It's been a sunny autumnal Saturday full of sunshine, grocery shopping, meeting with a friend at a café, cooking, piano practice, reading news and continuing my epic effort to listen to all of the speeches at the UN General Assembly. (I made it all the way through the first day's speeches, including the US president's rhetorical magnum opus. Two servings of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and the 1.25x speed function in YouTube helped.)
There was a large protest in Berlin for humanitarian aid to Gaza and an end to German military support for Israel today. I didn't go, but evidently over 60,000 people did, including a family member who sent photos and reported on the speeches. But in mid-September I went to a different protest — for the first time, I went as a protestor and not as an amateur journalist. It felt like once the legal consensus arrived that genocide is happening in Gaza, and Israeli organizations and public figures reached the same assessment, it's no longer a situation where it's appropriate to sit on the fence.
***
Yesterday was a more exhausting day.
Breakfast was rye bread with jam and a boiled egg, as well as ginger tea, and I chatted with the brothers and my mother. That part was fine!
Then I went off to the volunteering place to sort fruit and vegetables again.
*
The way there in the U-Bahn was stressful.
A smell like mouldy cheese reached me. I saw that a man who had probably been sleeping in the streets had entered the train, and although he was at least four seats away it was difficult not to feel his presence. A few other passengers either went over to the other end of the wagon or prepared to leave the wagon, or pulled up their sweaters over their noses and wrinkled their noses. I did neither because I wanted to be polite, but shifted a little to be upwind of him. (It didn't make a difference.)
Inwardly I felt anxious. Years ago when I still went to the office I'd been in a train with stinky fellow passengers more often — it was habitual in the Ring-Bahn in winter, and one of them in fact looked quite pleased to be épater les bourgeois — and I'd eventually caught a kind of infection, which made me self-conscious and miserable for weeks on end. I still don't really understand if this kind of intense stink is due to not washing often enough, or due to ulcers that require medical attention and rest that is not really possible in the streets. (Even if a doctor takes a look, the ulcers will reopen if the patient is wandering around, from what I understand.)
The man had walked almost to the door when we reached the next station. I was hoping that he'd get out. But he lingered in the wagon, although I thought he looked uncomfortable and miserable. If I left the wagon, I might not reenter the train in time before it pulled out of the station; and given that I was already late for the volunteering, I didn't want to risk it.
Then at the next station he got out to go to the next wagon. It didn't bring instant relief, but at least two windows were open further down the train wagon and the U-Bahn tunnel air was an improvement.
One station after, two young men came running in the door. They smelled the air, and saw the other passengers who still had their sweaters pulled over their noses and disgusted expressions on their faces. One of them asked, 'He's been here too?'.
When I stepped out of the U-Bahn, I breathed in the fresh air on the S-Bahn platform as copiously as I could. I also felt far more philosophical about facing the effluvia of rotten fruit and vegetables than I had during the past weeks of volunteering.
*
When I reached the locker room where the safety shoes and fresh socks are kept, the remaining socks were either singles, a random beanie, or too small. So I wore my own socks, hoping that the shoe disinfection process was working fine.
Since the sorting tables were pretty much full of other volunteers and I felt very shy, I took on the self-appointed task of pre-picking out the truly rotten or superannuated fruit and vegetables from the unsorted crates. Peaches half brown and mouldy, green chives marinating in yellow liquid behind a clear plastic package, lanky celery sticks with crispy dark leaves, squished figs, ... But a lot of the fruit and vegetables looked cheerful and bright, especially the orange-red pumpkins. I also went around and picked up scraps of paper fruit and vegetable labels to put in the paper recycling, from the sorting hall floor.
Eventually I asked to join a table. Then I set to sorting tomatoes, potatoes, bananas, peaches, strawberries, grapes, and nectarines for the remainder of the four hours. Beside and opposite me, two women were sorting lettuces, chicory, and radishes. Behind me, a young crew were sorting, amongst other things, onions; and one of them handed me bananas when he saw I was already working on them. A radio station played 80s hits in the background. Intermittent news snippets informed us that 1. the streets around the Victory Column were closed for car traffic due to today's protest, and that 2. a court has ruled that the AfD party must leave its current Berlin quarters, albeit not as quickly as the building's owner had requested.
The biggest food sorting excitement was that a grocery store evidently 'donated' empty perfume bottles alongside e.g. a few tomatoes. This felt opportunistic and unpleasant, but still less disgusting than the time a grocery store 'donated' floor sweepings — with potato debris, two cough candy wrappers, and a granola bar wrapper, like gold nuggets in an otherwise fairly ordinary huge cardboard box full of potatoes. Sometimes I feel like living in Berlin is an extended experiment about what lengths people will go to in order to avoid properly disposing of recyclable materials themselves.
It looked like we'd almost finished sorting all the food. The sign near the sorting tables says that the work is over at 2:45 p.m., I think. But the official shift time is until 3:30 p.m., and I've often worked up until then, as have others. That said, this time pretty much everyone left long before. And a new wall of fresh, unsorted crates of donated produce arrived. I sorted away stubbornly on my own, feeling rather exhausted. It was a relief when 3:15 arrived, and I could finally put away the last of the plastic and paper garbage, cover the sorted fruit and vegetable crates so that the sparrows don't eat or 'spatter' the produce, clean and disinfect the work surface, sweep the floor, take off my rubber gloves and my apron, close the compost bin, and go off to change into my street shoes.
*
On the way home, I decided to pop by a car museum/workshop/salesroom in a renovated turn-of-the-century old brick street tram depot in the northern part of the Charlottenburg district.
It turned out to have cars predominantly from the 1940s through to the present, with tall hoods or flaring wheel hubs, hot reds or sedate beiges, Alfa Romeo or Volvo, sports cars or even what I'd as a layperson call a stretch limousine from the 1960s, alongside a huge sports boat. I'd been hoping to see cars from before 1930, but if I did see them I wasn't able to identify them as such.
A pungent smell of car exhaust permeated the air even though it was a huge building, since someone had his car running as he and a mechanic conferred over it, and it prolonged the day's rather undesirable trend of strong odours. The way it filled the space reminded me of the scene in the black-and-white film Sabrina where the heroine turns on the ignition of every car in a garage full of her father's employer's automobiles, and then changes her mind about monoxide-poisoning herself.
In any case I was hungry, thirsty, and cranky and decided to return to the car showroom when in a sprightlier frame of mind.
It was a fair walk to the next Ring-Bahn station, but I managed to remember the way without cheating and consulting my smartphone. Just as I arrived, I saw a man relieving himself against the outdoor wall, and lightly breaking wind at the same time, a charming combination that I had not yet encountered in my urban peregrinations.
In a correspondingly misanthropic frame of mind, therefore, I went down to the U-Bahn platform. A train arrived after two minutes, but it looked relatively full. Since I was still antsy after this morning about being stuck with people who cannot or will not practice good hygiene, I waited for the next train after that, which was indeed a little emptier.
During the homeward journey I remembered that I also needed to do a bank transfer for next week. Since I refuse to do online banking, I went to the bank on foot, adding another five to ten minutes to my 5.5+ hour outing.
Thoroughly cranky, I finally did arrive home, lamented my woes to a sympathetic family, drank a glass of sirop à l'eau, ate a sandwich, and then started cooking potatoes to eat with duck gravy. We don't often eat duck — in fact I only remember two other times in my life, aside from Peking duck —, but I'd roasted some the day before yesterday for an elaborate Victorian Age cooking project.
Altogether, it was a rotten day. However, I didn't have the feeling that one sometimes illogically has that I deserved to have a miserable day because I had unconsciously done something wrong. Also, today has seemed delightful by comparison!
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