A Picaresque Shopping Adventure, and Springtime

It's been a reasonably boring few days: the weather was sometimes overcast and dim.

I've mostly stayed at home. On Monday I had a dentist's appointment, which was mildly dramatic for the dental hygienist insofar as apparently there was a lot of bleeding.

On Thursday I was walking to the Musikinstrumentenmuseum to give myself a treat, after being a little apartment-bound during a lingering cold, when I had a wild adventure.

A lady in the street asked if I'd pay for some milk for her children, and we turned back to a chain store. She and her children ended up loading baskets full of merchandise, despite my attempt to tell her that my debit card has a daily limit. I became more and more exhausted the more they added to the cart, because I pretty much never spend more than 50€ on one shopping trip. The merchandise turned out to be over €300 once the cashier rang it up. Even though the lady put back €163 worth of stuff, my debit card was still declined. The cashier and her colleague, fed up, suggested just returning everything to the shelves. But they were really kind when I offered to help out with sorting the merchandise back in and they saw that I was genuinely sorry for the trouble.

The lady in the street, having asked to sit down outside a café further along the street, then asked for the €10 I had along in cash, which I forked over. She also suggested that I could bring her more money the next day. Since I was no longer convinced that she was in genuine need (inter alia, the mop bucket, powdered milk and diapers were amongst the first things she gave back to the cashier) I had no intention of doing so. Nor was I even sure if my debit card would work.

But her 'offer' did make me worry that I can't walk around that area again, for the foreseeable future, without being asked for my savings.

So I went home, without the museum excursion, short the last 10€ in my wallet, worried that my debit card was locked for good, and kind of scared to go outside again. I knew that by staying inside the next days that I was punishing myself for no reason, but did so anyway...

Anyway, the experience would make an entertaining short story. But as it was my real life, after two years of unemployment and rigid budgeting, and it reminds me vaguely of shopping trips with my parents when I was small where I constantly felt guilty for wanting things, the humour in it was somewhat wasted on me.

It's good that the next dentist's appointment was scheduled for next week, because yesterday my simmering tooth infection flared up. Kind of heaping on the misery.

*

Fortunately, however, yesterday was also the first day to sign up for classes in the upcoming university semester. I signed up online for all the required lectures and seminars, which instilled peace of mind. Already in March, when I'd cobbled together a tentative schedule, it had also been a relief to see that I have no classes earlier than 8:30 a.m.

Also, my blood pressure's still doing well.

Besides I'm making progress in my nerdy project to play the first of two Beethoven sonata volumes from cover to cover. (The second volume I'd already played from cover to cover around 2022, so after the first volume my work is done.)

Lastly, I've ended my self-imposed spending ban, and when I bought groceries today, my debit card worked! And as I walked around, I took in the blue sky, tender green spring leaves, daffodils, forsythia blossoms, violets, and eccentric 'Zum Verschenken' offerings along the sidewalks, and these things made me happy.

Armchair Ideas about International Diplomacy and the War Chest

While world events are hardly inspiriting, I've been quite happy in my personal life lately.

Partly I do attribute it to my new technique of 'Detrumpification': when I read news that I find depressing, I put it into a spreadsheet and try to quickly find something positive to do about the relevant issue. 

It's informed the books and articles that I read: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, transgender rights, Latine writers, a lengthy work about the history of U.S. immigration, and independent Canadian publishers, are now major elements of my reading list. It's led to the embarrassment of riches that I now have in the way of freshly mended socks (to add something to the ecological side of the world's ledger). It's inspired me to look up official YouTube channels for Cuban and Mexican music. It's emboldened me to use my preferred gender pronouns in an email just because it feels good that I can do that without being fired from a job. And so on and so forth.

Besides, I'm simply happy about the university holidays and my freedom. It's the best I've felt since the earlier, glory days at my last job.

That said, I'm apprehensive about the social budgets being cut in Berlin and presumably in other parts of Germany, as well as e.g. closures of hospitals due to unprofitability and a new federal law that alters funding structures. Because I think that the extreme right is profiting a great deal by the economic impacts of Covid and the war in Ukraine. And it is a fair question, not just in Germany but also for example in France, to ask why taxpayer money that was unavailable to regular citizens in the face of steep inflation and regal rents is suddenly available to arm Ukraine.

I think that arming Ukraine is necessary and that abandoning Ukraine to its own devices (as a certain somebody has largely done) is morally deficient. But even in terms of dispassionate military strategy I think it is best at the same time to prevent social discord in the countries that will pay for it. €100 million [Edit: billion] for infrastructure investment, as the CDU and SPD have proposed, doesn't seem like enough. Do I wish that (by and large) the far right would be honest about the role that its beloved partner the Russian president had played in invading Ukraine and crashing the economy, and that the far right would stop promoting his views and interests and ridiculously blaming the effects of his malfeasance on migrants and refugees? — Yes, but I'm not holding my breath that they will finally be truthful, either with themselves or with anybody else.

At the same time, although I figure that Russia's government and media landscape (like those of other countries) could use serious reform, it was a relief to briefly have hope that warmer diplomatic relations would be reestablished. On the basis of its President not invading any more countries, and in some way being fair to Ukraine. Even after that hope was killed off in the Oval Office, I was quite pleased that President Emmanuel Macron took the opportunity of his speech on French television to say that he could envision a good relationship in future. That said, returning to the topic of reform: Looking at domestic Russian politics, I'm struggling to think of any historical parallel where it worked well for a population to have its dictator stay in power after he had killed off tens of thousands of citizens, and destroyed their economy, in an arbitrary war that had 'sounded good to him at the time'. They deserve better.

*

Spring has brought a string of mild and sunny days to Berlin, and golden winter aconites, snowdrops, purple and yellow crocuses are everywhere. Last weekend I saw a budding pink hyacinth and daffodils on the verge of opening into flower, and in the allotment gardens I saw freshly set out primroses. But otherwise it's still quite wintry.

I only have one photography class left, for which I need to take another roll of film. It's still not clear in my mind what to photograph, although perhaps the pro-Ukrainian protest on Sunday is an option. But this weekend the class was postponed due to International Women's Day, which has recently become a statutory holiday in Berlin.

Snapshots of Berlin on the Eve of the Federal Election

For the second weekend in a row, I've gone to the crash course in darkroom photographic techniques.

This week I did make black-and-white prints from the negatives I'd developed last time. I was pleased with my prints. The borders are topsy-turvy at times or the margins too large, and as I'd often photographed 19th-century buildings they were old-fashioned and it looked like I'd just filched a few images from a Victorian album. But as long as the photograph itself is clear and its motif modestly dramatic, I'm happy. For example, I'd forgotten that when shooting the arch over an U-Bahn entrance, birds had been flying in the background, and by happy coincidence they looked (at the instant they were photographed) like proper birds instead of like amorphous extraterrestrial projectiles...

I wasn't especially pleased about being out-and-about before 9:30 a.m. on a Saturday, but after two more weekend classes I can wallow in my indolence. Besides I saw a purple crocus, snowdrops, and yellow winter aconites on the way home, as well as lingering pools of snowdrifts and a red crabapple tree.

Tomorrow will be the day of fate in Germany — in other words the federal elections. It wasn't too noticeable today except insofar as a Green Party supporter was handing out leaflets at a street market in my neighbourhood.

I'm a little worried that yesterday evening's news that a 19-year-old Syrian refugee has stabbed a Spanish man at the Holocaust memorial here in Berlin will lead to more votes for the far right. While I go by there reasonably often, I'm still not afraid of being stabbed myself, and I really think that Berlin would not be Berlin without its cultural mix and (idealistically speaking) respect for international humanitarian law.

A Winter's Walk Through Germany's Snowy Capital

Two bright spots in my existence lately are, firstly, no norovirus infection for me, which meant that I could attend my final exam, on the history of Romance languages, which I passed with a little over 70%. Secondly, the end of the university semester.

On Saturday, I went to an intense weekend workshop for developing black-and-white films and making prints. It was a snowy day and the workshop took place at a picturesque pre-war square, which was convenient as I only had colour films along and had to buy and shoot a new roll with the hybrid digital-analogue camera that my mother bought for me when I graduated high school. (I used the camera regularly when I was a toddling undergraduate at the University of British Columbia, taking shots of the old and new buildings and sunsets etc. on campus. But since then I have felt too broke to be able to regularly afford to buy film and pay for it to be developed.)

Today I was planning to travel to a steelmaking town on the outskirts of Berlin to report on the possible effects of the steel and aluminum tariffs that might be impending in April, and the aftereffects of the last round of tariffs over 4 years ago. It's a town where, last autumn, it was also announced that a transportation manufacturer would close up shop. But now it's looking likelier I'll do it later this week.

First of all I needed to finish writing an essay for my Spanish & Portuguese literature class, so making progress on that took up some time this morning. Secondly, I wanted to photograph the makeshift memorial of candles, photographs and flowers on Unter den Linden in honour of Alexei Navalny, 1 year and 1 day after his death. Thirdly, since economics have never been my strong point, I'm feeling a considerable impostor syndrome about the ambitious steel works reporting plan.

In the end, at least I did make progress on the essay and take photos at the makeshift memorial.

On the way, I passed by the Berlinale film festival hub at Potsdamer Platz, and heard the delighted screams of fans at the red carpet during the premiere of Vivian Qu's film Girls on Wire. When the celebrities had passed along the carpet, the fans scuttled in groups as fast as their feet could carry them to the security tent. Presumably they still needed to show their tickets and enter the film screening itself.

Today's red carpet event, although I didn't follow it in detail, felt pleasantly wholesome. I'm still a diehard red carpet event skeptic, because seeing one in person (from a distance) in 2023 disenchanted me and I've never seen the need to revise that opinion since.

That said, later I felt gloomy and foreboding while treading across the snowy expanse in front of the Reichstag parliament building. It's not even so much the forthcoming federal elections and the impending rule of the CDU party. It's rather that after 4 years of glorious freedom during the last Trump administration from being too affected by his particular brand of mayhem, it feels like the grubby mitts of his regime, and possibly of Russia's 'democratic' leadership, are also being laid on Germany and Canada.

After J.D. Vance's speech to the Munich Security Conference last week (apparently the absence of white supremacist thought at the prow of European public discourse is a sign of the European Union's lack of freedom) and the American/Russian/Saudi den of dictators deciding Ukraine's future, it's not just European heads of government who are croaking of impending doom.

I hoped as I walked that I will still be able to tread across the lawn of a free parliament in a free Germany in two years' time. (I also hoped that I wouldn't fall and break my face on the ice; the area around the Brandenburg Gate, Tiergarten Park, and Reichstag is often embarrassingly bad for tourists to maneuver. In this case, the worst case scenario is that they are never able to travel anywhere again because they've slipped on the vast rinks of compacted snow and ice, cracked their skull and died.)

Less doomily, it was quite satisfying to walk past the US embassy with a Canada t-shirt underneath my coat, and to waltz into the Ibero-American Institute on the way home to familiarize myself with the maligned culture and history of Latin and South America.

Early February 2025: Nausea on Many Levels

It's still a Berlin winter, although I've seen snowdrops, winter aconites, lilac twig buds, and a few shoots of bulb flowers on my walks in the past weeks.

I had a bit of a breakthrough in early January when it turned out that I have high blood pressure: at first it was near the danger zone at around 170 systolic pressure.

Now it's much better, and I was down to 138 this morning. I still need to take medication another 2 weeks or so, because the diastolic pressure is not improving so quickly.

Since then, I feel a lot less anxious. It's easy to become absorbed in things like walks and looking around and reading books and making plans. I'm no longer constantly feeling like I'm a pressure cooker on legs.

And I feel even smugger about quitting my last job. Firstly, I think it didn't improve my blood pressure; secondly I'm also a bit concerned because I'm wondering if it would have been killing me in a literal sense. But I wish that my father (who also had blood pressure issues) had felt like he deserved to go get medical care before he died: if he felt as miserable as I did, his life could have been made a lot more comfortable, even just with one type of medication, and encouragement to go and enjoy life in the great outdoors for the sake of his health once in a while.

***

That said, reading the news is not especially healthy right now, and I think I need to be much more careful how often and how long to read websites. The same goes for attending protests.

Over the past weeks I've been to observe protests against the rightward shift of German politics. The CDU is looking to gain votes by assuaging fears of, unfortunately, the majority of voters who are blaming the results of household budget cuts on migrants and asylum seekers. It didn't help that in southern Germany, an asylum seeker from Afghanistan who has, if I recall the national Tagesschau newscast correctly, been in psychiatric treatment three times, stabbed a 41-year-old man and a toddler recently.

By legitimizing discourse that casts rare occurrences as systemic cause for genuine concern, I fear that the CDU strategy is undermining democracy and the rule of law — including undermining its own strength insofar as it is still democratic and bound to the rule of law.

The first protest was a 'sea of lights' at Brandenburg Gate, with thousands of attendees, who mostly criticized the AfD and partly the CDU leadership.

Then, a few days later, the leader of the CDU introduced a motion into Parliament that suggested blocking Germany's borders, refusing entry to any asylum seeker who did not have papers with them, and jailing undocumented migrants (if I remember correctly) nonstop until their extradition.

– Regarding the jailing: In the past, as Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg mentioned in a recent report, Berlin for example did have its own deportee detention centre. After suicides and other tragedies, the centre was closed down. Apparently, however, some politicians and many fellow citizens have learned nothing. –

The anti-migrant, anti-asylum seeker motion passed because the neoliberal FDP party, splinter Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, and the far-right group AfD voted with the CDU.

That evening, I heard shortly after 7:30 p.m. that a protest against the motion had begun outside the CDU party headquarters at 6 p.m.. I spontaneously went. By the time I arrived, the event had evidently formally ended. But masses of riot police officers on foot were still guarding the area.

I felt that protestors were unusually determined to stay to the end of the event, instead of skipping out early to hang out with friends or do other things; I had the same feeling the next day.

In that protest, a larger mass of people filled the street between the party headquarters, down the row of embassies and foundations, past the Chinese cultural centre.

Speakers from church groups and other organizations addressed the crowd. A leader of Fridays for Future Germany spoke about needing the cooperation of critical voices within the FDP politicians' ranks and elsewhere, to help defeat the anti-migrant legislation. A sign suggested that CDU leader Friedrich Merz should not play the role of Von Papen.

Then the next day the CDU party leadership submitted the vote on a law to Germany's parliament, patterned on the CDU's motion, that would have made the new rules legally binding. Fortunately, politicians from several parties did not vote at all, or abstained, and the law failed.

So, by the time Sunday arrived, I thought that Berliners' interest in protesting CDU etc. migration policy had fizzled.

So I was surprised when I turned up late at the Straße des 17. Juni. Foot traffic near Brandenburg Gate was a little thin. But a long stream of people was pouring down the Yitzhak-Rabin-Straße from the lawn outside Germany's Parliament building, and it clustered around the Victory Column before branching off toward the CDU headquarters. It was the kind of protest where the tributary streams are already as large as most regular protests. There were over 160,000 demonstrators according to the police, so in other words it was the largest political event I have been to since the first protest against the invasion of Ukraine.

The depressing antithesis, of course, is that 66% of Germany's voters were apparently convinced that Merz's plans were reasonable. I'm not sure how that can be changed. To be honest I'm pretty irritated that people whose houses and apartments are still standing, pantries adequately supplied with food, no armed forces running around with guns, and no bombs dropping, genuinely but foolishly claim to be 'in fear of their lives.'

But German politics are only the tip of the iceberg. Following events in the United States is even more horrifying.

***

On a domestic note, food poisoning (norovirus?) has gripped the household. First J. fell sick two nights ago, then our mother and Ge. followed last night. They've been in bed all day.

Sitting here under a figurative Sword of Damocles, I'm wondering if I'll still become ill and, if so, when. My final exam for Romance Studies is tomorrow, so it is not a good time to purge my stomach or be potentially infectious.

New Year's Circus in Berlin

New Year's Eve was extremely lively in my neighbourhood. I might write about it some other time; it's possible that the next days will bring further developments.

One thing that's less sensitive to mention is probably that we heard an explosion in the smaller street beside our apartment, then a car alarm going off. Because the explosion sounded a bit contained, I'd rightly surmised that it had begun beneath a car.

At first we just heard the car alarm. Then, after a minute or two, I looked outside again to see that a fire had kindled, and flames were shooting out to the left and right, lapping toward the black car on one side and the little smart car on the other. Pale grey smoke was billowing from the rear.

No one seemed to be doing anything about it. It also seemed to be near my little brother's window. Although I was guessing that at the rear of the car the flames wouldn't do much damage at first, I didn't fancy the fuel tank exploding, blowing in his windows, and injuring him.

So I very reluctantly went out of my building in my loungewear. As expected, a stray firework instantly landed maybe 3 metres away from me, bouncing off the house foundation; I haven't gone outdoors on New Year's Eve in years, maybe a decade or more, for this very reason of stray pyrotechnics thoughtlessly fired off. There was also a bad rubbery smell, overlaying the usual pyrotechnic sulphur, from the burning car.

I rounded the front of a huge silver-and-blue police van that was parked in front of my building, around the corner from the flaming vehicle. (~3 police vans had been circling up and down the block like a Barnum & Bailey unicyclist since around midnight, as had groups of 6 riot police officers on foot.) I gestured to the driver. He rolled down the window, pulled down the black balaclava material from around his mouth with a patient expression, and heard my report. He answered, 'The fire department is on its way.'

One of our upstairs neighbours was standing excitedly at the stair balustrade on a higher floor when I reentered the apartment building. Another neighbour joined and chimed in from an even higher floor.

After sharing the meagre gossip that I had, I went back into my apartment.

What I'd missed while going outdoors, but the neighbour had seen, is that in fact someone had already extinguished the fire. From a window I soon saw a group of young men encircling the car. A riot police officer with helmet standing near the car's rear surveying the damage, like George Washington inspecting a military parade. (Later, three riot police officers came and, again with flashlights, checked all around the car, probably to make sure that it was still entirely extinguished and maybe to gather evidence.)

It was just as well that someone took the initiative: the fire department never seemed to arrive anywhere near the car. Next day, in the evening news, a fire department official mentioned that within an 11-hour timespan, over 800 fires had been reported in Berlin. The year before, it'd been under 700. Clearly they were overwhelmed.

My brother Ge. looked out the window too. He immediately saw that the car that had been on fire belongs to one of our upstairs neighbours, and texted the neighbour to alert him. The neighbour is retired, I think, and a dedicated do-it-yourselfer who might be an alumnus of the hippie movement; and we like him a great deal. His partner is a nurse or care aide whom I've sometimes met on the staircase, for example returning home after a night shift, or in the streets around the apartment, or carrying firewood.

After a while, the neighbour went out with a flashlight and glumly inspected the damage. Now, days later, the car is still sitting there, while he's waiting for an expert to inspect it and tell him if it's safe to drive.

Fortunately the cars to the left and right seemed fine. Looking displeased and, like our upstairs neighbour, tired, the cars' drivers checked whether their doors and locks still worked properly, and then drove off.

I wish that the New Year's revellers had showed more empathy.

Instead, after the car was already injured, someone added insult to injury by finger-writing messages in the dust of the fire extinguisher material on the rear window pane, like 'PKK.'

I don't want to be too mean, but aside from feeling stupefied that the human species has survived so many generations given the stupidity I witnessed, I also felt that the posturing youths were pretty darn cowardly. For example, as far as I recall, a firework flew straight at someone who belonged to the revellers but was circumspectly crossing the street; instead of telling the person who'd fired the projectile to get a clue, the potential victim just smiled sheepishly.

As insane as the evening up to that point already sounds in retrospect, it escalated further.

I might be too biased because of the events in my neighbourhood, which I think were especially severe because we were on the periphery of a 'fireworks-free zone' that I think just exacerbated the problem where we were. (The German term verschlimmbessern — roughly translatable as 'improve-worsening' — comes to mind.) But I am peeved at Berlin's mayor Kai Wegner and at Germany's chancellor Olaf Scholz for not taking the mayhem and destruction seriously enough to agree to a fireworks ban.

(Local internet commenters suggest that Berlin's CDU party doesn't want the city to miss out on tax revenues from pyrotechnics sales.)

Admittedly I found it boring when my family lived in Canada, where we would squint through trees to see the upper crests of the official fireworks display at the nearby community hall. So I actually enjoyed New Year's Eve in Berlin around 2006. I only began to consider supporting a ban when two fires broke out in my neighbourhood maybe two years ago. But this New Year's Eve has tipped the balance.

I genuinely think that the two above-mentioned politicians should stay overnight in my neighbourhood next year — they don't even need to set foot outdoors — so that they have better informed views.

Anyway, I was a bit traumatized, in the non-medical sense of the word, by New Year's Eve. But at least now I'm able to make jokes about it?