House to home

When you make the foolish mistake of opting for an unfurnished apartment, you find your life being sucked into a vortex of what resembles a spy triller. There are vast sums of money being thrown away, blonde exotic women who speak strange languages ( the Ikea ladies ) and international intrigue when it comes to the stuff that you ordered being actually delivered and installed. May be I should not be so ungrateful. A fellow expat has been waiting for his internet for a month, and Alice, the highly recommended internet provider mucked up his address twice and just did not turn up the third time. The last time he talked to me, he sounded more like Darth than Anakin.

Anyhow, the guys came in and set up everything. Pictures were hung. The dead skins of Shawn, Liam and Betsy were laid out on the kitchen benches and living room floor respectively. The books were up in shelf and the house was 90% in order.

My most favorite place is the kitchen.

The kitchen overlooks an old Jewish cemetery, which is apparently a tourist spot. Every day, I drink tea with my feet on the kitchen counter and watch hordes of tourists walk through the place. Through out the day, the church bells ring to mark the hour, soft enough to meld into the day. Apparently, one of the famous but not too famous German composers is buried under my window. And across the green stretch of the cemetery is the Jewish school .

The days when I work from home, I sit in the kitchen, sipping tea and sitting on the sheepskin. I have started cooking for myself, and the food is not too shabby. My vases are holding flowers, and I found out where the neighbourhood grocery stores are.

I believe my house is slowly become my home.

Last day in Helsinki

Today is my last day in Helsinki. Today is my first day in Berlin.

Being in Helsinki has taught me to:

Appreciate fine wine

Rediscover some friends whom I always had - distance truly makes the heart fonder

Make some new friends

Use chopsticks

Live in a country where English is not the first language

Move homes on my own

Discover Vintage

Be introduced to Opera

Be introduced to Burlesque

Be introduced to Ice Hockey

Get over my cricket fixation

Be a better cook

Appreciate fine graphic novels

Experience snow for the first time

Try out horse, reindeer and moose meat

Discover salami as a source of nourishment

Discover berries

Appreciate rye bread

I am looking forward to the lessons that Berlin will be teaching me.

Moving

On the 15th day from today, I will pack my backpack with my books, clothes and knickknacks and will board an airplane.

It is going to be a one-way trip.

When I started my new job, I thought transitioning into a new team and role is going to be difficult, and moving cities will be easy.

I was wrong. I am touching wood as much as I can when I type this - but the new team, and because of them, the new role, has been fantastic - helpful when needed, and trusts me to do my job and do it well.

Moving cities, is not going to be easy.

It is not about finding a new place to live - I have moved about in Helsinki. But moving to a new city, I have to find a place where I can go for some great salad and occasional food all over again.

I need to learn which way the wind blows, how cold the winters are, and how high to set the thermostat.

I need to learn the public transport system again, the best places to shop for food, clothes and books. I need to scout the flea markets and vintage shops. I need to find the comic book shops that sell English books.

The most difficult part of moving cities is to make the new city look you over, sort you out, and choose to reveal it's secrets to you.

Serendipity

Since I was old enough to learn English - which was three years - I have been told that English is my ticket to freedom and opportunities. Apparently, nobody ever reached anywhere just learning my mother tongue. So once I moved to Europe, I did not expect the Indian languages to help me out.

I was so wrong.

I was in Berlin, and one wrong turn meant I was in the wrong street. In my search for the perfect food, I was suddenly in the middle of a residential neighborhood, most of the apartments looking deserted for the holidays. I was not too worried about the dark buildings, as much as I was about the hunger pangs in my stomach. I wanted to eat something good, and I wanted to eat fast.

I walked towards the one source of light, a restaurant which is open at this twilight time, looking like the only place in earth which is open. I went inside, only to stare at someone who only knew German.

Looking around, taking the decorations of the restaurant in, and discounting the nice Europeans who were peacefully dining, I bellowed into the kitchen - "Aare Bhaisaab!" (Hello Brother) - a girl's gotta eat.

Which brought out the owner pretty fast, much to the shock of his German customers and employees. I continued chatting with him in Hindi. A first generation Pakistani from Lahore, he has been in Berlin for the last forty years, his kids married to 'white women'. He questions me on my province, the number of siblings I have, about my parents and grandparents and if I am traveling alone; just like a polite first time conversation in Hindi ought to me.

One sublime chicken biriyani and a free, unasked mango lassi later, I am pointed out my way on the map; and one of the employees is volunteered by the hotel manager to drop me to where I live.

An Audi flag on the moon

There is art and there is art.

Art can be found anywhere. And often when you strip it down to the basics, it is all the same.

How can this,

which is essentially a painting on the contemporary life of the artist, drawn on a wall, essentially different from this?

We did talk about it on our walk to the Slaughterhouse Hill and reached the conclusion that art is in the eye of the beholder.

Even then, some artists are better than others. They take their surroundings into consideration and create smart art, like this:

Yes, on the first look, it is an austronaut. Now, you have to understand that when the artist started working on the mural, there was ( and still is ) an Audi showroom nearby. And like any self respectable auto showrooms, they did have a neat row of flags in front of the dealership. And of course, given that they also dealt in second had cars which were parked in front of the dealership, the entire space was lit with some very strong lights in the evening.

The artist noticed that the shadow of one of the flags falls perfectly on to the wall. So he painted the autronaut in such a way that he holds a shadow flags with the Audi symbol on it in the night, acting as smart art and a commentary on our wealth focused times.

TheTurk and the Bishop

Berlin has the second highest concentration of Turkish people after Istanbul. And for the few days that I was there, they seemed to get along pretty well. To be honest, I did not know how well they got along until I heard this story.

So, lets go back in time a little bit, even before 1989. The wall is still up there, and between the east and the west walls, there is a no mans land.

That was when a turkish youngster came to Berlin. He wanted a home to bring his young bride from Turkey to; he was too poor to find one, so he decided to squat - on a tree by the no man's land. He built a little shack, brought his wife over and they stayed their with their growing family.

Once the wall fell, the government wanted him to leave his home and evacuate. They first tried asking him nicely. Once he said yes, they threatened to throw him out.

He retaliated by cementing his outdoor furniture to the ground. The government had it's supporters, but the Turkish man had his supporters too. They did a bit of searching around and found that the property did not belong to the government. Instead, it belonged to these guys.

The German Catholic Church. That is easy, the government thought, and they went to the church to buy the piece of land from them so that they can evict the turkish, muslim man in peace.

However, the arch bishop's residence, by a twist of fate, was situated just next to the no-man's land where the turk settled down. The bishop had watched that family grow and try to survive year after year from his bedroom windows.

Also, this situation had some theological implications. By staying within the church grounds, the turk was technically seeking asylum.

And you don't kick out someone seeking asylum in the 1980s, especially when you have the dark history of world war two on your conscience. No siree. You try your best to be humane.

So, due to a near miracle, the turk got to keep his home. He and his wife still lives here, just across the road from the Archbishop, and their children and grandchildren visit them during the holidays.

Notes from Berlin - III The SS Art Camp

If buildings had a religion, they all would be Hindus. After certain eras, many of them get reborn - some undergo a step down to ruins, while others step up their standing - the Musee d Orsay is a great example. What was once an old railway station has now become this:

Not too shabby, especially if you house some great works of Degas and Monet, among others. However, the one building that really did the turnaround in it's lifetimes is this squatter house is Berlin. The building was one of the old SS offices which stored a lot of documents on how SS systematically wiped out entire families and communities in many parts of Europe.

So, when the Allies won the war, the SS flooded their basement where all the war crime records were kept. I doubt if the documents themselves were called war crime journals though, they might have originally called them 'Glorious Examples of Supreme Race's Ingenuity' or something. However, given that the entire basement was flooded the Allies sealed the basement when they found they could not salvage the documents. The building was left as a ghostly reminder of a past that was both horrifying and shameful.

That was when the artists and squatter groups started moving in. Now this place does not have an inch of space without some kind of graphics on it. People live, work and sell their works here. There are also plans to turn this into an open air movie theater.

Just because your past was shitty does not mean that you cannot have a fun filled future.

Lena come back

A city lives through the stories that it's streets tell about them. And in these days, street art ( or graffiti ) is the picture book which illustrate these stories.

I usually like to discover a city on my own, armed with enough reading material to start a traveling library. However, graffiti is not considered as a legitimate art form in many places, so when I heard of a free tour around Berlin which would be focused on street art, I had to sign up.

The tour was lead by a Londoner who stepped straight out of the pages of a Neil Gaiman book and his trusty dog.

And the group that gathered around them consisted of people as different and similar as a group of graffiti lovers could be. Among them were people I would meet again, and have a good time with, but I did not know that then.

So it was our guide who told us the story of Lena. See the pretty girl in the picture below? That is her, and this is her story.

The paintings of Lena appeared on the walls of Berlin one day, all with the same plaintive message "Lena, come back. I miss you." Unrequited love is an all too common and all too terrible thing, so many in the city sympathized with him. As the number of paintings across the city grew, the messages along with them also grew in their sense of loss. As the artist began to tell Lena that he would do everything, anything, to be back with her, the city waited with bated breath.

If you are a romantic who has experienced unrequited love, you would not have been able to stand these messages follow you around the city, whatever you plan to do, wherever you plan to go. So, in a sense of kinship, other people started to put out their own street posters, asking Lena to forgive the artist and go back to him.

If you have a heart, then being on the receiving end of a love that you do not reciprocate can be a terrible thing. Those who have experienced it thought back to their own experiences of the dark side of love, and rallied behind this girl they have never met with counter messages.

"Lena, do not go back to him. It is not going to change" and "Lena, are you safe, if in trouble, call xxx-xxxxxx" with their phone numbers in the posters. Lena became the friend, sister and daughter of people whom she had never met. Women who look like Lena were reported to be seen in different parts of the city. The city was on alert : one half to find her, the other half to shield Lena.

The Berlin radio station picked up the story and one of the RJs invited the artist to make his plea mainstream via his radio channel. However, it turned out to be more shocking than anyone expected it to be.

That day on air, the artist told the world the truth. There was/is no Lena. She was a figment of his imagination, an inanimate piece in his project to check how Berliners would react to a plea of love.

So, if you missed out on the love of your life in Berlin, do not put out posters asking her to get in touch with you. The city is going to shrug it's shoulders and move on, still in shock from the fact that Lena was not real.

Notes from Berlin - I

First bird call, first fresh green blades of grass, first shoots on a tree. I was getting tired of waiting for them in Finland and went to Berlin, Dresden and Prague in search of them during the first week of April. It was in a way, a temporary eloping with myself, away from the cold, grey skies and the dirty snow that became a fixture of Helsinki.

My birthday was just two weeks back, so a dear friend gifted me a moleskin notebook. For the first time in my travels, I stared to capture my journey not just in pictures, but also in words. A picture can show what you saw on the road, but being on the road is also an intensely intrinsic experience when you pause and reflect on the life left behind.

It has taken me more than two weeks to get to the little notebook with the furiously scrawled notes, but I will be transcribing them to the blog, to take them from my head and to put them away somewhere. So, in the order of random musings, here goes:

The Brand

Confession time : I have always felt like I have been to a Starbucks thanks to the many web-comics, tv series and web series that I faithfully follow. But I had never been to one, and when I saw one in Berlin ( derisively referred to as Starfucks by a local guide map to a walking tour ) I had to go inside.

The inside was not an architectural or design marvel. I have been to coffee-shops which were designed with much more love and whimsy, and I have seen food which had looked more mouth watering. I am not a coffee person, so I decided to order a tea from the counter. Tea in hand, I moved to a spot of sunshine in front of the coffeehouse. All around me, hipsters typed on, into their mac books, iPhones and even a few iPads; some of them even willing to rebel within their hipster identity by using HP touch-pads or Sony Wios. The place was intellectually snobbish. I found a free table, and sat down there, inhaling the second hand smoke that was liberally distributed by my coffee-table neighbors. Starbucks was exactly the way it was parodied to be.

Halfway through my tea, I realized that I was using my moleskin notebook in a way as to show off the fact that I am using it than actually trying to use it in a good way, and that I have been a little too careful with my placement of Bad Science, on my table. I had morphed into a little intellectual snob. I finished writing, made eye contact with the hard smoking guys sitting and typing away at a Mac at the next table, reciprocated their tight smiles and felt relief at the sense of belonging. I fit in. I can fake it at a hipster hangout.

The power of branding is very very subtle and very very strong, at the same time.