Saturday in 1968: Curried Rice from a Package, and other excessive detail

It was 1968 in my historical experiment today, and I've been struggling with figuring out how to capture the wilder aspects of the Sixties.

Two of my brothers left for a train journey to the Netherlands in the middle of the night (for scheduling and not for dramatic reasons, of course), so this morning was a little quieter. We ate croissants and drank coffee for breakfast, as always.

Then I set off into the sunny weather to the travel bookshop where one of my aunts works. It turns out that pedalling around a still-busy epicentre of post-war Berlin was an excellent idea. The modernist, geometric tower beside the war ruin of the Gedächtniskirche, the old-fashioned splendour of KaDeWe and the fancy entrance to the U-Bahn station Wittenbergplatz, and the tower blocks around Zoologischer Garten with the broad streets very much designed to appeal to car traffic, were all in their own way a bristingly prosperous 1960s-esque backdrop.

I also spotted a street party in honour of Berlin's LGBTQIA+ community, with an orange contingent of medical vehicles, a light police presence and white-and-red plastic street barriers, a massive flower stand, and a flurry of white pavilions like a brightly bristling medieval tournament along the side streets. It turns out that at least three of my colleagues were there today, so I slightly regret not passing through. Either way, I felt proud that 1960s movements like Stonewall had helped pave the way for this.

Then I popped into a toy store to buy donations for refugees, and right afterward walked on to the travel bookshop. After my aunt gave me a hug, she helped me find gifts amongst the ceiling-height bookshelves, Earth globe lamps, vitrines of old-fashioned sextants and other measurement equipment, maps, and travel guides. Then I bought a coffee table book for myself: a TeNeues hardcover about the 'golden age of travel' illustrated with everything from 18th century paintings (one of them was unfortunately of my literary nemesis, Goethe) through colourized Edwardian scenes to photographs of skiing glamour from the 1960s.

Then I dropped off the donations at Tempelhof Airport. (Altogether far fewer Ukrainian refugees are seeking help in Berlin now. I think ~200 to 300 arrive at the Hauptbahnhof daily compared to a peak of ~10,000, so the tent there is going to be replaced with a smaller construction; Südkreuz also isn't seeing much activity, so the volunteers there declined my last offer to donate; and one of the other refugee support places that I donate to, is closed for repairs until August.) There was construction at the Platz der Luftbrücke that detoured me through the small park with the 'Hunger Claw' sculptures. But altogether I didn't find the bicycle ride entirely fun, because having a heavy load on a windy day is rather dangerous, glass splinters littered the pavement at times, and I didn't like carrying the bicycle plus baggage down the steps of the park. These were small peas, however.

I was briefly perturbed when catching a glimpse of a materfamilias's bicycle: she had adorned her baby's seat with a round, yellow 'Forced vaccinations? No thank you' sticker on it.

For lunch, I set off again. In the organic food store I found dehydrated packs of pasta with tomato sauce, curried rice with peas, and sweet potato mash, which felt like a good approximation of Sixties food to me. Only the quinoa pack I didn't buy, as it seemed to me that quinoa was exported outside of South America predominantly in the early 2000s.

Next: a music store. I was tempted to buy an album by The Cream. In the end I went for a 1963 jazz studio recording by Oscar Peterson and Nelson Riddle, on a compact disc. Yes, CDs weren't invented in the 1960s, but I can't listen to LPs at home without hearing thumping noises, due to a newly temperamental amplifier.

Next: Turkish street market. The sellers were stacking green plastic crates and packing merchandise being back into cardboard boxes at the emptier stalls; it was already well into the afternoon and as usual some vendors either just wanted to leave or had already sold their stock. Pineapples and pears are big this week, but of course cucumbers, potatoes, dill, cabbages, kohlrabi, etc. were also there — also passionfruit. Then there were kilogram bags of pistachios and raisins, plastic drums of olives green and purple, preserved lemons, two little schools of fish that were stranded in the ice at the fishmonger's stall, and a long, colourful table of bras.

In the end, I popped home again without buying anything from the market; we already had enough food at home. But I did purchase pink biscuits from a French shop on the way; I had hoped that they were pink marshmallows with rose flavouring, but instead they were pink ladyfinger biscuits that tasted authentically but disappointingly of egg.

At home, I read the manufacturer's instructions and 'cooked' the dehydrated foods from the organic food store in 5 minutes by pouring boiled water on top. The curried rice was especially good. I also made additional rice, using the haybox from the 1920s phase of my historical experiment again to save on gas. (For any reader not in Germany: Right now I think Germany isn't importing gas from Russia, at least not through the Nordstream 1 pipeline, due to 10 days' scheduled maintenance. We're not sure if the gas will go back online afterward, due to political reasons i.e. the war in Ukraine.) We had fresh berries — red currants, blueberries — and mint-infused water and the pink biscuits with it. Ge. also made himself green tea.

Then I lit lavender incense, and read a few pages of a fashion magazine and of the 1960s American book Black Rage. I'd be curious to hear what anti-racism experts think of it in 2022.

Aside from housekeeping while listening to the radio and playing 2 or 3 Russian pieces on the piano and researching 1969 in preparation for next week, there's nothing else to talk about. So I'll just end by saying that I wore dark blue jeans and a turtleneck sweater this Saturday, which admittedly was a low-effort approach to period-appropriate attire.

I've taken a day off of work on Monday because I was feeling a little fragile again. But I was also pleasantly startled to hear on Thursday that my manager thinks I deserve a promotion by next year. As I was convinced that I was coming across as a flighty dilettante unworthy to helm any ships in our complex technical environment, I have been metaphorically floating on a cloud since they told me.