artillery failed to pierce the thick walls, had to skirt around them to reach the city’s center. After the war, the French occupied the Wedding district of Berlin, in which Humboldthain lies. Using something like 30 tons of TNT, they tried to demolish the bunkers. The north wall refused to collapse. So around the hulking structure the French piled up rubble – some from the bunker, some from a nearby church that had to be demolished, and some from surrounding neighborhoods, which, like all of Berlin, were bombed beyond recognition -- and built a hill.

Strangely enough, I learned most of this from an American TV show after I had lived near and walked in Humboldthain for several months. I did some more Internet research and uncovered a few more facts and wartime photographs. In recent years, people have become more familiar with the big bunker because a group has started giving tours of the “Berlin Underworld,” which includes a trip into the bunker’s innards (the outside walls, meanwhile, make for one of the only “natural” rock-climbing crags around). But the wall that I later found – clearly that of a second bunker -- is never mentioned anywhere. It’s almost as though everyone wishes it would just melt back into the earth, not a shred remaining, not even in our memories.

And that’s understandable. One need not go far in Berlin to find a monument reminding us of the atrocities committed here between 1933 and 1945. The Holocaust Memorial is the most visible and striking, but the Stumbling Blocks – shiny blocks embedded in the sidewalks engraved with details about Jews who were murdered or deported from the building or neighborhood – are equally painful. Dozens of other plaques, monuments and Denkmals are scattered across the city, each intended to remember the past so that we won’t let it happen again.

Just as a conscious effort has been made to remember and learn from those horrors, a parallel effort has been made to erase or simply ignore anything left over from that time that might be used to glorify the Third Reich or war in general. It seems to be a well-aimed jab at Albert Speer, the Nazi architect, and his theory of “ruin value.” He wanted to construct monstrosities that would continue to remind people of the Third Reich long after the Reich had collapsed and the structures had fallen down, much like Roman and Greek ruins still stand as reminders of ancient civilizations. Germans, to their credit, have done quite a bit to eliminate the ruins – not to mention the ruin value – of most of the work of Speer and his colleagues. Hitler’s bunker is under non-descript lot next to a Chinese restaurant, and until just a few years ago there weren't even signs marking its presence. Huge Flakturms in Tiergarten were successfully annihilated after the war, and are now gone.

Still, some ruins remain, like those in Humboldthain. They seem to be telling us that, no matter what we might do to forget, the landscape always remembers.

In his essay, “The Necessity for Ruins,” John Brinckerhoff Jackson writes: "A monument can be nothing more than a rough stone, a fragment of ruined wall as at Jerusalem, a tree, or a cross. Its sanctity is not a matter of beauty or of use or of age; it is venerated not as a work of art or as an antique, but as an echo from the remote past suddenly become present and actual."

Yes. Which is why, with this particular ruin, we can rejoice to see such beautiful graffiti on its face, and why we don’t cringe at the climbers’ bolts sticking out of the concrete next to the bricked up windows. And when I walk over those hills, the dog futilely chasing after rabbits and birds, I can’t help but think about what lies underneath, and can’t help but imagine a certain darkness seeping out of that wall, out of that rubble, and emanating up through the rotting leaves.

Bunker Art

Winter's day in Rehberg

2011-02-17T11:05:00.000-08:00

Rehberg Park is a huge expanse of grassy glades and dense trees, some trails and even an outdoor movie theatre. A lot of Berliners look down on the Wedding district of town, but Rehberg, not to mention the adjacent Goethe Park, Schiller Park (just a few blocks from Rehberg), the Panke River path, and tons of other green spaces make Wedding one of the best parts of the city. We're within walking distance of all of them. These are recent pics from Rehberg.

Berlin: Coolest city on the planet?!

2011-02-10T08:57:00.000-08:00

They are now saying -- again, apparently -- that Berlin is, as the Hollywood Reporter puts it, "the coolest city on the planet." It may be, but when the Reporter's attributing the coolness to the fact that Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and their kind have made Potsdamer Platz their "second home" is a tad bit absurd. For one thing, Postdamer Platz is an American-style architectural monstrosity. For another thing, I've never seen Angelina there or anywhere else in Berlin.

I'd say the Christian Science Monitor -- in a really good, in-depth article about Germany's rise as a "mini-superpower" and Berlin's becoming a real European capital -- summed it up better here:

That gives rebuilt Berlin something of an open and unfinished air. It's been compared to a combination of Boston and Washington. Social hierarchies here are newer than in traditional capitals of old Europe. You can wear your jeans to the opera. Apartments are huge by European standards, and cheap. Food is also inexpensive.

Yet for all the scrubbing and shine, Berlin is a city where 1 out of 5 inhabitants is on welfare. The German capital is poorer than the nation it oversees.

Low costs have made the city a magnet for artists and writers. By some estimates, more than 65,000 artists reside here. It is also an unofficial playground for the under-30 "globorati" who fly in on cheap flights from Barcelona, Spain, and Rome.

But neither story can answer the question: If Berlin's so cool, what's a guy like me doing here? Why do so many people have mullets, and listen to David Hasselhof? Why is there so much canned meat in the grocery stores, and why is Currywurst -- chopped up hot dogs smothered in curry powder and spicy ketchup -- the city's signature food? And if it's so damned hip, how is it possible that this godawfully ugly building monopolizes the view out our front window:

An apple in Naples

2011-02-08T09:11:00.000-08:00

An apple. Two, actually, on a white plate. They were not sliced and put into some buttery pastry, or ground down and frozen into gelato, or zapped with some beam that broke them down into their pure molecular form. They were just apples, their peels -- a burnished off-red color with no shine at all -- completely intact. A long stem, with a leaf attached, still jutted out of one. We were in a dimly lit little osteria on a side street in Naples. The thick green glass of the label-free bottle was almost empty and our bellies pleasantly full. Donna Teresa, for whom the place was named and its sole cook, sat on a stool, watching her patrons. The waitress -- or rather, I suspect, Teresa's daughter, beautiful but who also looked tired and almost apologetic that her mother's food was so good -- brought us our desert: two apples, on a plate, with two knives. That's when I fell in love with Naples, a city of chaos and history and crime and beauty. A place where one's senses are constantly under assault.

My wife Wendy, daughters Lydia and Elena, and I had come to Naples three days earlier almost by accident. We flew into Rome, and intended to stay there for a week, seeing the city and its surroundings; I had hoped to find Rome's best gelato and Negroni. But Wendy has a hard time sitting still, and after a three-day whirlwind tour of the Vatican, the Forum, the Colosseum, "Invader's" street art, Trastevere and Testaccio; and after sampling several off-the-beaten path Roman rosticcerias, no fewer than eight gelaterias and a negroni or two, we decided to head further south. Naples was less than two-hours away by train, at just 57 Euros for the whole family. So, why not?

In retrospect, it might have been too much to go directly from the zurückhaltend populace of Berlin to Naples. Luckily, Rome helped acclimate us to what we would experience when we got out of the Montesanto metro station in a bustling hillside Napoli neighborhood: a full-on sensual battering. Bright orange storefronts beckoned. Through the window of a barber shop, we saw a man sitting helplessly in the chair, his hair half shorn, as the two barbers yelled and gesticulated frantically at one another. The smell of garlic and pizza and garbage mingled together in an olfactory stew.

The Google map had shown a mere 200 meter walk from the station to the bed and breakfast we had booked. It did not mention that the walk also included a 100 meter vertical climb, through narrow passages (I'd use the word sidewalks, except cars and scooters used them, too) that were paved with black volcanic stone worn shiny from a millenium of use and that did not easily accommodate the wheels on our low-grade luggage. Clothing hung above us from every balcony like awnings, and there was more graffiti than in Berlin. I knew enough Italian to ask an old guy in which direction we should go, but not enough to understand his answer, except that he kept repeating the word "funicolare." Later, we would discover what that meant: A cable-pulled train that makes climbing Naples' formidable hills a lot easier. We kept walking. The old man laughed, threw up his arms and pointed up the hill.

That was good enough. While our room -- the cheapest one we could find in Naples -- was not exactly plush, it was adequate. It's part of a building complex perched perilously on the edge of a cliff high above the city, and was also serving as the residence of three college-aged women studying at the local fashion design school. Andrea, the owner and a Naples native, is friendly, fluent in English, and gave us great tips on how to spend our time in the city, steering us clear of tourist traps. Indeed, as it was lunchtime when we arrived, he sent us right back down to the chaotic neighborhood below, where we ducked down a street so narrow that felt like night, at noon. After dodging several scooters and even a small car, we found the doorway to the olive oil shop next to the big shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary (these shrines, or madonnine, are everywhere in Naples, but this one was especially ornate). There -- the place has no name as far as we could tell -- we found a few tables, a woman slaving away in a tiny kitchen, fresh octupi piled up on a counter. There was no menu, but somehow we managed to stumble through the language barrier and get a lunch of simple pasta, seafood meatballs (I don't know what else to call them), a couple of plates of vegetables drenched in beautiful olive oil and a jug of wine, all for about $30.

Naples is steeped in some 3,000 years of history. Greeks settled nearby islands in the 9th Century B.C., where the Sirens had once lured sailors to their deaths on the rocky coastline, and in the 5th Century B.C., Greeks founded the "New City" of Neápolis. Even after the Romans took over and danced a gluttonous jig on the Greeks' collective graves, the Greek culture persisted in Naples. Evidence of those early times can be found at Pompeii, of course, about half-an-hour by train down the coast. But better yet is Herculaneum, another city that in 79 A.D. was buried, and thus preserved, by Mt. Vesuvius' ash. Excavations began in the 1800s, and continue to today. It's closer to Naples' center, has relatively few visitors and is remarkably well preserved. Lydia and Elena refused to leave without seeing -- and narrating the significance of -- every room, every mosaic, every fresco. We were there for nearly five hours, seven if you include our trip to the National Museum and its artifacts from Herculaneum and Pompeii, not to mention that tantalizing "Cabinet of Secrets," full of Roman erotic art (kids not allowed).

Mosaic, circa 79 AD or earlier, Herculaneum.

One simply can't immerse oneself in so much history without fortification, so we made sure to stop and sit down -- okay, stand up, since that's what you do in Italy -- for caffe machiato and pasticceria. Our gluttony, er, gastronomical research, focused on the crostatta di fragola (tarts topped with what appeared to be wild strawberries), canolli and sfogliatelle, a phyllo dough pastry filled with ricotta and candied orange peel. In those narrow streets, under the watch of more shrines, it was easy to imagine eating an identical treat 400 years earlier, when these pastries were new -- sfogliatelle were reputedly invented in a convent in the heart of Naples in the 17th Century. In Naples time, that's a mere eyeblink. I suspect that 2,000 winters ago, the great poet Virgil sat at a Taberna in downtown Naples and enjoyed a plate of friarelli, a close relative to Brocolli Rabe that's rarely found outside the Campania region of Italy. Napolitans sautee it in garlic and oil, cook it with sausage and put it on pizza, which, by the way, was born in Naples.

Night, Pignasecca market.

Virgil, ancient Rome's most famous poet, wasn't born in Naples, but he penned some of his greatest work while living here during the 1st Century B.C. Virgil's epic poem, the Aenead, includes a number of scenes around the base of Mt. Vesuvius; Aeneas entered Hades to search for his father via Lago Averno, just up the coast from Naples.

Dante Alighieri drew on Virgil's knowledge of the underworld when he portrayed the latter as his guide through the Inferno.
Indeed, as I tried to navigate the dark forest of humanity that is the Pignasecca market, I summoned the guidance of Virgil. Maybe he wouldn't help me find Beatrice, but at least he could guide me to the next pizza and bottle of wine. Luckily, there in one of the city's oldest markets that runs every day, that wouldn't be difficult. The Pignasecca is a jumbled mixture of cheap plastic kitsch and Italian delicacies. Here, a man is peddling cigarette lighters; over there, a pig's head hangs in a window. Still-wiggling fish fill simple tanks at the pescheria, artichokes are piled high at a produce stand, and it can all be had at ridiculously low prices. We got dinner: a huge loaf of beautiful, wood-oven baked bread; marinated local artichokes; olives; salami; cheese; and wine, for just about $10.

Virgil is also said to be buried along the coast in Naples, his bones serving as protectors of the city. Attempted attackers are allegedly chased off by huge swarms of flies. The bones, I don't know about. The thing about the flies, I can believe. They emerge not from Virgil's remains, but from the mountains of garbage on many a street corner. Naples is perhaps as notorious for its trash heaps as it is for its pizza. In the mid-oughts, trash collection came to a standstill as landfills were filled to capacity and garbage workers went on strike. There's some sort of connection to organized crime here -- the city hosts one of Italy's most powerful crime families -- though I can't, for the life of me, figure out what that connection is. Berlusconi, apparently in between his dalliances with teenagers, cleaned things up in 2008, but the problem resurfaced just last year, after a proposal to build a huge landfill on the slopes of Vesuvius was met with riots. How this led to piles of garbage in Naples' streets, I'm not really sure. But, as an Italian told us with us a shrug of his shoulders during a moment of train chaos: That's Naples for you.

Street art in Naples.

That piece of wisdom came after an already long day on public transportation. As we were waiting for the metro to arrive, an announcement came over the loudspeaker, in Italian, of course, and incomprehensible to us, of course. Suddenly, everyone on our platform jumped down to the tracks, and ran across them to the opposite platform -- something you would never see in Germany -- and boarded another train. We followed, fearing for our lives. Then another announcement came, and about half of the people jumped back off the train, and ran back across the tracks. This scene repeated itself several times. A group of Italian musicians assured us that we were on the right train, and to stay put. They were right. I don't know why the other people were running back and forth. I don't know what was wrong with the trains. Nor do I know how the same pickpocket could work the same part of the train station day after day, without getting rousted by the cops. But there he was, first on Friday, then on Sunday. That's Naples, I guess.

And that's part of the reason Naples has a reputation as a hotbed of organized crime, petty crime and just outright chaos. Then there's the garbage, the big volcano, the huge fault line and the crumbling buildings perched precariously on vertical hillsides. All of which adds up to one big reason that a lot of people stay in Sorrento, or along the Amalfi coast, and just visit Naples for a few hours to eat some pizza.

Not us. We figured we'd do something like the opposite. We picked up one-day passes on the public transportation system for 4,70 Euros each (our nine year old was free, and the tickets are cheaper on weekends). That allowed us to ride a really slow train along the coast to Sorrento, via Herculaneum and Pompeii. Sorrento is clean, orderly and a cruise ship stop, meaning it's also a bit boring and overpriced (though beautiful). So, with our same one-day tickets, we boarded a public bus to, well, we weren't really sure where. It quickly filled up beyond safe capacity with very loud teenagers, including a kind of chubby obnoxious boy who kept yelling something about muzzarella, which I suspect has a broader, more crude meaning than just being a type of cheese.

The bus climbed, an impossibly steep, windy, narrow road that twisted through olive and lemon and orange groves and tiny villages, and offered a tremendous view of the Mediterranean, far below. Then it stopped at the top of the mountain, and we had to get off. Our hoped-for journey to the Amalfi Coast was cut short. We had boarded the wrong bus. We panicked. I think one of the girls started crying, or maybe that was me: The cafes were all closed for siesta.

Fortunately, after wandering around the sleepy little village for half an hour, we got on a bus going back down. Unfortunately, the bus driver was insane. As soon as we got on, he accelerated enough to throw us all back into our seats and caught up with the bus in front of us. Then, he engaged in what appeared to be a race or strange game of chicken with the other bus, passing those little Italian truck/scooter things that all the farmers drive on blind curves, tearing around the switchbacks way too fast, never falling more than a few feet behind the bus in front of us. Meanwhile the two bus drivers made faces at each other and gestured wildly via rear view mirror.

Procida, a 6 Euro, 40 min. ferry ride from just outside Naples

We survived, but we needed to get away from the cruise shippers. I needed a Negroni, truth be told, but would do with more caffe, a quiet beach, some gelato. All of which we found a few train stops away from Sorrento, at a town called Vico Equense. Getting to the beach here requires another steep descent on foot, but it was safer than the bus, and for the girls it was worth it: The beach was littered with sea glass and sea tiles -- pieces of ceramic tiles that had somehow found their way into the sea and had been worn smooth, like little pendants. We're convinced that we even found a piece of ancient Greek sea glass. Sitting on the beach in the day's last sun at Vico Equense, or the next day, on the island of Procida, which provided much of the setting for the movie il Postino, I could see why people might choose one of Naples' outliers as a base rather than the city itself.

As for me, I'll take Naples. It's scary, yeah, and disorienting and sometimes overwhelming. Its past seems to press down on you, its present has a darkness of its own. But it's also alive, fecund, raw and real.

Oh yeah, and then there's that apple. By the time we got back to Naples, we just wanted a quiet, simple meal, so we took the funicolare up to the relatively posh, somewhat calmer Voremo neighborhoodin search of a pizzeria. Elena spotted a little place with just a few tables and said, "Hmmm, this looks good." So we sat down. No menu, just two of each piatto to choose from. Wine arrived. Then a white bean, friarelli soup ("This is comfort food," said Elena, "and I need some comfort.") A plate of roasted, marinated vegetables. Meatballs. And two plates of exquisitely tender, tiny octupi, cooked in a tomato-based broth.

And then the apples. Raw. Simple. Tasting of the earth, of this place, of this history.

See a video slideshow of images from our trip.

Images from Rome and Naples

2011-02-07T03:09:00.000-08:00

Here's some images and music to accompany my short ditty about Naples.

My first winter in Berlin and how I’ve survived it (so far) with the help of a waterslide, a giant dome and a “Tropical Island” in northern Europe

2011-01-18T10:27:00.000-08:00

The cold is the kind of cold that makes your bones ache. Heavy is the sky, its grey pushing down on the buildings and the people who must venture outside on this dismal morning. They trudge slowly through snow and ice and the smoke-like haze that lingers over everything.

In other words, it’s just another winter’s day in Berlin. Only it’s not really just any winter’s day. It’s Christmas morning, and I am thankful to have my family huddled closely around me. I am even more grateful that I am in a train car, not outside like those other sorry sots, and that our particular train car has a heater that works.

The cold and the ice and the 8 inches of new snow, which has resulted in “Winterchaos” this year, causes the train to creep along slowly through formerly East Berlin. I don’t mind at all, because it allows me more time to observe this part of the city, its monolithic grey memories of Communism, its empty lots, slated for new development, its broken down factories-turned-squats-soon-to-be-luxury-lofts. Not long after sidling out of the city, the train stops in a small town and we debark, switching to a bus.

The bus is warm, and again I’m thankful. I’m not sure about the driver, though, who has the kind of vein-splattered, bulbous nose that only a lot of Schnapps can produce, and his coffee that he’s nursing seems to be fortified in such a way as to nourish that nose. I’m also a little bit unsure about the roads, which are not only snowy, but are covered with what appears to be a sort of glaze that reflects headlights as vividly as a mirror. And as we head out onto a highway, through a forest, and finally come to a halt at a giant traffic jam, I begin to feel as if we have made a big mistake.

I mean a really big mistake. It’s Christmas morning. We could be at home in the Old Country – Colorado, that is – gathered with family and friends, opening presents around the tree, getting ready to go skiing or sledding in the countryside before gorging on a huge feast. Instead, we are here. We’ve ripped our children from the warm womb of their homeland and transplanted them in an ugly, cold city whose dark past seems to fester in the faces of the people, in rundown old buildings, in the endless “denkmals” to terror. And now, on Christmas morning, we’re sitting in a bus, in a traffic jam, as though we’re in some perverted modernization of a tragic Russian novel, or like soldiers in the German army, headed East to our miserable demise in the Polish wastelands.

Finally, the bus begins moving again. At a tiny little burg in the middle of nowhere, the bus stops, lets us out, and leaves. There are about 20 of us here: another family, a group of twenty-something men who appear to be Indian or Pakistani, looking more worried than me, a few other people who nervously peer through the falling snow at an approaching vehicle. I can almost feel the collective relief when the brightly painted bus arrives: We are almost there. The bus takes us through the forest, past some sort of bunkers emerging from the ground like giant mushrooms, and then we see it, all at once. It reminds me of the first time I saw the Golden Gate Bridge in real life; it is so enormous that it dwarfs the natural world. It is Tropical Island.

The bus pulls up to one side of the dome, we sprint through the chilled air, open the door of the dome, and step in. Heat and humidity wash over us immediately. We have arrived. There are those who say the next wars will be fought over oil. There are others who say they will be fought over water. I say they will be fought over this place.

**

I spent ten years in a tiny Colorado town that sits in a valley at 9,318 feet in elevation, surrounded on all sides by mountains reaching higher than 13,000 feet. Beginning as early as October, snow piles up to the eaves of houses. Cars are completely buried. All roads in and out of the town are shut down for as long as four or five days in a row. Temperatures in the 20 below zero (F) range are not uncommon. The inhabitants of this little town face down winter with the same anticipation and dread as a soldier facing a battle, only their weapons are skis, alcohol, sleds and stubborn defiance.

Somehow, winter in Berlin is worse. Temperatures are not so extreme – it rarely gets colder than 20 degrees here – but the cold settles into your flesh like some kind of microscopic parasite that then reproduces in your bones. Day after day, the sky is invariably the color and texture of old mashed potatoes. On the rare occasion that the sun does emerge, it’s only a shadow of its former self, rising at around 9 a.m., lingering near the horizon and offering no warmth whatsoever for a few hours, before setting again not long after 3 p.m. The city’s ugliness, which is obscured in warmer months by vines and trees emerging from its fecundity, is laid bare. Garbage piles up on the sidewalks, mingling with dog shit and slush and mud.

Reminders of Berlin’s ugly history also emerge, or perhaps just become more pronounced, as the green of summer recedes. As I try to spot patches of ice before they launch me into the broken arm club of Berlin, I’m more likely to notice the heartbreaking “Stumbling Blocks.” A tree-covered hill, which in August provided a lush respite from the city’s flatness, reveals itself in December as a huge bunker, built so well by the Nazis that post-War efforts to demolish it failed, forcing the Allies to simply bury the thing. The ever-somber Holocaust Memorial becomes haunting when blanketed in snow. And as I ride the subway, this time of earthly darkness has me warily watching for psychic murkiness that surely dwells in this nation’s collective soul, somewhere beneath these German visages, which by late December are invariably the color of ash.

Except, that is, for the chosen few whose complexions are not flat and grey, but instead a burnished orange-brown color that is has no place in the natural world. There are those in Berlin who chase away the winter blues by attending operas and visiting museums, those who do so by dancing to electronica all night, and those who keep sanity intact by ruining their livers. And then there are those who simply spend an hour or two per day at the tanning salons that sit on many a Berlin street corner. The skin tone that results can be quite unnerving, especially combined with Berlin’s peculiar fashion, which is some kind of mishmash of New Jersey, Southern California in the 1980s, and early British punk rock. Still, one should not be shocked, come February, to see me sporting a garish suntan, and maybe even a mullet.

For now, however, less extreme measures will do, such as paying a visit to Tropical Island. After getting our bracelets (which have little computer chips in them, which not only open the gates but also allow you to charge everything, precluding the need to carry cash around), we head into the locker rooms to change. By now, the kids are amped to the point that it seems like their eyes will pop out. And when Wendy takes off her shoes and touches the locker room floor – which isn’t just warm, but hot -- her eyes roll back into her head, her lips curl up on her teeth, and a look spills over her face that brings up a lot of insecurities and makes me jealous. Yes, jealous. Of a tiled floor.

But I’m also relieved, and that earlier feeling of remorse has vanished into the rainforest trees that surround the little walkway. I look up and feel a bit of vertigo: The dome that we’re in, that protects us from the horrors of the climate outside, is astoundingly large. Its footprint is 66,000 square meters, or about 710,000 square feet – roughly the size of 5 or 6 Wal-Mart super stores. The roof is so high (107 meters/350 feet) that people can take helium balloon rides over the “rainforest,” and even base-jump inside the dome. I start to mention that this place is eerily similar in grandeur and shape to Nazi architect Albert Speer’s fantastical Volkshalle, which would have sported a dome smaller than this one (but still able to fill 180,000 people to listen to Hitler’s speeches). But bringing this up might dampen the mood. And anyway, if an indoor tropical theme park populated by some bizarre mix of Eastern European mafiosi with their girlfriends and middle-class German and tourist families is the modern version of Teutonic, Wagner-blaring world-domination, so be it.

Back in Nazi times, this stretch of forest was originally developed as a Luftwaffe training ground, which the Communists turned into an air base. Then, when the Wall came down, the Capitalists swooped in and appropriated it as their own, and erected the dome as a giant workshop for building heavy freight-bearing dirigibles. The idea was a good one, as we all know that dirigibles will be the only way to transport lots of people or stuff by air in the post-petroleum world, but perhaps a bit early. They created a couple prototypes – one of which was ultimately wrecked in a storm – before going broke. The dome was left behind and served as a perfect blank slate on which a Malaysian billionaire could realize his tropics-in-northern-Europe dreams.

And so it is that even on the coldest winter days, a Berliner willing to ride a couple hours on the train, sit on a sandy beach, swim in two huge pools, their water at 80 degrees, and sit around in their swim trunks and watch Vegas-style shows. And he can try to flush away that slowly building Angst with outright fear, and a nasal enema, courtesy of the highest waterslide in Germany. After climbing past the three lower, slower slides, the intrepid slider launches himself into a virtual freefall through an enclosed, narrow blue tube. Approximately three seconds later, he hits the pool at the bottom with tremendous force, creating an experience that would be classified as torture if one were not paying for it.

For the next six hours or so, we frolic in the pool, lay on the sandy beach, sit in the hot tubs, and even eat some of the overpriced food that could easily come from an American family chain restaurant. We simply grow tired before growing tired of Tropical Island, and so we must leave. The bus trip this time is quick, and the train ride treats us to the same city, only at night, which transforms once-menacing buildings into almost cheerful, brightly lit places. I decide that winter’s not so bad here after all, and figure it might be a bit better if they just moved Tropical Island a bit closer to the city. But then I reconsider. For a time is certain to come when cold darkness falls over this place, and people will resort to violence to get a little piece of Tropical Island. It will be a time when it pays to have a healthy buffer of space between such a gem and the masses. I’m guessing that dystopic time will come in the not too distant future. I'd say it will come in February.

IKEA and me

2010-12-20T02:28:00.000-08:00

I was in a hurry. I had something I wanted to tell my wife, and it’s so easy to forget things these days that I didn’t want to waste any time. So I not only rushed to find her, but I went against traffic to do so. I was in one of Berlin’s four IKEAs – the magnificent, outrageously successful Swedish big box store that has become a staple of urban life in all corners of the disposable-income globe.

I slid past the POANG chairs. I jogged past the EKTORP sofas. Halfway through the kitchen section, with its deep reds, stainless steel glimmers and those light Scandanavian wood countertops, I noticed a couple, probably in their early thirties, sitting on a KIVIK chaise lounge. They were disheveled in the practiced way of the creative class. Sitting at oblique angles to one another in order to avoid eye contact but still be able to track the other’s movements, they both looked terribly distressed. He glared at the IKEA list with a mixture of disgust and confusion; she looked as if she might weep.

I slowed for a moment, forgetting my earlier urgency. Pretending to inspect a BAGVIK sink, I furtively watched the distraught pair. The man had slightly scuffed blonde hair, sports glasses with clear lenses and a two-day beard; the woman had just enough lines around her eyes and mouth to allow one to take her beauty seriously. I was not able to hear their words, but their body language told of an age old struggle: You just don’t understand my furniture needs.

Most of us are able to go through life without facing this issue more than once or twice; some of us spend our lives trying to avoid it altogether. But if there is an IKEA within 400 miles, the attempt will be futile. Some day, the allure of cheap meatballs and free coffee refills will be too strong, and you, too, will end up here, facing those marital demons.

Remembering my earlier mission, I tear my attention away from the couple only to notice that an inordinate number of yellow- and blue-uniformed staffers are standing nearby, all feigning nonchalance while watching me through the corners of their eyes while muttering things into their shirt collars. I understand immediately what’s going on: I had been rushing through the furniture, and to hurry through IKEA, whether it’s in Burbank or Berlin, Phoenix or Salt Lake City, is taboo. I wanted to tell them that I understood their concern, but they had no reason to worry. I would turn around and follow traffic and do it at a proper pace. Not only that, but I belong here: You see, I’m Swedish. Okay, I’m ¼ Swedish, which is surely enough to give me a direct connection to everything IKEA. When I smell the meatballs cooking in the IKEA cafeteria, I get the sense that my ancestors are texting me from the Nordic climes. I have a natural aptitude for wielding the little tools that come with every IKEA flat pack -- my wife has assured me that I can assemble a STYRØN bookshelf almost as well as any guy she’s met. And I have a deep bond with the tall, blonde Scandinavian super models that the company plants in all of its stores to evoke authenticity.

Instead of explaining all of this, I slow my pace and make sure I stop occasionally to write down a product number on my little sheet of paper, and this seems to work. It occurred to me, then, how odd this slow pacing thing really is. I understood the slow food movement, and even the slow travel movement. But slow crass consumerism?

**

In late November, the people of the United States were once again subjected to the annual ritual known as Black Friday. In the pre-dawn darkness on the day after every Thanksgiving, people line up in vast big box store parking lots all over the country, giant Starbucks pumpkin pie-flavored frappolattachinos in hand, in order to get in a good position. When the doors open at an ungodly hour, the throng surges into the store in order to take advantage of discounts on flat screen televisions, video game consoles, and other gadgetry. People do not take this ritual lightly; nearly every year, news reports of serious injuries, even fatalities, rise from the scuffle of the stampedes.

This ritual is and has been repeated on various scales across the capitalistic spectrum. Once upon a time, blue lights flashing in K-Marts would ignite a Pavlovian response in blue-haired women throughout the aisles, and the need to get a Cabbage Patch doll for their kids turned otherwise mild-mannered mothers into clawing, biting animals. This primal response is predicated on the notion that these objects will all be gobbled up by competing consumers, and the resulting drought of said objects will threaten the survival of those unlucky ones who did not sprint fast enough for the blue light, did not wake up early enough from their post-gluttony slumber. No matter that the said objects are produced by the hundreds of thousands in far-away factories, and that the discounts on them will be even deeper in a few weeks, when the new models come out, it’s the ritual that matters. It’s our way, I suppose, to get in touch with our hunter-gatherer roots, and this frenzied consumption has become a primary component of our capitalistic society.

But not at IKEA. At 4 a.m. on Black Friday, the IKEA parking lots of the world were empty, the lights dark. They waited until mid-morning to open, just like any other day. They offered free breakfast as consolation, along with a few one-day only sales. But to try to race for the specials would have been futile because of the way IKEA is laid-out. There is no simple grid system here, no going in, getting what you need, and heading out. Upon entering the store, IKEA customers are first given the opportunity to drop off their kids at free daycare. This seems pretty progressive and pro-parenting, sort of like Sweden's generous maternity/paternity leave policies. Except that it's really just a way to give parents more time to shop and more room to spend. It's also a way to keep kids from the ugly truth: Their parents' marital bond can be snapped in two by a $39.99 light fixture.

Childless, customers then head up an escalator to a sort of staging zone from which there are only two ways out: by following the meandering maze through the entire store, or by taking a "short cut" to the restaurant. One cannot simply turn around and leave an IKEA any more than Dante could have called it quits after reaching the third circle of Hell. It just doesn't work like that.

So customers end up wandering through the store like rudderless rafts on a slow river, all the while slightly disoriented, following the arrows along a path that must, after all the turns and twists, be at least a mile long. This, of course, is intentional. It makes for a more contemplative shopping experience, as well as one in which goal-oriented shopping is virtually impossible. This puportedly leisurely shopping pace gives the illusion that one has plenty of time to consider which items to buy, seemingly making rash purchases impossible. It's only an illusion, though. Once, my wife Wendy and I, needing furniture for a new house, made a 10-hour drive to the nearest IKEA, in Phoenix, Ariz. We entered the store at 9:30 a.m., for breakfast. We did not emerge until 7 p.m., dazed and confused, with no real understanding of what we had just purchased save for the knowledge that our credit card company was now $3,000 poorer.

Extensive research of '80s-era sitcoms shows that shopping like this was once the provenance mostly of women, with the men only getting involved when they saw the receipt, which then caused them to go into some sort of epileptic, but entirely comic, fit. In this new hunting and gathering society, women became the hunters. But today’s IKEA shoppers are of a more liberated ilk, and almost always come in pairs. If one does not have a life-partner or spouse, then she brings a roommate or friend. And here, among the light fixtures, sofas, office furniture and prefab kitchens, they talk in hushed tones and serious voices as though they were discussing Soren Kierkegaard, not SØREN couches. If the Wal-Marts of the world have lowered shopping to some kind of primal, stone-age urge, then IKEA has elevated shopping to higher philosophy. I’m not sure which one is worse: Judging by the huge lines at ever checkout counter during every hour of the day all over the world, the end result is exactly the same.

**
After I had broke free from the unhappy couple and the suspicious IKEA staffers, all about half my age, I moved through the crowd once again until I found Wendy in the dining room table section. She was crouched underneath a round, glass-topped table, inspecting it intently. I was going to tell her something brilliant to prove my theory that Berlin’s populace has a disproportionately high amount of injuries of hands, fingers and arms (another story altogether), but I completely forgot. Instead, I blurted: “Hey, don’t you think it’s time to head to the cafeteria for some meatballs?”

She peered up through the glass at me, bewildered. “It’s only 11:30. (She pauses to let me consider how base and uncontrollable my desires are). What do you think of this table? I’m thinking it would fit nicely in our kitchen.”

I looked at the table, and the price tag. I did not mention that we had no kitchen. No living room. No bedroom. At the time, we were still looking for a place, and were having no luck. The search for a Berlin apartment had slowly disintegrated into a nightmare that involved bumbling bureaucrats who didn’t seem to be conscious of the world outside their office doors, evil real estate agents who engaged in a particularly caustic brand of passive aggressive behavior, and which offered a glimpse into the naked psyche of the German people -- even now, months later, the wounds are too raw for me to talk about it in any detail. So, at the time, the IKEA trip was still purely hypothetical, a form of wishful thinking, perhaps.

“Yeah, it’s okay, I guess.” I searched for something more to say, something intelligent about the lines of the table’s base, or something insightful about eating off a glass table. I really, really wanted to converse with my wife, my soulmate; to connect with her here amongst all this furniture. But a table is just one of those things in life that I may never truly understand, and I just don’t have a whole heck of a lot to say about it. It’s just four legs on which rests a plank sturdy enough to hold dinner, a few bottles of wine and maybe a drunken dancer every once in a while. So why were there so many choices? I looked across the vast plain of tables, long skinny ones, square ones, plastic ones and wood ones. I longed, suddenly, for the “generic” products of my youth, with their non-descript black and white labels promising nothing but what was inside: Orange Drink, Cheese, Hot Dog. What about just: Table? “I like the name,” I said, finally. “Sounds like a Scandinavian philosopher or something, doesn’t it?”

This is not what she wanted to hear. I mumbled something about light fixtures, and scurried off, until I came across the place where, in a seemingly impossibly small space, they had set up an entire apartment, complete with kitchen, bathroom, living room. I plopped myself down on the OLEBY sofa underneath the STYRØN loft bed and stared at the dead screen of the TV. I marveled at the self-contained efficiency of the faux flat. These are in every IKEA in the world, and they are my favorite part of the store (after the free coffee refills, of course). They exude an almost erotic sense of comfort. Someday, Wendy will find a man who can converse about tables, and I’ll end up alone, no doubt. These little places assure me that when that time comes, I can find a tiny apartment, call up IKEA, and have them deliver this very setup to me. And like the little apartment, I too will be self-contained.

Perhaps that’s the IKEA secret, and the reason some Swedish dude has made millions of dollars on wrecked marriages. These particular stores are not just a collection of discreet items to be purchased individually; they are instead a collection in which the sum makes up more than the parts. IKEA’s not about buying objects, which seems base but is just what shopping should be. It’s about purchasing a sense of self -- an identity. We don't really fully become members of the post-industrial graphic designer class until we purchase our first flat-packed sofa couch to fit into that tiny, 250-square-foot apartment. We don't really become post-post-modern parents until we've spent at least 12 hours in the IKEA kid's section. And we're not really post-divorce, bitter old bachelors until we've once again furnished a 250 square foot apartment with IKEA, this time leaving a few empty feet on the floor where the kids can sleep on their occasional visits.

As I sat in the prefab-apartment thinking about all of this, I felt a bit as if I had been duped. My anti-capitalist tendencies had been confused by the IKEA approach, and here I was, sitting in just another big box store, longing to spend my credit card company’s money. It was no less crass than Black Friday, I figured, maybe even worse. What’s weird is that people don’t see that – they boycott Wal-Marts and burn down Starbucks, but the only people who scorn IKEA are hipsters, at least when they’re not too busy tossing scorn at, well, hipsters. I considered getting up and telling Wendy all of this, and insisting we get the hell out of this place and go build our own stinking table. Then I remembered, I don’t know how to build a table.

My daughters finally found me in the prefab-apartment and rousted me from my thoughts with their lists of all the things they had to have for their still non-existent bedrooms. By this time, the yellow and blue-suited staffers were getting really worried about me. So I pulled myself out of the couch and we all headed down to the restaurant to stand in line for our meatballs. I ate happily and drank a coffee with my meal. Then I drank another. And, since it was free, I lined up for a third. That’s when I started to see the light, and understand what it was all about. That’s when I heard my ancestors calling to me: Buy the table, you idiot. Just buy it. It will save your marriage. For now. Besides, it’s flat-packed, and will only take a few minutes to assemble.

A Macaroon for the 21st Century! (And holiday cookies, too)

2010-12-19T06:50:00.000-08:00

These are rough times. From our European vantage point, the Old Country seems to be unraveling (tax cuts for the rich, billions being spent on two wars, Wiki-leaks shenanigans). Meanwhile, over here, climate change has made it colder not to mention snowier, which has resulted in late, overcrowded trains. And in our Berlin neighborhood, even as the grimy snow piles up on the sidewalks, so, for some reason, does the garbage. It looks a bit like an ugly bomb exploded here. So, in order to bring some more balance and sweetness to the world, I figured I'd spend this Sunday baking holiday cookies and some macaroons, and then sharing the recipes with you (because I'm all about redistribution of wealth). That doesn't make much sense, I know, but either does anything else going on these days.

Here's something that does make sense: My new macaroon invention! I had set out to make the Barefoot Contessa's coconut macaroons, which are ridiculously simple: Mix up 14 oz. sweetened shredded coconut with 14 oz. sweetened condensed milk. Add some vanilla and some whisked egg whites. Bake. Thing is, I had come home from the store with unsweetened coconut and unsweetened condensed milk. And this being Germany, stores aren't open on Sundays (don't get me started).

Luckily, macaroons are marvelously flexible. And luckily, yesterday when I was cruising through Punjab's market, which is an amazing mixture of Indian grocery store, Halal butcher and "Afro Shop" (one entire row is dedicated to hair extensions and associated products), I picked up this huge container of vacuum packed dates for next to nothing. I had found the sweetness for my unsweetened ingredients. The super sweet dates alone probably would have sufficed, but I wanted to push the macaroon envelope. So I made this magic sauce: Start with some butter or ghee in a pan, throw in some fresh ginger, add two sliced bananas and a handful of pitted, chopped dates. Sautee it all until the bananas and dates shine with the butter, then add enough water to cover the fruit. Cook, stirring, until it all turns into an unappetizing-looking mash (a few chunks are okay). Add more water if necessary.

Date banana sauce. Looks bad, tastes great

Now taste. Yum-mo-lishious, no? Save a bit to sweeten tomorrow morning's oatmeal, then add the rest to your 14 oz. of unsweetened condensed milk and mix it up well (it wouldn't hurt to cook this a bit, too, if you want). Add the 14 oz. unsweetened coconut and stir it all up. If it seems too watery, add a bit more coconut. In a separate bowl, whip two egg whites until they have firm medium peaks (mine never peaked, and it didn't seem to wreck things). Fold the eggs gently into the coconut milk mix. Scoop into little piles onto a baking sheet. Bake in a 325 degree oven until the little tips of your coconut bergs are burnished brown. Keep an eye on the bottom of the macaroons, as they might burn if you have a crappy baking sheet. Let cool. Eat. Want to experiment? Try using coconut milk in place of the condensed milk. I can't wait to try that one.

The finished macaroons with their earthier color and more complex flavors.

Okay, macaroons are not really traditional holiday treats, so the kids and I threw together some great little cookies with which they can bribe their teachers, too. When I make Christmas cookies, I prefer to make a big hunk of base dough, and then add variety at the pre-baking/decorating stage. And my favorite base dough comes from Alice Waters' Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook. I take Alice's lemon-clove cookies and remove the cloves (because cloves don't quite go with everything, while lemon pairs well with everything from chocolate to chicken -- and no, I'm not making chicken cookies. This time).

So, if you want to try these, go to the link and follow the recipe. You should end up with a couple of logs of dough in the refrigerator (I like to double the recipe and get four logs). Now's the time to get creative. As the dough chills, come up with your own mixtures for topping the cookies. We did: Lemon zest-black pepper-salt-sugar; candied ginger-dried cranberry; sugar-lemon zest; walnuts-chocolate. Though it sounds weird, my favorite by far turned out to be the lemon zest/black pepper one. To make it, I covered a plate with freshly ground pepper, sprinkled some turbinado sugar onto the pepper, added just a tiny pinch of salt, and some lemon zest. I then took one dough log and rolled it in the mixture, pressing hard so that the spices all get stuck in a fairly even layer on the whole log. Then, I sliced the log into 1/4" slices (each one a cookie) and put them on a baking sheet. If you want some more flavor, top the cookies with the same mix you put on the sides. Bake at 350 F until the cookies are golden brown.

Rolling the cookie dough log in chocolate/walnut/cranberry topping

Give a few away. Eat the rest. Feel better about the world.

Woman in a burqa

2010-11-17T08:04:00.000-08:00

Badstrasse, Berlin, 10 September 2010. Summer's over, but the sun's back for a day or two and it has brought the streets to life. Olive-skinned teenage boys with their tightly sheared black hair listen to tinny music on their mobile phones, the Turkish grocer sings his apricot-selling song. A plastic bag dances drunkenly over the cars to the nee-ner nee-ner melody of polizei sirens.

From the delirium you emerge, woman with a burqa, like silence. A tenebrous wound in the streetscape, you cut through the bustle until you stand directly across from me. You wait for the light to flash green. I am also waiting. Perhaps through the screen that shields your face, you notice me: I'm the one with the disheveled hair, the peach-colored linen shirt, the shorts, two beers hanging from my hand, leaning against my thigh in the way of the infidels. I suppose to you I look like everyone else in this crowd.

Not you. You are a void in the frenzy. Your nothingness is so pure that you seem to float just a few inches above everything else: shards of green glass clinging to the Beck's label; a to-go cup, rolling back and forth in the gutter; a dropped currywurst, its ketchup staining the sidewalk like blood. You are invisible, yet everyone is staring at you, even as they pretend to be looking at the signs advertising specials in the Woolworth window.

You are the unknown, yet we think we know you so well. Everyone seems to be fretting about you these days. Here in Germany, a book came out this summer accusing people like you of destroying the country. Ever since, the politicians and pundits have been tripping over one another for the chance to make their own statement about you, and the failure of integration, or the collapse of multiculturalism. In France, they made you as illegal as a Mexican making his way across the Arizona desert on foot, his head swirling with dreams of working the slaughterhouse knife table in Greeley for 12 bucks an hour. But all I see is a woman in a burqa, nothing less and so much more.

***

When the big aluminum tube carrying my family landed in Berlin on a quiet, hot evening this past June, I had only vague notions of what I would encounter here. I had never been to Germany; never lived anywhere but the rural or semi-urban Western U.S. My pre-flight research of the place had been scant. I certainly didn't know that I'd live in a neighborhood with so many immigrants, particularly from countries that are predominantly Muslim. Nor could I have guessed that I would be surrounded by a debate about those immigrants that shares many similarities with the immigration debates back home.

After World War II, Western Germany experienced the Wirtschaftswunder, or the economic "miracle" that resulted from a huge infusion of cash to rebuild the country's demolished infrastructure. Human capital was in short supply (it had been "spent" in the War), so it was imported, mostly from southern countries. So-called guest workers flocked in from Greece, Italy and Turkey. They were expected to leave after a few years - an orderly system of chewing them up and spitting them out before they could get settled here. It didn't work. People stayed and more came to join them, especially from Turkey. Though the energy/economic crisis of the 1970s sparked an anti-immigrant urge, it didn't stop the inward human flow.

Today Germany, like the U.S. (and France, Belgium, the Netherlands, et. al.), is a land of immigrants.

My family and I ended up in the Wedding district of Berlin. They say that in our particular neighborhood, about 40 percent of the residents are foreign-born. Kids born in Germany to non-German parents are considered foreigners, at least until they turn 18. That means that well over half the people we see each day on the street are, like me, Ausländer. Our street is lined with shops whose windows sport German, Turkish and Arabic lettering, along with a smattering of commercial English (FaxService, Internet, Prepaid, Automaten Casino 23 Stunden Open). I shop in grocery stores where varieties of tahini and olives are as abundant and cheap as chips and soda pop in an American convenience store. Conversations here are as likely to be in Turkish, Arabic or a kaleidoscope of African languages - along with some Russian or Polish thrown in - as they are to be in German.

There's a temptation to attribute the Wedding phenomenon directly to German's guest-worker programs of the 50s and beyond, because that gives us an illusion that we (society, governments) have some sort of say in how these things turn out. I don't think so. Bigger forces are at work here - Wedding is globalization made manifest. Borders dissolve in the face of consumer desire. It doesn't shock us to find mangoes in Minnesota in the dead of winter, or to see a Starbucks on a street corner in Cairo. Stinger missiles make their way to Afghanistan; Mercedes tear through the dust of the Sahara, and a frozen burger from Wal-Mart might have come from a dozen different countries. We have long accepted that goods and cash will flow across borders, regardless of trade policies or tariffs. We should not be surprised when people do the same.

Today, it is virtually impossible to find a corner of the globe that has not been saturated by globalism. It's got a certain stench that swirls up from the giant cones of döner flesh, and joyfully mingles with the aroma of mint and exhaust, coriander and the molasses-like smoke from the Shishas. Globalization has a feel, the warm ooze of the sweet and tangy Big Mac special sauce dripping through the fingers of the Arab boy with his gangstah swagger and hip-hop style. It's the burn in the throat from a brain taco wolfed down in the parking lot of a rowdy Honky-Tonk bar in Rock Springs, Wyoming, on a Sunday afternoon. It's a woman in a burqa on Badstrasse in Berlin.

**

It wasn't supposed to be like this. The Ausländer were to learn German, appreciate Bach and Goethe, drink bottled water and wait for the light to turn green before walking across the street, even when it's 4 a.m., and there are no cars around. Because that's what Germans do. It's okay for Ausländer to hang on to certain parts of their culture, sure -- the falafels and the olives and the Turkish pizzas. Just as long as they abandon those aspects that make us uncomfortable or scared: the dark fringes of the religion, butchering goats in the back of grocery stores, and, especially, those burqas. When everyone integrates according to the rules, we can all live side-by-side as one big, colorful family, like in those old Benetton commercials.

Of course it hasn't worked out that way (how could it?). The folks in Wedding didn't integrate fast enough, or properly. Clearly, they not only still speak with their mother tongues in everyday situations, but they also have held onto much of their cultural identity. They don't fit the German mold, and that's got people worried. In the recently released, bestselling book, "Germany Does Away With Itself," Thilo Sarrazin argues that this failure to integrate, particularly among Muslim immigrants, is eroding the very identity of the Vaterland. German Chancellor Angela Merkel followed that up by declaring recently that multiculturalism - the idea that various cultures could walk side-by-side in harmony - was dead. A Netherlands politician, Geert Wilders, said that Muslim immigration had so diminished the Germany of Bach, Goethe and Schiller that it had become unrecognizable. (In the U.S., the anti-immigration crowd is more apt to fret over the loss of "the American high standards of living" than it is to bemoan the loss of culture, but the idea's the same).

Of course, these are the hardliners speaking. But even the moderates on this issue share a common conceit: That the policymakers and cops and bureaucrats have some sort of control over the situation. They believe that we can put up filters on our borders to keep out the riff-raff, and stamp "integration required" on visas, and that will solve the "immigration problem." They see no contradiction in the fact that tons and tons of tomatoes flow freely from south to north over the U.S.-Mexico every day, but people aren't "allowed" to do the same. We don't understand that we have no control. Adam Smith's hand, it turns out, is not only invisible, but it's powerful, meaty and indiscriminate, too.

I take all of this a bit personally. I'm an Auslander, too. I'm trying to learn German, but it's a lugubrious process. When I order a coffee, I still feel as though I have a mouthful of pebbles. When the waitress responds, I strain to understand every other word. I'm not accustomed to all of this concrete, or these grey skies. I sometimes imagine that the weathered brick wall outside our apartment window is a desert-varnished, lichen-covered, sandstone cliff, and I lay at its base, in a sun-warmed, tadpole-filled pool. I dream of a hot dry wind, a two-track road leading into an endless plain of sage, thunderheads piled high in a sky so big it makes the eyes ache. Those are the components of my culture. Sometimes, I feel so out of context that I could be walking down the street in a burqa, too.

But I'm not. And even though I have no job here, can't speak the language, and have yet to develop a taste for sauerkraut juice or canned meat, the anti-immigration hardliners don't have a problem with my kind. As someone of European stock, I fit in enough so as not to offend; my culture doesn't grate up against Germany's. Woman with a burqa, however, you're a different matter altogether.

***

I'd say that at least one-fourth of the women I pass by on the sidewalk here in Wedding on a daily basis cover their hair - occasionally their faces, too -- according to Muslim tradition. Most wear simple but colorful headscarves made of a shiny material, usually accompanied by generic-looking trenchcoats. Others wear a more elaborate get-up, their hair bundled up in big bunches inside the scarf, tassels hanging down over their foreheads. A tiny minority wear the full-on burqa, a head-to-toe garment, usually black, with only a screen or a slit through which to see.

Curiously, these scarves and burqas have become one of the focal points of the current integration/immigration debate, popping up often in the rhetoric of Wilders, Sarrazin and others. Of Islam, Sarrazin said, "No group emphasizes their differences so strongly in public, especially through women's clothing..." and he refuses to respect a group that "constantly produces new little headscarf-girls." Wilders proposed a headscarf tax in his country (which would apply only to Muslim women, and not to orthodox Christians who wear similar head coverings). In a New York Times op-ed piece, Mona Eltahawy, a Muslim woman, argued: "(The veil) erases women from society and has nothing to do with Islam but everything to do with the hatred for women at the heart of the extremist ideology that preaches it." The French government apparently agreed, banning the burqa because, they say, it demeans women.

The French ban is terribly flawed. For starters, it rubs against our ideals of freedom of religion and expression. By prohibiting a piece of clothing for ideological reasons - even if they are admirable ones - the French lowered themselves to the level of the Islamic countries like Iran, which require women to wear burqas or headscarves. It's little different than a government banning torturous high heels, bras or breast augmentation surgery because they, too, demean women; there are better ways to legislate equality (how about starting by wiping out the gender pay gap). Women won't suddenly shed their burqas in France, they'll just stay inside their homes, where they will become even more imprisoned than they are behind a black cloak.

But even worse is that the French weren't really worried about women's rights so much as they were about integration. The real reason they, along with Wilders and Sarrazin, want to do away with headscarves and burqas is that on the streets of Paris and Berlin, the garments do exactly the opposite of what Eltahawy says they do: Rather than erasing identity, they are potent assertions of identity. The simple act of putting on a headscarf of whatever type before heading out the door is a big signal to the world: I am a Muslim woman.

But it's more, and less, than that, too. Even if the women in Wedding are required by custom, tradition or religion to wear the scarves to conceal their beauty and femininity, they've successfully transformed them into something else altogether. Younger women tend to tweak the style to fit their own taste or expressive urge: They wear curve-hugging coats, stiletto heels, and makeup that draws attention to their eyes, which resemble Italian plums. (It's enough to drive many a young German Lutheran boy to run home and covertly memorize verses of the Q'ran and relevant Turkish phrases). I've seen a dozen other styles, too. One particularly beautifully elegant woman covered her head and body in a sort of robe made of linen, and it flowed from her body like cottonwood leaves in a breeze.

The burqa is a different matter. It does, indeed, block the individual, physical expression of that woman's identity. Body language is obliterated, as are facial expressions and eye contact. There is no smile, no frown, no disapproving scowl when someone crosses the street against the light. That, on its own, so goes against our individualistic culture that it can be downright scary to encounter someone so cloaked on a German street. But that same trait is also what makes a woman in a burqa such a powerful symbol. She forces herself into the consciousness of everyone around so that she's impossible to ignore. What she lost of her individual identity she has made up for with a screaming declaration of her cultural identity.

That's simply not allowed under the hardliners' rule of integration. (Okay, the term "integrate" is a loaded one, and it's hard to define. I think the hardliners are actually hoping that immigrants will assimilate into the culture. That is, they want the dominant culture to subsume the non-dominant culture in a way that not only erases the differences between the two, but also changes the dominant culture as little as possible). And so, perhaps totally unwittingly, the woman in a burqa has found herself tangled up in this messy debate that promises only to intensify.

As woman in a burqa stands across from me, I notice something strange. Directly behind her, on a grungy apartment firewall, hangs a giant placard. It's identical to ones hanging up all over the city this fall. Seemingly bursting out of the billboard's red background - but partially obscured from this angle by the woman in a burqa - is a much bigger than life picture of porn star Angie Katz, reclining voluptuously in nothing but gauzy white underwear - an invitation to the city's annual sex industry trade show.

**
Immigration is a force of nature. Borders are not. Throw up your steel fences, razor wire, motion detectors, cameras, border patrol and soldiers - in the end, it is meaningless. Integration is organic. The need to control it is not.

Woman in a burqa, you are everything because you are nothing. You are ripe pomegranates right off the tree; you are the thud against the wall next door. You are old men huddled over tea; you are a bruise. You are the haunting howl of prayer at sunrise; you are the blast ripping through a crowded bus. You are a giant raven strutting down the street.

You are the flock of geese flying south so far above the city's grit and grime. They follow an ancient path, older than words. They were there during the Crusades, they flew through the soot from the old factories. They mingled with the planes that dropped the bombs that demolished this city during World War II. They will be there even as the earth warms, and their seasonal journey is no longer required.

The light finally turns green and we both walk towards each other. As you walk past, I can hear you speaking to the woman beside you in an animated, almost girlish voice. This surprises me for some reason. Then, when you're right beside me, you break into a laugh. This is a language even I can understand.

Was ist los?

2010-10-29T04:53:00.000-07:00

So, two of the three people who read this blog have asked me where I've been and why I haven't posted anything since that vertigo-causing video from the back of my bike. Where do I begin? For starters, I'm fortunate enough to have been asked to write a pre-election "guide" for High Country News. Now, I'm working on the post-election wrapup, and have the onerous task of saying something interesting that I didn't say in the leadup piece. Actually, the real task is keeping the word count at a reasonable level. Though this is merely a midterm election, it's an important one in many ways: the sheer cost of the thing is outrageous in itself, and will total around $4 billion when all is said and done; it's the first election since the Supreme Court ruled that corporations can finance campaigns; whether or not the Tea Party wins many races in the general election, its presence has altered the shape of the Republican party forever; and the Western United States may lose a lot of the national influence it has gained in the last decade; etc. Some of it will be in HCN, the rest I'll put here. When I have time.

And I haven't had much as of late. First, we finally found an apartment, which is something I'll write about after I have a bit of distance from the trauma, during which Germany's psyche was laid bare for us to see. It wasn't pretty (but the place isn't bad. Above photos are two views from our windows, and one pic of an old insane asylum a couple of blocks away). Now, we're trying to get Internet in our apartment. A simple task, you say? Then you haven't tried it in Berlin. And, I started my German class. It's about time I started integrating, right? Problem is, I somehow "tested" into the B-level class based on residual knowledge left over from high school German classes I took more than 20 years ago. What this means is that I now spend four hours each day in a classroom filled with much younger folks than me (and from Paraguay, Brazil, Japan, China, Argentina, Spain, Chile, England, Australia, Ukraine and even Moldavia), who speak to each other in what sounds to me like gibberish but is, in fact, German. And I'm expected to talk back as though I understand, and take quizzes, and talk to the teacher. It's humbling, I suppose, which is only a few letters away from humiliating.

I can't sign up for a class at a more appropriate level because to do so might require repeating the bureaucratic (take a number and wait) ordeal that I already had to go through. So, I will quietly endure yet another trauma that will leave permanent scars for which I will once again fail to get the professional help that I need.

But suffering, I hope, will make my writing better, because I've got a whole bunch of stuff to say: About immigration and integration, about Muslim women and their headscarves and burqas, about shopping at Ikea and a short story about what happens when I accidentally walk into the wrong apartment and another one about sagebrush, Berlin and high-speed trains. Stay tuned. And since those of you deserve a reward for plowing through all my neurotic gabbing, watch this video of Borges reading "The Art of Poetry" with some harsh but good images. I stumbled upon it at nthWORD.

Bike's Eye View of our Berlin 'hood: Wedding

2010-08-19T14:15:00.000-07:00

"Berlin," said the bartender at a wonderful little cafe near here, "is so ugly, it's sexy." Or something to that effect. I guess that's why I like Berlin, because that's exactly how I feel ... after a vodka or three. After living in one of the prettier parts of Berlin, we moved to the Weddin g area, which many Berliners consider to be the uglier part of town. Wedding has a bad reputation: It's working class, kind of gritty and run down, poor. But since we moved here a month ago, I've become quite fond of Wedding. I'm struck by the area's diversity. It's not only ethnically varied -- Wedding is home to many Turkish, African and Middle Eastern immigrants -- but also demographically diverse. Young hipsters live next to the working class; artists' studios sit next to industrial sites (or in industrial sites that were taken over by artists). In one tiny section of one block, I can go to the poetry center, buy antique tchockes, browse a huge selection of shishas, or hookahs, and go to an African restaurant. Wedding even has its own progressive, graphically-rich magazine. Most striking to me is the diversity of the urban landscape. You can be on Badstrasse, a hectic, busy, garish, commercial street one minute, and turn off, ride your bike half a block, and be in a green, quiet park next to the Panke River. I tried to capture all of that in this video. Because my favorite way to see the area is from a bike, I figured I'd give you a similar point of view; the video is all shot from a camera strapped onto my bike rack. All photos and video were taken within a 10 minute bike ride radius from where we currently live in Wedding. The music is by Damscray and DJ/Rupture.

Twist & Science (Damscray) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Taqasim (DJ /rupture) / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

My Commie Berlin bike and me

2010-08-13T06:54:00.000-07:00

I suffered my first head injury* on a bike. I was five. When I was 11, I spent all my saved up paper route money on a Coast to Coast 12 speed. A year later, I dismantled it, combined it with another bike, and crashed it when I hit a rotten apple on a curve while delivering the aforesaid papers. I went to the emergency room. I started racing bikes (and getting spanked) that same year. On late summer nights as a teenager, I rode my bike home from my girlfriend's house, the fresh memory of her mysterious smell mingling with that of sprinklers on the grass. And when I came to the non-lit sections of street, I felt as if I were flying through the darkness. I worked in a bike shop for five years. I got married and had a kid and started a business and stopped riding and got chubby. Later, I started riding my bike again. I'm still chubby, but at least I can go out and purge my demons by riding up a mountainside, and not worry about cardiac arrest.

So, when I left the Old Country to move to Berlin, I wasn't about to leave my bicycle behind. I packed up my road bike, which was engineered to translate my aging legs' waning power into forward motion as efficiently as possible, and brought it over the pond. I then spent two weeks coughing up my lungs, looking at the unopened bicycle box with the impotent longing of an old man in the Sex Kino down the street. That I was on the mend was confirmed the day I crawled out of bed and tore open the box.

My first Berlin ride was a humbling affair. After the woman -- I'd peg her age at 62 -- passed me on a bulky one-speed nearly as old as her, I realized that perhaps my lightweight, many-geared machine was a bit much in a city with only one hill** to speak of. In my attempt to recover a sliver of my ego by overtaking the woman -- who, unfairly, was loaded down with groceries -- I swerved out of the bike lane and into the sidewalk. I was headed straight for the rear-end of a high-heeled pedestrian. Since I had no bell (rendering my bicycle illegal in Berlin), and since I don't speak German, I was reduced to making incomprehensible grunts of warning before abandoning all hope and swerving back into the bike lane, behind the aforesaid older but much faster woman.

The road into the Grunewald, a huge forest on Berlin's edge, provided quiet relief. It's a smoothly-paved, virtually carless street through the dense trees. I got down into the drops, stretched out my legs, kicked up the gear and started hammering. That's when I got the flat tire. It's also when I realized I had left the house without pump, tube or any other remedy, save a few bucks for a train ticket. I hobbled up the road to the S-Bahn station, clicked conspicuously across the shiny tiled floor in my cycling shoes and boarded a train. It was mercifully empty. And then the two women, attractively tattooed and fetchingly pierced, boarded the car and sat across from me. And laughed. At me. I was, after all, wearing lycra. Bright pink lycra. And so it was that I decided to change my life, or at least change my approach to this Berlin bicycling thing.

I needed a new bike. Okay, an old bike. One of the purely functional, no-frills one-speeds that are everywhere in this city. They stream by on the bike paths, which line every sidewalk along nearly every major thoroughfare in town, and the paths come with their own turning lanes and traffic lights. The bikes are practically piled up at every subway stop. Many seem to have been abandoned, overcome as they are by rust and weeds. Bike shops are plentiful, all of them selling an assortment of new and used rides. The bounty, however, has not rendered the bikes cheap. And equipping the family wasn't easy. But a fervent search, lasting a week or so, unearthed a nice shiny ride for Wendy, a ragged but cheap one for Elena and a vintage beauty for Lydia. Nothing for me. There was only one place left to go: Mauerpark on a Sunday.

Mauer means "wall" in German, and the Mauerpark is somehow meant to commemorate the Wall. More importantly, it's home each Sunday to a huge flea market, filled with vendors selling everything imaginable, from soft served ice cream, to vintage sunglasses, to enigmatic machines that were surely used by the Stasi either for listening in on dissidents or torturing them (if I weren't so intent on finding a bike, I would have picked one up for those evenings when the kids won't calm down, or when Wendy's feeling especially frisky). And then there are the bikes -- steeds in all shapes and sizes, sold by a motley cast of shady-looking characters. Rumor has it, every bike there is stolen.

After perusing dozens of Fahrrads, as they're called in Germany, I finally stumbled upon a guy who was asking somewhat reasonable prices. If the salesman weren't speaking German, I might have mistaken him for someone running a junkyard on the backroads of Delta County, or the goofy cousin on the Dukes of Hazard. He wore a dark blue jumpsuit, had long, greasy black hair, and a lopsided, half-toothless smile. His hands were stained black from handling many an oily chain. He had just a handful of bikes for sale, a less overwhelming selection than some of his colleagues. I pointed to a green one: How much? 45 Euros. How about the blue one? 55. Then, in true socialist fashion, he made the hard sale on the cheaper bike: It's much better, he said in German, because it's from East Germany. The other one, from West. No good. East is better. Sold.

Like all Berlin bikes, it has a bell, a head- and tail-light, a rear rack. It rode beautifully for the first few blocks of the trip home. Then the right pedal started feeling funny. No biggie, I thought, I was going to put better pedals on, anyway. It kept getting worse, though, and by the time I got home I had made a sickening realization: The bike guy was no smarter than he looked, and had forced a left-hand pedal into the right-hand crank, completely stripping the threads. I think I wept a little, but it was okay, because I did it privately and out of sight of pretty girls on the subway. I washed away my depression with a healthy dose of the Grauburgunder wine that they sell around here for remarkably cheap, and then I got excited about fixing up my bike. A big hammer, and another 20 Euros later, it was up and running again. In the process, I also learned something: Berlin has government-supported bike shops devoted exclusively to people who are unemployed and on welfare. I see a job in my future.

In the days since, we've sampled many a Berlin bike path as a family, saving us the cost of U-Bahn tickets, and giving us a means to explore weird little pockets of the city. We live about 100 meters from a heavily treed path that heads south into giant parks and beyond, to the farmland at the edge of Berlin. To the north, it cuts through cool neighborhoods before joining up with the Mauerweg -- the Wall trail -- and skirts the line that once divided West from East Berlin. I've got my bike again, and I'm happy. And last night, as we ate another round of doner kepabs after looking at another round of potential apartments to rent, my youngest daughter, out of the blue, said: "I can't imagine what it would be like to not have my bike. When I ride it I feel all airy and light." Amen.

*My brother decided it would be funny to push me really fast on my little red Schwinn. I went over the bars, head first into the pavement, resulting in a huge road rash on my forehead. As far as I know, it didn't cause any permanent damage. That may have come earlier, when some unremembered event caused the big dent that remains in the back of my head to this day. But since my parents deny they ever dropped me headfirst, I count the bike wreck as my first head injury.

**The only hill in Berlin is actually a huge pile of rubble, the detritus of World War II bombs. The city was pretty much obliterated by Allied bombing raids.

I feel like Franz Kafka or, The bureaucratic war of attrition continues

2010-08-12T04:11:00.000-07:00

I awoke that morning from uneasy dreams. I felt strange, which is not unusual before I have my coffee, but this was different. I felt transformed, though I could not put any more words to it than that.

The day began at 9 a.m. We went to the Job Center to drop off documents and ask a question and get approval for a housing expenditure. They told us that they could not complete our file until we got our health insurance cards from the AOK agency. The Job Center also said they could not answer our question; only the people at the local branch of town hall, or Rathaus, could do that. We went on the subway to the Rathaus. The man there said that we had to come back at 3 p.m., when they would not answer our question, but would tell us where we had to go to have our question answered. We could not call to find out where to go, he said. We had to be there in person. Our German friend was there to translate, but I am beginning to suspect that fluency in the language does not increase understanding, at least when dealing with the bureaucracy.

While we waited for 3 p.m. to arrive, we went across town to the Volkshochschule, where we were to register for our German and integration classes (required as a condition of my residency permit). They gave us a piece of paper, to take back to the Job Center, who would decide whether the government would pay for the classes or not. We went back to the Job Center at 2 p.m. It was closed to everyone without an appointment.

My pre-coffee feeling of being transformed came back to me. People looked different to me, I realized, and they were looking at me in a curious manner.

At 3 p.m., we went back to the Rathaus. The man there looked something up. He said we needed to go to the other branch Rathaus to have our question answered. We got on the subway and went across town. The receptionist sent us to room 146a, which required a seemingly endless trek through the cavernous halls of the Rathaus. People sat in seats in the hallways, waiting. We knocked on door 146a, and a friendly man with long, grey hair and a ponytail emerged (the dress/grooming code amongst German bureaucrats is decidedly casual... many look as if they just got out of bed and forgot to change out of their pajamas). He told us we had to speak to Frau Heinrich, and escorted us to her office door and told us to wait outside. Her door had a sign on it telling visitors to find her at 146b, but the man ignored it. He told us we might have to wait for an hour or more.

We waited. The man disappeared.

The clock ticked. The hall was long, and dark, and empty. We knocked on the door of Frau Heinrich. No one answered. We knocked on her colleague's door, and asked if we had been forgotten. She said no. Then she called Frau Heinrich to make sure we hadn't been forgotten. It turns out we had not been forgotten; Frau Heinrich never knew we were there in the first place. Frau Heinrich emerged from door 146b. She asked us why we had just sat there, waiting. Why didn't we come to 146b, like the sign said? We told her about the ponytail man. She didn't buy the story. I got the impression that she didn't believe the ponytail man existed. I'm not sure I believe it either.

We asked her the question; we needed her to approve an extra expenditure. She fetched her colleague to help her answer the question. They said they could approve it, but that the Job Center is the one who decides, and they would almost certainly say no. But, we explained, the Job Center sent us here; they said you decided. They always do that, the two women said. And we always say yes. And then the Job Center always says no. She gave us a piece of paper to take back to the Job Center.

We walked through the hallways. I suffered a strange hallucination in which the walls and ceiling and doors seemed to expand, and I felt as though I were tiny, like a beetle skittering about on the floor, looking for crumbs in a house full of stomping feet.

We went to the AOK agency, which is quiet and clean and very corporate, but everyone dresses in the same sub-casual way as the bureaucrats. They said they could not give us our insurance cards until the Job Center gave them the final approval. But, we said, the Job Center won't give us final approval until we have our insurance cards. They gave us another document to give to the Job Center. We went home. Darkness and rain settled on the city.

That night, I had uneasy dreams.

Berlin's super-sized community gardens (and why they should be exported to the U.S.)

2010-08-04T03:02:00.000-07:00

When I’m in a city, I am drawn to the places in-between. Spaces, I mean, that somehow avoided being paved over, or built upon, or that once held buildings that have now collapsed, the rubble mostly hauled away, leaving only the structure’s ghost all filled up with spindly weeds. Sometimes these spaces are just surprising: When vacant lots are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars just a short walk away, how has this space remained empty and undesired? Sometimes these spaces are surprisingly wild. When I visit Los Angeles, my wife always drives (thanks to urban-automobile-neurosis on my part), leaving me to wonder at the remarkably green strip of land that separates many lanes of interstate asphalt. The vegetation is so dense here, I think, these slivers of wildness so unnoticed by the harried passersby, that I can’t help but wonder why the homeless don’t carve out little abodes here, rather than in concrete doorways. Perhaps they do.

My proclivity for seeking out the spaces-in-between did not perish on the plane trip to Europe. I automatically started noticing them on our first S-Bahn trip through the city (the S-Bahn rides above-ground, and affords a view of the backside of Berlin, while the U-Bahn is the underground train). There are many such spaces here: vine-infested hillsides; buildings that look to have been bombed out in the war and never resuscitated; random grafitti-covered walls sticking out of the dirt here and there; and an enigmatic, hulking metal skeleton called a gasometer, whose purpose I still cannot divine. On that first trip, I noticed something else, too: Little settlements huddled into the spaces-in-between.

The first one I saw reminded me of those L.A. freeway strips. It was nestled between the S-Bahn tracks and some sort of factory, on a piece of land no more than 30 feet wide. A low fence surrounded it, and it was divided into several different plots. Each plot had a small structure, along with a lush garden. The gardens were immaculately groomed, yet densely populated with vegetables, flowers and often a fruit tree or two. I began noticing these complexes all over the city; some were tiny, some were as big as city blocks, with dozens of plots and the tiny little houses that made me wonder if Berlin’s multicultural quilt included Elves. Finally, I saw a sign on the entrance to one of these spaces. It read, Kleingartencolonie.

Turns out I was wrong about the Elves. In fact, these colonies are Germany’s allotment gardens, which are something like U.S. community gardens, super-sized. In these days of so much talk about urban agriculture and local foods, it’s an idea that U.S. cities might try to emulate.

The concept originated in the 19th Century, when the German government, instead of handing out welfare, granted land to poor folks to garden so that they could provide for themselves. The gardens were also intended to reconnect kids with nature, which was certainly an idea before its time. Over the decades, the number of allotment gardens grew; when the city ran out of empty land, it bought more, with help from the federal government. After World War II, people actually lived on their plots, which may explain why so many of the current structures look more like little houses than potting sheds.

Today, there are more than 800 Gartenkolonies in Berlin, alone. Within those colonies are a total of more than 75,000 garden plots, each measuring about 250 square meters. Apartment-dwelling Berliners pay between 300 and 400 Euros per year to tend to and enjoy the plots. They must follow strict rules; at least 30 percent of the plot must be devoted to food production, hedges can be only so big, they are supposedly not allowed to live on the plot, but some of the so-called garden cottages appear to be big enough, and adequately equipped, for full-on habitation. Traditionally, the allottees have been older folks, but in recent years the back-to-the-land movement has brought younger people, along with a new wave of immigrants, to the gardens. Thousands of people are on the waiting list for the gardens.

View Berlin Allotment Gardens in a larger map

In addition to getting people out of the concrete landscape so they can get their hands in the dirt and produce fresh fruit and vegetables, Berlin’s allotment gardens also add to the city’s already abundant green spaces*. The Gartenkolonies appear in even the most downtrodden neighborhoods, providing oases of tidy vegetation amidst the grafitti-stained concrete and dog poop-piled pavement. They appear to go mostly unmolested by the graffiti artists, who have covered nearly every other surface in this city with their work.

My first thought after finding out what these things were was that the concept needs to be exported to the United States, pronto. Then the caffeine wore off, and reality set in: U.S. cities with a true need for these things – New York, Boston, San Francisco – probably don’t have the land base to accommodate much in the way of these super-sized community gardens within the urban area; and the cities that do have a lot of land are mostly inhabited by people with big yards, and plenty of space for their own gardens. At least for now.

But then, we are in the midst of a major financial crisis. The housing bubble burst a long time ago, and it is showing no sign of re-inflating. The growth machine has screeched to a gear-grinding halt, especially in places like Phoenix, which had fed the machine with sunny skies combined with rampant air conditioning, favorable growth policies (read: a lack of planning and regulation), seemingly endless expanses of developable desert and farmland, mass-production homebuilding companies and lots of cheap credit and equity refugees. Because the greater Phoenix megalopolis didn’t just sprawl, but leapt into the desert, passing up perfectly usable land for cheaper plots further out, hundreds of acres lie vacant within the greater metro area. With thousands of homes already foreclosed upon in the area, I suspect that land is not selling at a premium. Which makes this a perfect time for the city to go for a bit of that stimulus money to buy up the land and convert it into it’s own garden colonies. Perhaps the banks, who I assume now own a lot of that land, would even consider donating it to the cause (not out of any sort of charitable urge, of course, but to get a tax deduction so that they can siphon more profits to CEO compensation, and also to unload some worthless assets).

Meanwhile, the financial crisis has forced Americans to curb their appetite for giant new homes, with giant green lawns, in giant new cookie-cutter developments far out from the city center. In fact, recent reports say that apartment rental rates are increasing thanks to all the foreclosures. And at least a few of those McMansions that surround the West’s cities are being divided up into multi-family rental units. I also believe that sprawling cities do evolve to become more densely populated, from the city’s core outward; old industrial buildings become loft apartments, and the creative class flocks not to suburban sameness but to downtown flats. That creates a whole new group of people who might feel a bit cooped up in those gardenless apartments; people who could save a bit of money and get their hands in the dirt in one of these garden colonies.

And for those of you who worry about polluting America's Jell-O-fed purity with some commie Euro idea, check out the great essay by Grist's Tom Philpott on the history of urban ag in the U.S. Turns out Berlin's allotment gardens look a bit like American urban gardening efforts of old (the German gardens merely persevered, rather than getting paved over by strip malls).

With bio-intensive gardening, these plots could feed a family for a summer, or offer an ambitious farmer enough produce to make some cash at the neighborhood farmers’ market. They’d add diversity to the concrete landscape, turn a few of those spaces-in-between into places of horticultural creativity (not to mention creepy lawn ornaments) and keep the Starbucks and strip malls at bay.

*Which truly are abundant, making Berlin one of the greenest (in the literal sense) cities in the world. There are the huge parks, such as Tiergarten (essentially Berlin’s Central Park), which is in turn dwarfed by the Grunewald (which is a forest, not a park), and many in-between. The waterways that wind their way through the city are all lined with green spaces and trails. In most parts of town, one can't walk little more than a couple of blocks without running into a public playground or park of some sort. We are currently staying in Wedding, which many Berliners consider the "bad" part of town. Yet within a two-minute walk of our flat, we are in a park replete with a vegetation-shrouded walking/bike path that stretches for many a kilometer in either direction. Huge parks are within an easy bike ride. And our neighborhood is flanked by Gartenkolonies of various shapes and sizes.

Pfifferling und Makrel: Saturday at a Berlin market

2010-07-24T07:25:00.001-07:00

This is the time of year -- late July and early August -- when my home mountains of southwestern Colorado start getting hammered by the monsoon cycles and its regular afternoon rain showers. That's enough to coax the chanterelle and porcini mushrooms from the cool, moist forest floor, and to lure the mushroom maniacs into the hills. It's also enough to make a Colorado boy in Berlin a bit homesick.

Happily, we have a homesickness cure here: The weekly market. Just about every neighborhood, or at least every district, has its own market in some prominent platz or plaza at least once a week, usually on Saturday morning. Today, we found our favorite thus far, the Winterfeldtplatz market in Schöneberg. Dozens of tents and booths huddle around a grand brick church, peopled by peddlers selling everything from sunglasses to sausages, flowers to cappuccinos. Nearly every produce seller has a big bin of chanterelles -- Pfifferlinge* in Deutsch -- with their earthy aroma and apricot-like color. We planned on just picking up enough shrooms to make a risotto (the scorching temps gave way to cool rain and cloudy skies, making the idea of standing over a pot of cooking rice tolerable). Then we got hungry.

So we got some kind of middle eastern spinach-cheese pastry thing, and some pancakes smothered with sugar, cinnamon, plum sauce and vanilla. And then we found the fish: Sizzling trout and mackerel and trout cooking on a grill. The chef recommended the whole mackerel, and he was right on. Wow. We were told that this was an imported delight; Berliners are known for smoked or pickled fish (indeed, one can find nearly any variety of fish, beautifully smoked), while the Bavarians specialize in grilled fish. The only complaint is that we didn't find out that the guy two booths down was selling a nice chilled white wine by the glass until AFTER we finished the fish. Next time. But while we ate, a very nice woman told us about another booth that sold homemade bratwurst to die for. We just had to try some. On the way, we saw some cookies made of nuts, and coriander and cardamom and dipped in chocolate. Couldn't pass that up.

Finally, we got a bagful of chanterelles for a mere 2 Euro. Homesickness: Cured.

*Pfifferlinge/Chanterelles apparently came into season here right when we arrived, and the things are as ubiquitous as donerkebap stands. A lot of restaurants even have Pfifferlinge menus, with chanterelle pastas, salads, and schnitzel -- pounded, breaded, fried veal -- smothered in shrooms.

Zermürbungskrieg: The bureaucratic war of attrition

2010-07-16T23:43:00.000-07:00

I'm an immigrant. Or at least I'm trying to be. Most people in my situation might prefer to be called an "expat" because it sounds cooler (i.e. sitting in Parisian cafe plotting revolutions and writing novels) and doesn't evoke frightened masses huddled in the creaky hull of a ship catching the first glance of Manhattan, or desperate folks dodging cacti in the desert in 100 degree heat in order to get landscaping jobs in even hotter Phoenix. I am not writing this in a Parisian cafe. I do not feel like an expat. So call me an immigrant. And being an immigrant means going through the immigration office.

It should have been easy. After all, I'm married to a German, and these Germans are efficient, folks, right? The trains all run on time; and they make some killer cars and appliances, which are actually manufactured here, for the most part, not outsourced to some up-and-coming third world country. And opening our German bank account was one of the easiest, most pleasant such processes I can remember*. So why would getting my residency permit be any different?

We were told to arrive early. So we left the apartment at 6:30 a.m., jumped on the U-Bahn, grabbed a really bad coffee in the subway station, got on the S-Bahn and disembarked at a stop in a strangely institutional part of town. We walked past enigmatic factories, and what must have been a coal-fired power plant in a strangely sterile part of town. Big, bunker-like medical facilities filled the horizon. The day, though barely just begun, was already hot. And humid.

The immigration bureau has one entire floor for Turkish immigrants. Meanwhile, North-, South- and Central Americans, Africans, Australians, New Zealanders and etc. all go to another floor. We waited in line for 45 minutes. To get a "waiting number." The women didn't speak English. They asked how long we had been married. Wendy said a long, long time, and snickered. The woman yelled at us (in German, of course, which is so much harsher): This is no laughing matter! Then they informed us we were in the wrong line. We went to a different line, and into a different room, but I'm pretty sure the woman was the same. She sent the children away. She took our passports and my application. When she realized Wendy was a German citizen, but didn't speak German, she looked at us disapprovingly (a common reaction, it turns out ... and, yes, Germany has its own "German-only" crowd). She gave us a number. We waited.

I started to get angry. I looked some stuff up in my dictionary so that I would be prepared next time someone scolded Wendy for not speaking German. "Ihr Grosseltern war im das Gemetzel. Deine Vorfahren töt ihre Vorfahren. Sie is Deutsch weil Deutschland ihr Grosseltern Leben gesteht." I thought it meant: Her grandparents were in the Holocaust. Your ancestors killed her ancestors. She is German because Germany stole her grandparents' lives. It actually means something entirely different about confessing a life and carnage. Perhaps it's best that I never had a chance to use it.

We waited. A heat wave is clobbering Europe. It's the hottest summer in Berlin in 110 years. Every day, temperatures get into the high 90s. It does not cool off at night. People are collapsing from heat stroke on the trains. No one in Berlin has air conditioners, least of all the bureaucratic agencies. Fans are unheard of. An Australian woman, waiting for her work permit, told us that a giant indoor mall here has air conditioning. People flock to it for sanctuary. We waited one hour. And then another. The digital board kept calling the same number, over and over again. The heat kept climbing. I doodled things a sane man should not doodle.

At 10 a.m. a woman came out, locked the door to the office, and put up a sign announcing that they would give out no more waiting numbers that day. The Australian woman talked. My children rolled around on the floor in agony. We waited some more, along with other people from all over the world. Germans do not have water fountains. The immigration office is the only place in Berlin that does not have a donerkebap stand, a currywurst place, or a Lotto/coffee place, or a bakery, or a Turkish fruit stand. The nearest grocery store is way down the street.

We will wait in other un-air-conditioned offices as well: mandatory health insurance, Kindergeld, the job center. The health insurance people will tell us we need our job center numbers, the job center will tell us we need immigration and health insurance numbers. There is no central database from which the bureaucrats can access the other bureacrats' numbers. We will walk/ride the U-Bahn from one office to the next, take a number and wait.

Three and a half hours after arriving at the immigration office, our number flashed on a screen. A woman handed us a paper. We had an appointment to return in four weeks. The paper warned us not to be late, or we would miss our appointment. It also let us know that, even though we had a very defined appointment time, we should expect a long wait.

*Just before we came to Berlin, we went to the Delta, Colo., Wells Fargo to set up the system that would enable us to wire money from our U.S. account to a German account. We sat down with a "personal banker" to do what seemed like a quick and easy process. The personal banker clearly had no idea how to do such a thing, and went searching around the inter tubes to try to figure it out. He spelled our names wrong on the forms several times, and didn't catch it until he printed it out. Then he'd fix it, print out the forms again, and we'd discover another mistake. This went on for hours, while our kids' brains boiled out in the car in the parking lot. Contrast that to our German experience: We walked into the Sparkasse. Found a banker that spoke flawless English. He offered us cappuccino. And we had a German bank account no more than 20 minutes later. Easy as kuchen.

Das Krankenhaus: Or how I got Pneumonia in Berlin and (hopefully) live.

2010-07-07T07:49:00.000-07:00

One way to learn about a new place is to go to cultural centers, museums, eat the food and meet new people. Another way is to get an incapacitating, sometimes even fatal, ailment. I chose the former, but the latter chose me. And once again, my lack of assertiveness got the best of me.

It started out with fatigue, aches in strange places, and a sudden lack of appetite, even for beer, even during a World Cup game. Then the coughing started: wheezing fits of hacking that caused people on the street to steer clear (or was that the dog?). Each cough caused my eyeballs to strain against their sockets, and made it feel as if my windpipe would implode. One fit was so violent that it threw my back out (which in turn was wracked with a sharp pain with each cough). I ended up prone and delirious. The only problem was, we had things to do, so I had to pull myself up and stagger down the street to school offices in far-flung parts of the city. This was during the recent heat wave, by the way; 90 F plus himidity. And the subway is at least ten degrees warmer, kind of like a moving sauna, with everyone packed together, trying not to look at each other or at the guy with the accordian trying to collect money. And then there was the guy coughing as though he had tuberculosis. That was me.

I drank lots of fluids and tea. I ate vitamin C and turmeric until it oozed from my pores. I took hot baths in spite of the heat. I slathered my body with Vicks vapor rub as though I were a menthol turkey getting ready for Thanksgiving.

That natural stuff, it soon became clear, wouldn't be enough. I needed some Nyquil and Aspirin, stat. But when I went to the grocery store, I only found more homeopathic/naturopathic remedies. Okay, I thought, it's pretty progressive to have this stuff in the corner store, but where's the heavy artillery? Turns out that in Germany, you can't even buy aspirin in the store. You have to go to the Apotheke, or pharmacy, and then specifically ask for what you want. You even must explain your symptoms. This was a challenge.

"Ich habe ein schlimmel Husten," I said, only to be answered with the usual Gatlin-gun, incomprehensible Deutsch. "Ich verstehe nicht," I continued. "Ich spreche nur ein Bissen Deutsch. Langsam bitte."* And so it went until I got some kind of nasty tasting syrup that was probably good enough, along with a box of aspirin. Proud to have communicated successfully, and relieved, I went home and started pounding the stuff. No improvement.

In fact, things started getting worse. When I slept on my right side, things were moderately okay -- I'd only erupt into coughing once every hour or so. But when I rolled over onto my right side, an eerie sound emanated from my lungs. It was reminiscent of tinfoil balls rolling across crumpled newspaper. That is not a sound that should come from a human body.

My kids started looking at me with that so-I-guess-I'm-about-to-be-a-quasi-orphan look. And Wendy gave me that why-didn't-you-get-life-insurance-when-I-told-you-to-you-jerk look. And it seemed prudent to get some medical help. All the doctors were closed, so we had to go to the emergency room, halfway across town. This entailed more walking; more subway rides; more walking. Now, before you socialist types get all excited about me taking advantage of that free European health care, you should know something: Health care in Germany is not free. In fact, they are on a mandatory health insurance system, just like the U.S. will be soon enough. I haven't been here long enough to get that insurance. That meant I had to pay 100 Euros up front, and they'll bill me for the rest later.

The Berlin E.R. was a grim place, with people all around who seemed barely to be clinging to life. So when I told the receptionist that I had a bad cough, she gave me that what-a-sissy snicker. When I told her I thought I might have pneumonia, she looked at me with a questioning frown. So I read her the German word that I had written down in my notebook: Lungenentzundnung. Then she almost laughed, but sent me onward. I told the doctor about the cough. I got the same look. I told him about the pneumonia, and he smiled: Ah, another American hypochondriac. "Surely it's just the flu," he said. Then I told him about the tinfoil sound in my lungs, and about the color of the stuff that was coming out of them with each cough. His eyes got big. He took my blood**, my urine, and an X-Ray of my chest.

One universal trait of health care everywhere is the waiting. I waited, and waited, and tried to study some German, and doodled some weird, disease-addled stuff. And then I waited some more. Wendy and the kids went out for lunch and visited the Brandenburg Gate. I sat in das Krankenhaus, listening to weird beeping sounds coming from the patient beside me, and a coughing that sounded like vomiting coming from the next room. Finally, the doctor returned.

"Okay, Mr. Thompson...," he began. But before he could give me the diagnosis, someone down the hall screamed. The doctor ran out. There were yells, an alarm went off, another skerfluffle, and the sounds of footsteps running urgently down the hall. Apparently someone got badly hurt; one of the people passing said something about "in der Augen," or "in the eye." Ouch. So, anyway, the doctor finally returned. And he calmly told me I had pneumonia. He said outpatient treatment was possible, but that I could have some kind of antibiotic-resistant strain that I picked up in a hospital or something, so I should probably be admitted. I explained that I hadn't been in a hospital in years. I didn't explain the flawed logic of staying in a hospital in order to treat something that can only be caught in hospitals. I also didn't explain that I couldn't really afford to stay in the hospital. I just told him, No thanks.

He sent me back to the Apotheke instead, where, after a bit of a runaround dealing with regulations (I'll try to explain the German attitude toward rules in another post), I was issued the most potent cocktail of antibiotics I've ever experienced. I've been on them for three days now, and they've purged everything in my body. Except the cough.

Now, I wait. And see if these Euro-antibiotics will win, or if the disease will. In the meantime, I've got another ordeal to face: German bureaucracy, which even Germans say is "rather unpleasant." Immigration, first, then the "Job Center."

* This would be a good place to insert the joke about how I got home and opened up the box and found a bunch of blue pills with "V"s on them, thanks to my bad German skills. But that's too obvious, and besides, I think I got the right stuff.

**Have I ever mentioned how much I hate hospitals, needles, etc.? I gave blood once, though. I was a strapping young high schooler, and my girlfriend persuaded me to do a good deed. So I went to the classroom where the blood drive was happening late in the day -- I was the last to get poked and sucked dry. When I came to, the blood people were all gone, replaced by the school baton twirling troupe or something, dancing and yelling and throwing things in the air. The blood folks had packed up and left, leaving me a half-eaten cookie and a paper cup full of Coke which, in my dizziness, I spilled.

Das Hund: Princess comes to Germany

2010-06-26T23:43:00.000-07:00

Now, I will tell you about the dog. Das Hund, as they say in Germany. Her name is Princess, which is both appropriate and just plain wrong. Yes, she demands the pampering of royalty. But just try screaming "PRINCESS! STOP! NO! DON'T KILL IT!" when she's trying to rip the throat out of a rottweiler that is six times her weight. It just doesn't sound right.

It's not our fault, though. Princess, who is reputedly some mix of lahpso apso, pit bull and boxer, already had her name when we got her four years ago. Changing it to something appropriate (Rex? Butch? The Jackal?), might just confuse her even more. So I prefer to call her Das Hund.

When we decided to come to Germany, we might have also decided to do something reasonable to offset that decision, like leave all of our animals with good homes in the United States. That's what we did with Cleo, one of our cats, who is sweet and cute and fat and clumsy. That's what we did with Lucee, the elder cat, whom Wendy and I got back when we first got together. Lucee is a long-haired beauty who lures people in to stroke her. Then, in a stinging blur, she slices into the unsuspecting person's hand with surgical precision, leaving a series of parallel lines of scarlet along aforesaid person's flesh, which would be beautiful if it didn't hurt so much. We also gave Plato to a new home. Plato is a cockatiel with a rabid hunger for human affection. He flies around the house freely most of the time -- leave him in his cage for more than an hour and he utters a horrific squawking and violently attacks his wooden toy -- and seeks out the tops of heads or shoulders on which to perch. He is drawn to those who are not so comfortable with having birds crawl on them, or having same bird walk around the dinner table, eating off of everyone's plates. Once he finds a desirable human perch, he actually snuggles with the victim. No, "bird" and "snuggle" should not appear in the same sentence. And yet. The lovefest lasts until the victim decides to stand up, or take a bite of dinner, and then Plato attacks. He usually aims for the earlobe, or the back of the neck, using his needlelike claws to get a purchase on that part of the back that is impossible to reach, causing victim to jump up from chair, spill his pasta all over the table, and futilely try to stop his attacker. I'm Plato's favorite victim.

Even the cats could not intimidate Plato. Lucee was actually terrified of the thing. Cleo eyed him hungrily sometimes, but nothing ever came of it. Das Hund, er, Princess just wanted to play with the bird: It was her life's mission to just lick him just once or twice. In many a failed attempt to accomplish that goal, she chased after Plato as he flew around at human eye level, jumping several feet into the air to try to catch him, and then landing roughly, her unclipped claws gouging the soft wood floor. Our otherwise pristine and beautiful house is on the market, and we still haven't figured out exactly how to explain the floors to a potential buyer. Easier just to offer a few thousand off the price so they can get them redone, no questions, please.

So, yes, the animals were all a part of our family. And, yes, it was heartwrenching to leave them behind. But then, when you tear up the roots, move across oceans and time zones, without jobs or knowing the language, you have to forsake some things: Like the last shreds of your sanity, good jobs, loving friends and family, a paycheck, any sense of security or stability and possibly even your identity. So saying goodbye to the animals was just part of the package.

Except when it came to Princess, of course.

Wendy would simply not leave her behind. I suppose I could have stood up to her and asserted my masculine right to make family decisions. But Wendy, you have to understand, is German -- think Panzer tank and Blitzkrieg -- and also Jewish (I won't bore you with a list of those inherent character traits). It so happens that I'm also German (and it turns out I'm also Jewish, which I discovered when a cousin did a DNA test and found out that he had the Ashkenazi gene strongly up our shared matrilinial line). Yet something else in my confused genetic mix offset the Panzer/blitzkrieg gene and replaced it with something a bit more, well, Volkswagen beetle-like. Which is why Wendy, who can't speak even one word in German, gets along better in this country than I do, despite my four years of high school Deutsch, which have turned out to be utterly useless. When I heard the Panzer rev its engines, I wisely stepped out of the way.

And so it was, that when we flew off to Germany, Princess was left behind. For a day. You see, she's just a few pounds too heavy to fly in the plane's cabin as a carry-on (and besides, she'd be less likely than Osama bin, himself, to make it past security), and British Airways doesn't carry dogs as luggage during the summer so as not to end up with a cargo hold full of roast canine. So we had to fly her on a separate airline, which, in case you're wondering, cost more than it did to fly each of us human beings here. Add to that the hundreds of dollars we had to spend to get all the veterinary checks and certificates and microchip implanted and to treat post-flight trauma, not to mention the thousands of dollars we'll have to discount our house to make up for the mangled floor, and Princess is turning out to cost as much as your average, well, princess.

Which is probably part of the reason Wendy couldn't sleep for the forty-eight hour stretch between when we boarded the plane in Denver and when Princess landed the morning after we arrived. While the girls still slept, Wendy took the bus to the airport. She returned nearly four hours later with a bloody, shell-shocked dog, wearing a stench that can't really be described here, and looking a bit harried, to say the least. Princess had survived the flight, but only barely; her condition involved relentless defecation and blood. Enough said.

The vet was mercifully just a few blocks away, and he actually spoke English, and was quite friendly as he probed and poked Princess. That didn't ease the feeling that I get when I go to doctor's offices, though. One of the nice things about having kids is that you can pretend to be comforting them when, in fact, you're the one about to either pass out or puke or both on the veterinarian's exam room floor. I gripped my daughter, Elena, and rubbed her head; I don't think anyone, least of all the squirming-to-escape-my-grasp-Elena, was fooled. The vet's assistant eyed me worriedly, but didn't say anything thanks to the language barrier.

Ultimately, we all made it through. Princess just had a bad case of nerves, which is exactly the same thing that happens to me when I fly, only I can stanch some of the nasty symptoms by self-medicating (British Airways is pretty liberal with the free booze, even in coach!). We left the Vet -- Tierarzt in German -- and headed out into the soft light of late afternoon. People were out and ambling on the streets, drinking beer in sidewalk cafes. Many a German Hund loitered unleashed on the streets. Princess's tail perked up, though she was clearly still miffed at us for not putting her in First Class where she belongs. As we passed one big dog, a retriever of some sort, I felt that familiar tug of the leash, there was the old snarl, and my arm was nearly pulled from the socket. That's when I knew Princess would be just fine.

That's a good thing, because I've got other things to worry about: Wendy has been researching ways to bring birds to Germany.

Last impressions, first impressions.

2010-06-24T23:51:00.000-07:00

My family and I moved yesterday. After spending my entire life in the American West, living the whole time in an area with a radius of about 200 miles in Colorado and New Mexico, I now live in Berlin, Germany.

We don't have jobs. We don't speak the language. We don't have a trust fund. We are here, in large part, because Wendy, my wife, and Elena and Lydia, our daughters, are German citizens, though this is the first time they've ever been to Germany. Long story (I'll fill you in later).

Two days ago now, in the space/time warp that occurs when one travels by jet over oceans and through time zones, we left our friends' house in Boulder and drove our overloaded car down the freeway to the Denver airport. My final impression of America was not necessarily of the airport, because an airport is not really of a country, but of the predominant view from the toll road which skirts Denver's suburban edge. There was the odd view of hundreds of houses, each almost identical to the one next to it, sprouting from the rolling, grassy hills as if they were geometrically-correct weeds. It was an appropriate last impression, I think.

Just a day earlier, we went to the Boulder Apple store, which is located in one of those newfangled outdoor mall sorts of things meant to resemble a downtown, I guess. My daughter, Elena, looked around and insisted we had been to this mall before: She vividly remembered the same Apple Store, the Anthropologie, the Jamba Juice, the AT&T store. We hadn't been there before, though we had visited an identical mall in Tucson a year-and-a-half earlier. I tried to explain to Elena that there were probably many other malls just like that one all over the country. But for her, the whole idea was maddening. She couldn't get over the notion that she had been to THAT mall once before. America.

Americans are masters at obliteration of place -- I don't mean the literal destruction of a place, although there's also that, but the voiding of any sense of difference between one place and another. We find comfort in the fact that we can feel like we're in Boulder even when we're in Tucson; we like to know that McDonalds in Paris is just the same as the one in Grand Junction. The houses with which we cover the grasslands of Colorado are no different than those we assemble on the edges of Reno, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Phoenix.

This happens all over, of course: I won't be surprised if I find the same mall here in Berlin. Yet the Americans certainly have perfected this art of erasure of place. After all, home delivery of the New York Times at our house in tiny Paonia, Colorado, was a piece of the same phenomenon, as is the tasty Nepalese restaurant in downtown Grand Junction. These are means of transcending the local. Also, efforts to preserve "place" can get all tied up with efforts to preserve culture, which in certain contexts can look a lot like xenophobia, chauvinism, racism, ultra-nationalism. Thank goodness the Germans didn't try to preserve their place by instituting a German-only law or something.

...

Flying into Germany, I noticed this: A huge flat green plain. It's carved up into fields, and villages. Interspersed here and there are thick, dark forests. The villages are all tidily contained, and don't sprawl out into surrounding fields. Giant wind turbines sit at many a town's edge. Unlike the Wyoming wind farms, these are more frequent, though they appear to each be of a smaller scale.

On the outskirts of Berlin, a huge forest. Lakes, rivers, canals. A barge hauling coal. A nuclear power plant.

Our apartment for the next five weeks has three rooms. High ceilings. White walls. A view onto a tree-lined street and an old building across the way with flower-filled balconies. It's not unlike neighborhoods in Paris. Except everyone is speaking German, which sounds nothing like French except that it, too, is quite foreign to my ears. But it's that very foreignness that ensures me I am in a place. A different place. Out of place. Now I must try to make this place mine. It is terrifying and exciting all at once.

Werner Herzog is a plastic bag

2010-04-09T07:12:00.001-07:00

This is simply brilliant. It lasts 18 minutes, which seems long to you blogospheric twitterheads, I'm sure. But watch it all the way through. You'll thank me later.

How Not to Cook Stew

2010-02-10T11:18:00.001-08:00

Foraging herbs and mushrooms and other stuff from the wilds for dinner is a great idea. Except when it's not, as a Maryland family found out the hard way. See, I subscribe to a tasty little electronic newsletter known as MMWR Weekly. That's short for the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (yes, there's a redundancy in there somewhere) from the Centers for Disease Control, and it's chock full of good stuff about diseases and death and other things to ponder when you're feeling a bit too happy. Last week had a great little nugget buried among HIV stats and the like: A full account of a family who accidentally prepared a jimsonweed stew. Then ate it.

For those of you not familiar with jimsoonweed, a.k.a. Sacred datura, it's a bushy plant, with dark green leaves and big, white, trumpet-shaped flowers. It grows in the desert, where it's sultry appearance seems wildly out of place. Georgia O'Keefe has a few famous paintings of datura. Adding to its allure is its danger: It's an hallucinogen, one of many written about by Carlos Castanada. And, as follows, it's also poisonous (kids looking for an easy trip sometimes brew a tea out of this stuff; it can take several days for the resulting visions to recede). So, you probably shouldn't make stew out of it lest this happen:

In the early morning hours of July 9, 2008, six adult family members were admitted to a hospital emergency department in Maryland with hallucinations, confusion, mydriasis, and tachycardia of approximately 3--4 hours duration.

Yikes.

The six affected persons came from one family and included three men and three women ranging in age from 38 to 80 years (median age: 42 years). All six shared a meal of homemade stew and bread at approximately 9:00 p.m. on July 8, 2008. No one else was at the home when the meal was eaten. Approximately 1 hour later, another relative arrived at the home and discovered the six affected family members laughing, confused, and complaining of hallucinations, dizziness, and thirst.

During the next 6 hours in the emergency department, the six patients continued to experience tachycardia, mydriasis, and altered mental status. One remained unconscious. The others demonstrated confusion, aggression, agitation, disorganized speech, incoherence, and hallucinations. All six were admitted to the hospital, five to the intensive-care unit. The unaffected relative reported to providers that pesticides had been sprayed on mint leaves that might have been incorporated into the stew.

Ahhh.... no. That's not it!

Over the course of their hospitalizations, the patients' signs and symptoms of anticholinergic toxicity fluctuated. In addition to tachycardia, mydriasis, and altered mental status, two patients experienced urinary retention, and one had a small pleural effusion identified by computed tomography scan (Table). The patients received supportive care, including cardiac monitoring and intravenous fluids. Four of six patients were administered lorazepam to control agitation. None were administered physostigmine. Their neurologic statuses improved during hospitalization and were normal by the time of discharge. Four were discharged on the third hospital day, one on the fourth hospital day, and one on the fifth hospital day, each with a final diagnosis of altered mental status secondary to food poisoning. The patient reported to have eaten the most stew was the slowest to recover and had the longest stay. All patients fully recovered.

And that's when they were able to remember what they ate: A stew with potatoes, garlic, onion, tomatoes, curry powder and the leaves from some plant out in the yard. Bingo.

Unchopping a Tree

2010-01-12T07:50:00.000-08:00

Maya Lin's video on deforestation. Quite beautiful.

Maya Lin - Unchopping a Tree from What is Missing? Foundation on Vimeo.

To can or not to can

2009-09-28T07:44:00.000-07:00

I hate this time of year. The leaves fall, and crackle under the feet like the bones of tiny children. And the light takes on certain harshness that reminds me that, even as I grow closer to death, I have gotten no closer to realizing my dreams.

Most of that is made tolerable with a healthy dose of self-medication. But there’s one autumnal rite that I can no longer obliviate with gin. Beginning in August, adherents of this practice descend on the U-Pick orchards like magpies on roadkill; and by September, this cult – yes, I think it can be called a cult – is fully engaged in a perverse ritual of self-flagellation involving steamy kitchens, boiling water, blistered fingers and sterile jars. Sometimes even death and disease.

Yes, it is the season of canning, when certain Caucasians of elevated socio-economic brackets come together and prostrate themselves on the altar of the root cellar, and “put up” the harvest. And then they talk about it.

Like any cult or religion, this one has its evangelists; and its guilt. “I put up 60 pounds of tomatoes this weekend,” one of the followers of the cult said the other day, her voice sticky with self-righteous, semi-competitive verve. “And today, as soon as I get home, ten bushels of pears await me.”

Seeking my own accomplishment, I imagined replying. “Well, I made it through 200 pages of Infinite Jest this weekend, and I think I finally understand the plot.” But I suppose that would only prompt a reply like, “Oh, Infinite Jest? Isn’t that an heirloom tomato?”

***

Last week, my wife Wendy, apparently feeling a bit inferior with all the canning chatter, and my mother, who since moving to Hotchkiss has joined the Locavore sect, spent a full day preserving tomatoes and salsa. This worries me. As I was growing up, my mother generally avoided the kitchen. When forced to cook, she relied upon Kraft dinners and frozen enchiladas in tinfoil platters. Wendy, meanwhile, is alarmingly blasé when it comes to foodborne illnesses, and has an inherent oblivion to “sell by” dates. I suspect that she figures if she poisons someone, she’ll never be expected to cook again, which is just fine by her. Still, possessed by some back-to-the-earth demon, they forged ahead into the battlefield of boiling water and sterile jars.

Wendy’s description of the ordeal was so awful that I was overcome with enough guilt to agree to partake in the next session. I wanted to educate myself first, though, and I soon discovered that there’s a plethora of literature on the subject. Indeed, there may be more people writing about canning than actually doing it. In addition to several books, the cybersphere has exploded with blogs extolling the virtues of “putting up”. One advocates a Canvolution; another goes so far as to compare canning to sex, which leads me to think that my sex life, which only occasionally involves boiling tomatoes and finger-scorching jars and food processors, needs some spicing up.

As I read, I try some of the salsa canned before. Not bad for salsa without lime, or salt, or a hint of chili pepper. Then I reach the scary chapter of the book, where I discover that canning is like sex; that is, it can lead to various forms of bacterial infection when done recklessly. Turns out, canned stuff is a leading cause of botulism – a nerve toxin that can paralyze and even kill you. Tomatoes are especially prone to the bacteria, and so, the book says, one should always add acid to them before putting them up.

As I take another bite of lime-free salsa, I feel my eyelids drooping, and I have a hard time moving my arm. And when I ask whether they boiled the jars for long enough, I must slur my words beyond recognition, for neither my mom nor Wendy seems to hear me.

“Couldn’t we just freeze these?” I ask, eying the pile of tomatoes that we’re about to can. I receive a caustic look in return; it’s just not the same. And besides, as the manifesto of canning explains: What if the power goes out? You see, no cult is complete without an apocalypse fantasy, and the canvolutionary’s vision of Armageddon is as frightening as any, with pesticides and disease; GMOs and Peak Oil; and deep-chest freezers without electricity regurgitating rotten produce. As with all good end-of-days scenarios, the canners’ version include those who will be saved – that is, people who have put up plenty of green beans and peaches; and the damned – who put up nothing, and now must spend eternity, or at least a few minutes a day, wandering the supermarket aisles to ensure sustenance. The Bible tells us that the Prince of Darkness will one day burn in the flames of Hell. In the canners’ version of the Rapture, the CEO of Monsanto will spend his eternity trying to eat his way out of a pit of the North Fork Valley’s excess zucchinis.

Okay, so forget about the freezer. We’ll can the salsa, already. I throw in as much bacteria-killing garlic, lime, and chili as I’m able. After the third burn blister erupts on my hand, I ask myself: Wasn’t technology intended to free us from such chores so that we could work less and spend more leisure time doing the things that make us human, like reading, doing art or watching reruns of Battlestar Galactica? Isn’t that why our grandparents gave up home-canning in the first place? Or was it just because canning sucks? After all, canned fruit isn’t even all that good – it’s basically a less tasty, slimier shadow of its original self. Not unlike Mickey Rourke.

Five hours after beginning, our canning ritual is complete. I must admit, the salsa looks beautiful in those jars. And it’s going to be tasty come mid-December. I get it. Okay? I get the canning thing. And to prove it, all of you canvolutionaries can come try some of the salsa I put up. Don’t worry. I sterilized those jars really well. At least I think I did.

How a Paris Carnival differs from an American one

2009-08-24T05:20:00.000-07:00

There are certain things I expect when I go to a carnival: The gnashing of gears mingled with the exhilarated screams mingled with that creepy music. Diesel fumes intertwined with motor grease mingled with cooking grease. Funnel cakes, neon snow cones, cotton candy. The prototypical carny, his hands smeared with grime, his teeth blackened with rot, his smell soured by a string of Thunderbird-filled nights, his leer enough to make David Lynch shudder. And a low lying fear that one of the clamps on the 40-year-old Graviton wasn't clamped down tight enough this time, and the whirling orb will soon rip itself and all its nauseated occupants free and sail into the crowd and crush us all into the dusty ground.

When Wendy and I stumbled upon a Paris in May, it seemed, at first, to fit the bill. The nauseating colors were there, and the music and screams and whir of gears, too. A few moments of wandering around, and getting over our surprise at being in a carnival in Paris in the first place, revealed that this was a much different place. The ferris wheels were gigantic, which was a good thing. We needed a good vantage point to figure out where the hell we were, so that we could find our way back to the hotel. We had started out in the city's center hours earlier, our bellies full of a lovely lunch and wine and cafe creme, and began walking along an abandoned rail line that had been converted into a trail, park, and green space. And we didn't stop until, quite disoriented, we reached the end, way out at the Boulevard Peripherique in the city's fringes. There, next to the Bois de Vincennes -- a gigantic park replete with a boat-filled lake -- was the carnival and its towering ferris wheels.

The scarf-wearing, beautiful people of Paris were mostly absent here; this was a place for the working class, the immigrants. The carnies, if you can call them that, were meticulously arranged: Each a distinguished -- at least by rural American standards -- looking man in his 40s, often working alongside a young woman, probably in her early twenties. Most memorable, perhaps, was this: In one food tent, one could order not only German beer on tap, but also soft-served ice cream. And it wasn't just vanilla, or chocolate, or some tasteless swirl, but was cassis, citron, banana, pineapple.

It's these tiny, perhaps insignificant, differences that I love about Europe. Yes, one is dazzled and overwhelmed when the plane lands, and one finds himself in another country struggling to speak and understand another language. It is both remarkable and scary to step onto an airplane in Grand Junction, Colorado, a place that, to be charitable, suffers from aesthetic anemia, and end up less than a day later in Paris, where every person and every baguette and every little planter in every apartment window is infused with some sort of beauty and history. And yet. After one stumbles through ordering that first jambon de Paris, that first cafe creme, that first vin de rouge, and he is sitting there taking it all in, he starts to notice those small things, be it the curbside, automated bike rentals, or the way the waiter allows a patron to linger for hours and hours on end without hassle.

It is these small things, I think, that matter the most. For it is in the most mundane acts that we make the most significant statements about our attitude toward life. I'm sure it says something that Paris has the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, and New York does not. But I think we can find much more significant clues to how one lives in the smaller things, whether it's the cassis ice cream in the Paris carnival, or the way things are presented and packaged in a little store. That's why I could spend hours in a corner grocery in Paris, poring over the selection and noting the quirky-seeming things they sell. Yes, it can be embarrassing for those around me: More than once, Wendy has had to drag me out of a little shop as I picked stuff up from the shelves and exclaimed things like: "Look! They sell Campari and soda in a bottle, like it's soda pop!" as dismayed Parisians tried to steer their way around me in the narrow aisles.

I like the big differences, too, of course. For example, if one of the Parisian carnival rides were to tear loose from its pivots (which seems less likely, since the equipment appeared relatively new), and then mangle me and my fellow carnival-goers, none of us would have to worry about being turned away at the hospital because we didn't have health insurance. Which is a wonderful thing.

But those little things are important. Like this, which was emblazoned on the "Family Fun Hall" at the Paris Carnival. I have to say, I've never seen this at an American fun house. I wonder why?

Cobblestone Aioli

2009-08-02T06:37:00.001-07:00

My grandparents were farmers. Their place was in the Animas Valley, in southwestern Colorado. They had dairy cows, and corn, and veggies, and sheep. It was a tough life, I think, but they had a lot of kids -- seven -- around to help out. My mom was one of them. So, as a child, she was a farmer, too, by default. Folks from the valley remember her and her sisters picking raspberries and selling them to passersby.

That pretty much did it. My mom swore she'd never be a farmer, that's for sure. And for about 50 years she succeeded in keeping that vow. Until now. Not long after Wendy and the girls and I moved to the North Fork Valley, my mom, Jan, and stepdad, Gary, moved to a little place on Hanson Mesa, outside of Hotchkiss. At first, they just had a pretty big garden. Then, last fall, they planted 600 garlic plants. They harvested them this summer, and have been selling the Cobblestone Farm varieties (a bunch of them) to the local outlets and a couple farmers' markets. Now, they are farmers.

Which leaves them exhausted. But it can be really great for us, because we can pick stuff right out of the field, and pretty much have a meal. Last weekend, on a scorching Saturday afternoon, we got: basil, garlic, fennel, squash, squash blossoms, chard, new potatoes, and eggs from "The Farm" (which is exactly how we referred to my grandmother's house when I was a kid). We then stopped at Delicious Orchards for some Avalanche che vre and a bottle of Plum Creek sauvignon blanc.

Back home, after I started swilling the sauv blanc, Wendy stuffed the squash blossoms with the chevre and lightly sauteed them in butter. I made pesto and some pasta and marinated the squash for grilling and we got the potatoes roasting. Then, my favorite: the aioli. In case you don't know, aioli is essentially homemade garlic mayonaise. It's also divine, when prepared correctly and with good ingredients, and, like bacon and butter, it makes any food taste good. But where bacon and butter are imbued with a sort of loose lasciviousness, aioli is more erotic; or perhaps that's just me thinking about the look on Wendy's face when she eats aioli.

I stole the idea of using roasted garlic rather than fresh garlic from the brilliant cookbook: Artichoke to Za'atar, by Greg and Lucy Malouf. It mellows out the garlicky edge. In fact, this whole recipe is an adaptation of the Malouf's.

Cobblestone Aioli

• 2 very fresh egg yolks
• 1 head of Cobblestone Farm garlic
• A dollop of Dijon mustard
• A dollop of honey
• 1/2 - 3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil (if it's very strong oil you might want to substitute a bit of canola oil for 1/4 cup of the olive oil)
• Some fresh lemon juice
• 1/4 cup white wine vinegar

Start off by roasting the garlic until it's nice and soft, then squeeze all the garlic meat out of it's skin and into a blender (yes, a blender, with my apologies to the mortal & pestle purists out there). Add egg yolks and vinegar and mustard and honey to the blender and fire it up. As it whirs, drizzle the oil in one drop at a time. This is important -- drip it too fast, and your aioli "breaks," a condition that can be repaired only by drinking large quantities of wine and going hungry for the night. When the aioli emulsifies, you can go more quickly with the oil. Stir in the lemon juice and salt and pepper. Spread it generously on everything, as there's nothing worse than being stingy with the aioli. Eat it sooner rather than later.

For another lovely aioli recipe, check out david lebovitz's blog.

Blossom Sno Cones

2009-08-01T08:58:00.000-07:00

Blame it on Fishtank Ensemble.

See, they played in Ridgway, in the Pickin' in the Park concert series, and Fishtank Ensemble rocks (gypsy style). And Ursula -- that's her in the picture -- is oh so sawcy. Yeah, that's a saw she's playing, and she can make it SING. So we had to go. Great concert (see that look she's giving me? Sizzling sauce). Much dancing.

On the way -- it was sweltering hot, you see -- we saw a big sign in Montrose that said "Snow Cones." Jay insisted we stop. We did.

Overwhelmed, I was, by the scene: Teenaged girls licking syrup off their lips while a mediocre jazz band played. Then there was the wacky flavor selection. Dragon's blood? Blue (blue???) coconut? I ordered some combo with Cajun (cinnamon) and Mango. Refreshing, but just not that tasty. Syrupy sickly artificially sweet.

What if? I thought. What if there was a snow cone stand that sold really yummy snow cones with homemade syrups, seasonal and local and the like?

Turns out, there's at least one other place like this, but it's way over in Kansas City, and that's too far to drive for a snow cone.

Then we started talking: What if the snow cones were not just ice and syrup, but actual snow cone CREATIONS? What if they were inspired by great art? Or literature? What if our cart flew under the radar, and it would show up randomly at selected places, with just a few select snow cone flavors, and people would find out where by word of mouth or our twitter feed? Like they're doing like crazy in the Mission of San Francisco (everything from a creme brulee cart, to a sexy soup cart, to salami cycle).

Yeah. What if? So, it's on its way. We call it Blossom Sno Cones. Best way to keep track of Blossom's awesome flavor ideas is to follow on twitter.

And, of course, we'll have to have a Fishtank Ensemble snow cone. Hmmm... something spicy, something fruity, something oh so saucy...

A distorted sense of place

2009-06-10T18:39:00.000-07:00

It's been cool here lately, and cloudy. Downright weird for this part of the world and this time of year.

So I took a walk on the ditch thinking there was nothing better to do. Once up there, away from the people and the streets and all the rest, it was still cool. I wore a sweater. A breeze. Clouds, dark up the North Fork, a curtain of rain obscuring the mountains.

The temperature, the clouds. It felt like being up in the mountains this time of year. In Silverton, perhaps, 4,000 feet higher than here. Yet along the gurgling water of the ditch, the place was so full of life just like it's supposed to be this time of year, only it wasn't wilting under the heat. Apricots hung from the trees, still green and stone hard but with silver fuzz and a cleft slightly erotic. Plums, too, shiny green. Wild roses pale pink and waxy green leaves. Above, a hawk sailed effortlessly, pestered by a tiny swallow. Milkweed flower like an explosion of stars. I picked it for Wendy, though she's not here. The air felt moist, as though the sky would soon open wide.

I felt the same way. Just the slight change in expected weather had turned the utterly familiar into something novel, and full of possibility. It's like being married to someone for a long time; so many nights spent at the altar of her flesh, exploring every inch. Then, one day, you look at her from a different angle, and see a freckle right there above her clavicle that you had never noticed before from that angle or in that light.

And suddenly, it's all new.

Rura'sexual wristwarmers

2009-02-17T18:42:00.000-08:00

These here are my rura'sexual wristwarmers. What's a ruralsexual, you ask? It's like a metrosexual, only in a rural area. We like nice clothes, and nice food, and good wine (and really good gin), and sometimes comb our hair, just like our urban counterparts. Only we're a bit more pragmatic about things. Like, we're not afraid to crawl around in the mud under a crappy old car in order to save some money on an oil change. And it's sometimes hard to find our grade of clothes or food or culture (or conversation) in rural areas, leaving us perpetually frustrated.

Luckily, we're usually able to find someone special to connect with. And if we're really lucky, they'll help us out in the clothes department. My talented wife Wendy just picked me up a lovely silk and cashmere Banana Republic sweater from a local (rural) consignment store. And, better yet, she made these wristwarmers that no self-respecting, PBR-drinkin' rural guy would wear, but a rura'sexual would love. They're not only fashionable, but they also keep my hands warm when I'm typing.

That's rura'sexual. (roora sek sh ooel). And I'd bet Wendy would knit a pair for you, too, for the right price.

After the beeting

2009-02-09T19:00:00.000-08:00

Alamos dos: Street food vs. ....

2008-12-31T15:05:00.000-08:00

It's a lesson I've learned nearly every time I've traveled to foreign lands. And yet. With each new journey, I seem to lose the lesson, only to repeat the same mistake. I'm sure you've done the same.

Imagine the scene: After two days of driving, we arrive at our destination, a small town in northern Mexico. We pull the deerslayer -- our trusty but stinky minivan -- up to our friend John's humble casita. As soon as we drag our stiff bodies out of the car (followed by the wrappers from the only fast food place open in the Tucson region on Christmas Day), and into the distant clatter of ranchero music and John's dusty yard, which has been plagued by the neighbors' chickens, we are overpowered by the scent of guavas and limes and an undercurrent of smoke.

Something's always burning in Mexico.

Naturally, we eat street food. Carne asada, mostly, the kind you can get from a little nicho off the alameda from the young and unusually lithe woman with short hair died golden blonde almost orange and the big sunglasses. For five bucks we get a container of carne, a dozen tortillas, salsa, grilled onions, guacamole -- enough for four people.

What's not to like? But here's the age old dilemma: One day, we go to a small town in the hills. After a hike, our judgment impaired somewhat by sun, we stumble upon a restaurant that promises "gourmet international food." John says it's a five star establishment (judged by whom, I wonder, but don't ask). We look at the menu: twenty bucks a person, plus. Looks nice and quiet inside, with the promise of sophisticated conversation over wine. Just outside the restaurant, in the plaza, sits our alternative for dinner: A long, white table holding only several large jugs of red sauce with three bare lightbulbs strung overhead. Flames leap from a grill, black with many many uses. Two men cook something over the fire.

After a bit of back and forth and counting of pesos, we decide that the five star restaurant might be kinda nice. There is a logic to this decision that goes like this: If we can pay five bucks for a great meal on the street, then shouldn't a meal costing ten times as much be ten times better? It's based loosely on the axiom: You get what you pay for.

We sit down. We are immediately assaulted by the proprietor, who tells us how great his food is, how great his restaurant is, how everything is made by hand right there in that tiny little town. This is red flag number one (why's he blabbing to us instead of slaving away over masterpieces in the kitchen?). Still, the margarita is exquisite, the Chilean wine decent. Then the food comes: The garlic-saffron soup tastes suspiciously like french onion. The bread has a tight, bleached crumb (passable with a big coating of butter). The salad is fresh, but not remarkable. The chicken is chicken, no mas, no menos. Then dessert. The proprietor had promised that his chocolate gelato was "killer." So we ordered it. Or we thought we ordered it. Instead, we got vanilla ice cream (store bought, I'm sure), smothered with more talk from the proprietor, and then the bill, smothered with an obvious gringo tax that John and I paid just to get away from the guy's incessant, arrogant, blather. You get what you pay for.

What had we done? Our lesson learned, we've indulged in street food three times a day ever since. Lots of carne asada, sure, but also tacos pescado (frito), with crispy fresh salsa and cucumbers and onions and avocados and yellow sauce and pink sauce out of squeeze bottles and a Coca-cola from the old glass bottles. Bare light bulbs hanging overhead just a few feet from the cars cruising the alameda and the man with a blue cloudy eye looking out from the darkness of his pickup truck and the men in the white cowboy hats and the women glittering from their eyelids to the sparkly studs on their black jeans sticking to every curve and fold and the competing ranchero music and a little brown bag of churros crispy and still hot, their grease seeping into the bag, and Negra Modelo in a bag of ice and lime and chiltepin hot sauce so hot "I can feel it my chest" says Wendy and the bus station across the street lit up and cold and, next to the Tecate store, in a sunken empty lot, a canopy with candles burning and people sitting solemnly and silently oblivious the the carnival on the street paying their respects to the man or the woman or the child in the coffin under a shawl bathed in the orange light of the fake candles under the canopy in the empty lot next to the store where they sell Tecate and only Tecate, ice cold.

Alamos Uno

2008-12-27T11:18:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, Christmas is about snuggling up in a cozy place while snow falls outside and eating and drinking and spending time with extended family. Sometimes, it's about driving to Mexico.

This year, we chose the latter. After two days of driving through mountains and snow and saguaros and deserts, we landed in Alamos, in the state of Sonora. It's one of the northernmost colonial towns of Mexico, and sits where the desert and tropics collide. And, like much of Mexico, a feast for the senses. As soon as we arrived, and climbed out of the deerslayer (our car), Wendy was overcome by the scent of guavas falling from the trees. It just got better from there.

More on that later. For now, just pictures of the first couple of days, including from the opening at John Sheedy's gallery. John is working on a documentary -- the Tijuana Project -- about the Tijuana dump and the children living there. He gave the kids some cameras, and they documented their neighborhood; the Alamos gallery opening included those photos.

Whoa, whoa, Mexico!

2008-12-23T06:28:00.001-08:00

The entire gin + gelato team (that would be my family and me) are headed south. To Alamos, Sonora, Mexico, a colonial mining town in the mountains about 8 hours south of the border. And we're driving. We will search for gelato on the way (this looks like a good bet in Tucson). We'll forsake gin for tequila and cerveza. Perhaps there will be a gin + gelato post or two from the road.

It promises, already, to be a harrowing adventure. Simply getting from here to Durango (where our children await), requires traveling the treacherous San Juan Mountain roads through a huge storm. Then, on Christmas day, we'll cross the border near Nogales, a place that has become a hotbed of narcotraficante violence of late.

Everyone says it's fine, as long as you drive during the day. And besides, it can't be any more dangerous than flying, when airplanes at Denver's airport are skidding off the runway at 400 miles per hour. Yikes.

Vesper: The James Bond Martini

2008-12-22T05:41:00.000-08:00

We all know, or think we know, that James Bond drinks dry vodka martinis: shaken, not stirred. (Who the hell stirs their martinis these days, anyway?) Then, in the most recent movie, Quantum of Solace, the layman is introduced to a new drink. While flying across the Atlantic on a private plane, Bond pounds six, yes six, martini-looking drinks. And in one of the most awkward moments of that movie, Bond can't even articulate what he's drinking, so he leaves it to the bartender to give us the recipe: 3 measures Gordon's gin, 1 measure vodka, and 1/2 measure Lillet Blanc.

Now, from what I understand, 1 measure equals 1.5 ounces, or one shot. In other words, Bond had drunk 27 shots of alcohol during the flight. Yowzers.

It is my duty as a gin blogger to try to recreate this cocktail, and try it out (although in much smaller quantities). So I did. Turns out that the original recipe for the cocktail comes from Ian Fleming's 1953 novel Casino Royale. In it, Bond goes into a bar and orders a "dry martini. One, in a deep champagne goblet." Then he reconsiders and says:

Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?'

Got it. Except no one makes Kina Lillet anymore, which was a wine based liquor with a heavy dose of quinine (the stuff that makes tonic water bitter). In the 1930s, the name was changed to Lillet Blanc, and in the 1980s, the quinine content was reduced. Today, Lillet Blanc is not easy to find, but I was able to order a bottle from Paonia's 133 Liquor; and I picked another bottle up at Corks in Montrose. It's a bit like vermouth, truth be told, but sweeter.

Then, I found a beautiful and seductive German spy (Wendy, my wife) to help me mix up and quaff a batch. We usually drink Bombay Sapphire, so we used that in the place of Gordon's. Absolut was the vodka. And Lillet Blanc. The big slice of lemon peel is crucial.

The verdict: Very nice. In spite of the orange hue to the Lillet Blanc, the resulting cocktail was clean and clear. So was the flavor -- the addition of a bit of vodka mellows the stronger gin flavors, which is not a bad thing. And by the last few sips, the lemon peel flavor has nicely infused itself into the alcohol.

Why such a big drink?

'Gosh that's certainly a drink,' said Leiter.

Bond laughed. 'When I'm ... er ... concentrating.' he explained, 'I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad. This drink's my own invention. I'm going to patent it when I can think of a good name.'

Later, he met the lovely Vesper, and thus, the name.

Sacrifice for the Sun

2008-12-21T15:25:00.000-08:00

The snow was like sugar.

There were no sounds except of the skis sliding across the granular snow and the labored breathing of the three of us. Nancy broke trail, and with each powerful kick, a cloud of snow shot out behind her, glistening in the moonlight.

It was the winter solstice, and Mike had pulled me out of the warmth and comfort of my house, just as I was settling in for the evening to watch TV, to go on this ski. Mike was always doing things like that; he seemed to have an obsession with preventing me from getting comfortable.

"Come on, you've got to come. We have to make a sacrifice," he said. "If we don't, the sun will keep moving south and will never return."

"Why can't we do it in the daytime?" I inquired, knowing that my question was futile.

"Because it's the longest NIGHT of the year, not day. It's a time to celebrate the night," he proclaimed as he gathered up my ski gear. "Hurry up. Nancy's waiting in the car."

READ THE WHOLE STORY AT BURNING SUNFLOWER.

Chocolate Truffles (real ones)

2008-12-14T10:39:00.000-08:00

The English language is constantly being perverted by modern culture, especially by the commerce side of things. And nowhere is that more true than in the realm of food. Witness, for example, Starbucks' corruption of Italian coffee names such as macchiatto; coffee snobs would say it's a shot of espresso "stained" (the literal meaning of macchiatto) with a tiny bit of hot or cold milk (and maybe some foam, though that's up for debate). Starbucks, meanwhile, has this sickly sweet and syrupy drink. Which could hardly be called coffee, let alone a macchiatto. It's not mere semantics, either: I've personally witnessed the mayhem that ensues when a Starbucks fan orders a macchiatto from a real barista.

Yeah, that's just evil corporations for you. But another name has been misused by the entire candy industry, even the aficionados: chocolate truffle. Go to a chocolate boutique and order a truffle and what are you likely to get? A nugget of chocolate ganache coated with a harder chocolate shell, perhaps drizzled with some sort of decorative fluorish to indicate the flavor within.

That's crazy, of course, because chocolate truffles were named after that tres cher fungi worshipped by foodies and known by the French as le truffe. And they don't have hard chocolate shells; rather, they look dusty and brown -- a bit unappetizing in fact. True chocolate truffles look the same, dusty and brown -- thanks to the cocoa dust coating -- and thus the name. The candy folks probably thought they looked a bit like turds, so they went for the snazzier chocolate shell, but kept the old name.

Problem is, the revised truffles just don't give the same experience. A real truffle should first assault the mouth with a dry and bitter cocoa dust, which gives way to creamy, deep chocolate ganache. The contrast delights the tongue, and the flavors move all the way through the mouth.

In an attempt to keep true chocolate truffles alive, gin + gelato made some last night for a Paonia rager. People at the party looked at them funny, but after they were assured that they were, indeed, edible, they ate them enthusiastically. The ecstatic looks on their faces said it all. Here's how to do it:

Ingredients:
1 cup bittersweet chocolate (I use Ghirardelli's 60 percent cocoa chips)
1 little square of unsweetened chocolate
7 tablespoons of butter
4 tablespoons of heavy cream
High quality cocoa powder

Put the first four ingredients in a saucepan and melt it all over hot water (if you can't come up with a double boiler setup, you can also heat the cream and butter and then add the chocolate, stirring constantly over very low heat).
Stir often -- the goal is to have a silky, shiny chocolate ganache without any chunks of melted chocolate.
Chill the chocolate in the refrigerator for an hour or so, until it's firm, but pliable enough to shape with your hands.
Cover a plate with cocoa powder, have another plate nearby on which you can put the finished truffles (it's a good idea to dust this plate with cocoa powder, too).
When the ganache is ready, scoop out a teaspoon at a time, mold each piece of ganache with clean hands into a little ball, and roll it in the cocoa powder.
Voila! Truffles.

Now, I must confess, gin + gelato did their own part to pervert the truffle name. They like to play around with different coatings, from curry powder, to chili powder, to crushed nuts, to saffron to beet powder, which makes for a beautiful bright red contrast to the dark chocolates.

Finished truffles can be kept in an airtight container in the refrigerator for a few days or more, but they should be eaten at room temperature.

Pears and Polaroids

2008-12-13T09:52:00.000-08:00

It is the time of year when pears hang too ripe from the trees. And when memories of adolescence and lost love cling like spiderwebs.

All that separates us is a small wooden table, an empty green bottle, a Mason jar half full of red wine, and a pear.

From the silence that grows between two people who have said all they have to say to one another, I speak.

“What are you working on?”
“Oh,” she says, “not much.”
I wait
“You know I don’t talk about my work. Not before it’s done.”
“Yeah,” I say. “You don’t talk about much ‘til it’s done.”
Another pause.
“A pear,” she says.
“You’re painting a pear?”
“Yeah.”

To read the whole story, go to gin + gelato's new short fiction/essay blog: Burning Sunflowers.

World's (second) Greatest Smoothie Recipe

2008-12-10T19:00:00.000-08:00

Now, you're probably wondering why this jerk is giving you the recipe for the SECOND best smoothie in the world, and not the first. So, just to make you feel better, I'll first give you the recipe for the BEST smoothie in the world:

Ingredients: 1 beach in Costa Rica; 2 mangoes, freshly picked from a nearby tree; 1 papaya, ditto; 1cup of homemade yogurt; a handful of ice; a blender; and a beautiful, scantily clothed person of the gender of your choice to deliver it to you on the beach, followed by a massage.

There.

Now, I've been making smoothies just about every morning for at least five years now (without a tropical beach, mango tree, and you wouldn't want to see me scantily clothed). And I've played around with recipes a lot. For a long time, all of my smoothies included frozen fruit -- berries, strawberries, mangoes, etc. But frozen fruit are expensive. So, recently, I started experimenting with banana-based smoothies. Here's what I came up with -- utter simplicity with a hint of the exotic.

Ingredients (makes enough for two)

2 ripe bananas (the miracle fruit)
1/2 ripe avocado (optional, but highly recommended)
1/2 cup yogurt (homemade is best, Brown Cow vanilla or plain are good, too. Add more if you want extra creamy).
1 cup orange or pineapple juice or similar blend
2 tablespoons flaxseed oil, flax meal or wheat germ (or a combination thereof)
1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger
1/2 teaspoon curry powder (Yeah! Curry. I like it spicy).
1/8 teaspoon ground cardamom
handful of ice

Throw it all into a blender, and blend thoroughly (I've got a "smoothie" setting on my deluxe blender, which pulses the mix for a whole minute). For a thicker smoothie, add more banana or avocado. For a lighter one, add water or more juice.

My friend Amy, who is a practitioner of Ayurveda, likes the fact that I add curry and cardamom and ginger to my morning meal. You see, ginger gets the digestive fires going (along with a lot of other benefits), which is a good thing when you're all sleepy and stuff. The spicy stuff in curry gets the fires going, too. And turmeric (prime ingredient in curry powder) is good for everything from boosting immunity to increasing mental clarity.

Of course, Amy also recommends not mixing fruit and dairy, which this smoothie does (look for a later post -- after I interview Amy -- explaining why, and giving more details on Ayurveda). But I figure all those good spices, plus the great taste of this smoothie, offset whatever side effects there are.

Yummy.

NY Times tries Sorbet, and it stinks

2008-12-09T11:15:00.000-08:00

Okay, maybe it doesn't stink. But it's also not really sorbet, says gin + gelato chief food critic, Quel Fromage.

Over at the New York Times, the "Minimalist" Mark Bittman yesterday ran a little recipe for really quick and easy sorbet, in which he just throws frozen fruit, sugar and water into a food processor, and whips it up, then calls it sorbet!? Now, here at gin + gelato, we're all about quick and easy. Still, to equate pureed frozen fruit with sorbet is just WRONG. What next? Throw a bunch of ketchup onto some pasta and call it marinara?

No, what Bittman has created is more like a slurpee or a slushee. Which is fine and good. Just call it that, not sorbet. And definitely don't call it gelato.

Speaking of: In the next week I plan on posting a recipe for the best sorbet ever. I'm just waiting for the part to fix our refrigerator, which went kaputz, quite suddenly, the other day. I couldn't figure out what was wrong so I went to the appliance blog (that's a blog that has a use, not just some vanity thing like gin + gelato) and came up with a diagnosis and ordered a part to fix it. If I don't get electrocuted, I'll let you know if it worked.

Barrel tastin' in the North Fork

2008-12-07T17:13:00.000-08:00

Here's what's great about the place I live, known as the North Fork Valley in Western Colorado.

On a Saturday afternoon, I can head out into the 'dobes and shoot things amid rotting animal carcasses, garbage and a variety of abandoned appliances. An hour later, I can be in a setting that, to a foodie, rivals the south of France.

The 'dobes is an area of badland-like terrain, ubiquitous in this part of the state wherever irrigation doesn't reach, that is scruffy with scrub and dotted here and there with juniper trees and sage. There's one particular part of the 'dobes, not far from Paonia, that locals use as dumping ground, nightclub, shooting range and, apparently, a place to sacrifice both deer and Whirlpool washing machines. This Saturday, my daughter Lydia and I headed out there to practice archery with some friends. Scattered about were dozens of deer and elk bones, hides, and heads in various states of decay. It was tough to walk without stepping on a hair-covered skull, or a still meaty ribcage. And the ground -- grey brown by nature -- was instead green, red and metallic, thanks to a plethora of spent shotgun shells and Keystone Light cans. But it gave us plenty of things to shoot at, including an old air filter that we threw up into the air and tried, unsuccessfully, to take down in flight.

Within an hour after returning we were here:

The cave, or cellar, of Alfred Eames winery. Eames, who produces the most consistently delicious wine in the valley -- and perhaps the state of Colorado -- held his annual barrel tasting event this past weekend. On hand were Joe and Corrine Coniglio, of Roubideau Farms, with their very French raw goat milk cheeses. Eames gave us a taste of Merlot from the barrel (it had a very raw taste to it; unrefined; rustic; and for some reason reminded me of Jean Gio no, the great French author. A lot about this area reminds me of Giono, who often writes about places in France where farming and nature collide -- in a nice way.

Plenty of other tasting -- from bottles, not barrels -- was to be had. The Pinot Noir is a favorite of mine, for no other reason than the grapes all are grown right here (it's too cold to easily grow Cabernet Sauvignon or Franc -- those grapes are imported from Palisade, over the Grand Mesa from here).

But that wasn't all: Delicious Orchards had its own open house tasting. I once referred to this place as a "fruit stand," which is partly true, but doesn't get near the reality. It's really a full-blown local grocery store, general market and wine bar (with gin and vodka, too!), located just outside Paonia. They even have an entire wing devoted to yarn and knitting.

I tasted a fair number of wines, but my favorites there were the Stone Cottage Cellars Syrah and the Bethlehem Syrah/Cabernet Sauvignon blend. Both have a lot of character to them.

Today, I didn't get to go dance around on deer carcasses. But I did get to enjoy the fruits of my tasting labors of the night before. I cooked up a flank steak (local) with mushrooms and arugula (local) -- really quick and easy recipe, if you want it, let me know. Some delicata squash (local). We accompanied it with Eames's Menage (which is a spicy, forward threesome in which Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot come together to create a whole much bigger than the parts) and had a Coniglione Tomme goat cheese for desert.

Lovely.

Introduction II: Gelato (flashback) In the City

2008-12-02T18:24:00.000-08:00

Blogger's note: The following is based on something that happened over a year ago. The result? A lack of details and photos from the various gelato/ice cream establishments. Still, I hope it gives a general overview of the best gelato in Manhattan.

HOT HUMIDITY WRAPPED ITS SWEATY ARMS AROUND ALL OF MANHATTAN. Skyscrapers glistened under blue skies. Perfect, in other words, for ice cream. We were on the Upper West Side. Someone, or some Google search, sent us to a place with a slightly funny name. We quickly forgot the name, but remembered the approximate location. Which left us standing on a street corner, looking around in confusion.

That's when the stranger approached. Now, keep in mind, this is New York City, where strangers are supposed to mug confused looking yokels like ourselves. Or scream at them. Or throw them under the wheels of speeding taxis. Not this stranger.

"Can I help you find something," she asked Wendy. Such kindness seemed odd. It seemed especially odd coming from a major television/movie star. Yet there it was, Cynthia Nixon, a.k.a. Miranda from Sex in the City, offering Wendy directions on a busy street corner in Manhattan.

"We're looking for an ice cream place," Wendy replied.

"Oh, there's a great one down the street, Emack & Bolios," Nixon said.

"It's great to see you here," Wendy said.

Then Nixon winked at her. Then we went to get ice cream.

The Emack & Bolios experience turned out to be anticlimactic. It was ice cream, and it was good ice cream. It was not outrageously good ice cream. Nor was it Cynthia Nixon giving us directions ice cream. Give them credit for giving the world an alternative to Baskin Robbins three decades ago.

If you're in Manhattan and you want the real good stuff, check out the laboratory of ice cream, more formally known as il laboratorio del gelato. This mad food scientist's hideaway is down in Lower East Side, and isn't much to look at. But hotdamn that's some innovative, tasty stuff. Flavors range from toasted sesame, to orange bitters, to Guinness and Kahlua, to lime basil, to tarragon with pink pepper. They have ginger; no gin, as far as I can tell. Still.

Or, if you want something a bit more trendy, there's always GROM. When we went, there was a line out the door. It's always like that in summer, I'm told. It was a long time ago, and I can't even remember what flavors I got. But I remember this: It was excellent. I also remember this: I was a bit torn regarding the basic premise. See, GROM is based in Italy, and even has its own organic farm there for growing ingredients. Very nice. Problem is, they also make the mixes for the gelato way over in Italy, then ship them to New York before creaming them. Huh?? That seems a bit strange.

So, if I had to choose, I'd hit the lab.

Later, after we told Steve about the Cynthia Nixon encounter, he insisted that the actress was not just offering directions, but cruising Wendy. Wendy, not knowing this, was crestfallen at the lost opportunity.

Oh well, the gelato, later on, was pretty damned good.

Introduction: gin

2008-12-01T06:16:00.000-08:00

It was our last night in the city. Rain had fallen for three days straight, and we were perpetually damp. We had spent our evenings combing the neighborhoods for that quintessentially urban experience. Perhaps a corner bar with exquisite cocktails, appetizers and understated elegance. Or maybe something truly bohemian -- pasty faced, scruffy poets throwing verse at one another.

We hadn't found it. Instead, we drank at an Irish pub, dined at an overpriced, crowded, trendy Italian joint. Not bad, but not transcendent, either.

Why Wendy was drawn to the Liberty Hotel, visible each day as the train rose up to cross the river, I don't know. It was detached from any neighborhood, and attached to a hospital. Its brownish grey facade seemed cold against the steel grey sky. But drawn to it we were. Which is a good thing. The lobby was the inside of a colonial-era jail, and it was truly grand. The bar, called Clink, offered sumptuous couches and an equally sumptuous bartender. We settled in.

A few hours later, we found ourselves in the kitchen of a corporate lawyer, cooking carne asada in various stages of undress and carnality.

Lips. Everywhere.

And it all started with gin. Hendricks, to be precise. Which is funny, because normally I'm a Bombay Sapphire guy (which causes gin afficianados' livers to pucker up and cringe -- the NY Times called it a "neurotic" gin. Pshaw.). The martini was called the Classic Twist, a delightfully cool concoction of Hendricks, muddled cucumber, black pepper and perhaps some vermouth, all shaken quite beautifully by the aforementioned bartender.

I sipped it, and spoke effusively about a talk I had heard that day about the importance of storytellers in every tribe, community, society. I almost cried, in fact -- maybe it was the words, maybe the martini. Wendy gulped French Kisses -- vodka, chambord, champagne. She delighted in asking the waitress, quite seductively, for another french kiss.

I was about to order a second twist. After all, they say a martini is like a woman's breast: One is not enough, three is too many. But before I could call the waitress over, the couple approached our table. He, a sturdy guy, self-conscious scruff, foreign accent; she, long blonde hair, lips shaped like a heart. We chatted. We drank some more. All four of us left together.

I would not need another Classic Twist. And later that night, I would discover that the saying about martinis and breasts is sometimes wrong, on both counts.

****

Stick around, and perhaps I'll finish the story sometime. In the meantime, I'll be blogging semiregularly here at gin + gelato (I'm of the slow blogging school, I'm afraid). And here's what this blog will include:

chronicles of our journey to find the world's best gelato/ice cream;
recipes from our attempts to create the same;
musings on gin, and cocktail formulas;
short fiction (in the hopes that you'll not only read it, but that artists in other media will steal my work and use it in other forms -- like make movies out of it);
explorations of the intersection between the rational and the hedonistic;
photographs;
pointers and commentary on other artists, websites, blogs, etc.

I'm hoping that this will be a place not just for my monologues, but for conversation. Please comment, even if you're ripping me to shreds (I'm used to it, I've been a newspaper/magazine editor for eight years). Send me your recipes, reviews of gelato and gin, and other thoughts. Either with the comment option, or to my email: jonnypeace{at}tds.net

And please: enjoy.