1 Week Holiday, Day Four: River Sports and Blueberry Cake

It's the second day of The Finals 2022 (lamentably pronounced 'FINN-nalz' on the Berlin evening news), a bunch of German Olympic team qualification events in less frequently televised sports like the pentathlon, 3x3 basketball, and kayaking.

The first thing I did today was to prepare a vegan blueberry cake, baking both halves and letting them cool. Later I would layer them with the rich elderflower-flavoured frosting in the centre, without melting the plant butter of the frosting. Although I guessed a bit at the quantity of olive oil and used larger-crystalled brown sugar instead of the soft brown sugar recommended (adding 20g to try to compensate), the cake turned out quite lovely. (Ge. said that it looked like an enormous blueberry muffin.)

Then I cycled off to the Spree River in eastern Berlin. The Oberbaumbrücke with its distinct peaked towers in pumpkin-pie orange was familiar, but I'd never visited the East Side Gallery that turns off from it. The Gallery itself, likely well known to any Berlin tourist, is a fairly slight wall (presumably concrete) with a rounded topping, which is a remnant of the former Cold War wall and is now host to a rotating display of artworks. But behind it is a conglomerate of boho-hipster and traditional middle-class tourist enterprises: from a white-and-blue riverboat hotel of a familiar American chain that twinned the Ukrainian flag with the one it is already flying, to a multi-level restaurant that seemed like the perfect boozy place for anonymous masses of carousing twenty-somethings, and a museum lodged on an upper floor of the same waterfront building.

Today spectator and other facilities for the Finals kayaking races on the river were set up further down from the East Side Gallery. In front of the mixed modern and traditional industrial Berlin waterfront — a spurious-looking stepped façade on a white contemporary building that was clearly intended to wink at olden times, but also a hulking building of time-softened brick (with windows cut out of for utility more than aesthetics) that had something of the mild charm of a massive 17th-century farm house in a Rembrandt-era Dutch painting — stippling lines of buoys were the racing lanes for the kayaks, and inflatable 'pillows' with advertising on it formed a triangular barrier between these racing lanes and the regular, motorized river traffic. A tourist ship like a paddlewheeler floated by, two or three speedboats sped by. I seem to vaguely remember a few trees, for example willows, gracefully breaking up the human artifacts of the scene.

In the athletes' river lanes, the lanes were often empty where I was spectating. At the beginning I did briefly see two pairs of kayakers competing to cross a finish line that I couldn't see, in the distance, and then another pair paddling out to the starting line. A drone that looked like a cross between a biplane and an insect hovered over the surface where it could get a good look at the competitors, and whirred loudly. Loudspeaker announcements from the commentator. Listless music being played from the stands, quieter than the announcements. And, at a bend in the river, race officials importantly tootled back and forth in their own motorized boats.

And on the banks where I was, onlookers sat in loose groups in whatever shade they could find under the few trees in the dry golden grass. — The temperature reached around 30°C today.

I was far away from the scene of the action, as mentioned. So whenever the sports were out of sight, I indulged my curiosity about the camera equipment and the TV producer(?) who was strolling back and forth, wondering how a professional sports recording set-up works.

And because I risked a sunstroke by staying longer, and I didn't want to venture into the official spectator area if it meant that I needed to lock up my bicycle, I soon left again.

Earlier, along the way to the place, I had passed an office machine shop, and popped in to ask if they'd be willing to repair an old Olympia typewriter and replace the ink band for me. A man came out from a room in the back, alerted by a sensor at the front of the shop, and (gnome-like face breaking into a smile) said he'd be fine with doing so — it'll take a week, though, he warned.

Lastly, I popped into an import shop and returned with Kalamata olives and a feta-lemon dip, ready for the next recipe experiments.

I've lost track of all the observations I made during my peregrinations today. (Except perhaps the amazing fact that some pedestrians respected the bicycle lane. — I'm beginning to see that in Berlin there are strong cultural differences by neighbourhood, and beginning to 'stereotype' places where few people seem to care about the rules of traffic and I already know that I can't rely on street markings, traffic lights, etc. to know where cars, pedestrians, or other cyclists will be at a given moment. Because I'd pigeonholed the law-observers today as tourists, I was especially pleasantly surprised that they didn't moon around in the middle of a demarcated zone for vehicles.) But I'm grateful in general that during all of my cycling this week, I've had the time to indulge my curiosity about sculpture inscriptions, the architectural features and religious affiliations of churches, event posters on public bulletin boards, etc.