The Next University Semester Draws Near

It's been another sunny autumn day, temperature above freezing, late stray acorns falling off the oak trees to plunk aggressively off the parked cars in the street below.

As it's the first day to register for university courses, I've applied or registered for the ones I want. This semester a lot of my Romance Languages department courses use a lottery system to determine who gets a spot in which course. Normally direct booking is the main option. Is this a late consequence of higher education budget cuts in Berlin, or e.g. an attempt to make sure that less 'popular' seminars are also attended? — I don't know.

For my Greek language class of last semester I've received the welcome news that I passed with a 2,3 grade — a relief and a triumph because I took it the first time starting in 2012, took it again I think twice both as a guest auditor and then as an enrolled student, and finally took the leap and wrote the exam for credit this past semester. My listening comprehension, speaking and grammar skills could still use improvement. But progress has been made in most aspects and by now I'm able to read some books in modern Greek without resorting to a dictionary. It's an achievement that was 14 years in the making!

That said, my Greek History essay is still a burden. Having finished the first collection of essays comparing Greek, Portuguese and Spanish transitions from dictatorships starting in the mid-1970s, I am now taking notes on a second. The paper was due in September...

Tomorrow I will go off to work as a cashier again in northeastern Berlin — a grocery store I haven't worked at before. The thought of a 7.25 hour shift with a 30 minute break is daunting, and since I haven't done mini-jobs other than the election exit poll work since August I feel like I've lost the momentum and familiarity a little. But I'll try to go into the job well fed and with a positive mindset; I have a good feeling going into it.

On October 8th I'll have dental surgery and my face will (if past experience is any guide) once again look like a bruised chipmunk's. Brother Gi. cannily suggested that during the recovery days afterward I could find a job as a sports mascot, where my face wouldn't be visible ... but I am guessing that such opportunities rarely present themselves! So let's see, especially given the resumption of university on the 12th, if I can do enough jobs this month.

In the afternoon, trying to find a little breathing space from my essay, I went to the allotment gardens, coming home with two rose hips and peace of mind. A hooded crow was tugging at the ground near the gardens' entrance. Looking more closely, I saw that tunnel-like holes, roughly the diameter of a plum, were dug into the soil. I wondered if the crow was trying to eat the rats or other tenants. On a more peaceful note, there is red foliage almost everywhere now, purple fall asters, sunflowers, and late sunset-red Hokkaido pumpkins hanging on their wilted vines.

But I was anxious to get home again, too, because it was my uncle Pu's birthday, he would come to visit in the evening, and Ge. was already baking a lemon meringue pie in his honour.

Walnuts and the Squirrel

A few days ago, after the family returned from the UK, I developed a mild cold. As a result, I've been largely lurking indoors until I stop feeling contagious, still working on the same essay and watching Wartime Farm followed now by Tudor Monastery Farm. But on the last day before the cold I made the quince-and-elderberry jelly and fruit leather (or quince paste, if you will); and, having finally figured out — after two sad attempts in past years — that the jelly needs to reduce and boil at 104°C before it will gel, it was a triumph.

Today I therefore avoided the crowds at the Berlin marathon, instead of photographing it and cheering on the runners as I've done in past years. I also avoided applying for a mini-job over the weekend.

Instead I went to the allotment gardens again. I returned with a haul of walnuts that are not yet ripe, Concord grapes, quinces, and a flower that had been ripped off and dropped on the walkway. These grapes turned out to be delicious, as the gardener who put them out in a basket promised, and the flower looks pretty in its vase and comforts me for not having floristry in my budget. We haven't had a proper frost yet, so I didn't bother picking sloe berries on the way home. But I did notice amongst the sloe bushes that a fresh crop of blackberries (the berries were a bright red, like a medieval painting of a bleeding knight) had sprung on their brambles, despite the lateness of the season.

As I was gathering the fallen walnuts in the gardens — the nuts partly looked sepulchral when the green flesh had turned brown or black, mouldering away, some seamed with whitish fibres — I heard more objects plop to the ground at a fairly regular rate in the garden behind me. There was a wind, but it felt too gentle to shake the trees enough to make many fruits or nuts fall off. So I looked up and found a squirrel making its way gracefully, on all four paws and tail trailing behind, along a branch. In consideration of the squirrel's work in dropping the walnuts to the ground, and of its need for winter feed, I decided to take only one more nut before leaving the rest of the harvest to the squirrel. As I am used to the squirrels in Victoria, Canada — who would nibble the green-and-white husks off of the walnut shells from their perches in the walnut tree, chucking down fragments like rain (these fragments stained everything brown with the walnut juices) all over our lounge chairs and us — this Berlin squirrel also seemed remarkably polite. Now, at any rate, my share of the walnuts is lying on a newspaper on my windowsill, waiting to dry in the upcoming days of late summer sunshine.

Inspired by Edwardian Farm, I have also begun tracking the atmospheric pressure with a homemade barometer: a jar with water, which I turned green using water colour paint, and an empty bottle inverted into it. Happily the day on which I made it was just before the high pressure front really came in, so the very first morning I already saw a dramatic rise of the green water level into the bottleneck. Now I'm drawing little lines on the jar and adding the air pressure measurements in hpA that are reported each day on the Deutscher Wetterdienst's website.

Other than that, I cooked a cabbage soup and made oat cakes today. In the morning I listened on the radio to a Catholic church service, which celebrated/commemorated both Thanksgiving and the upcoming 800th death-day of St. Francis of Assisi. When I was little I thought that St. Francis was one of the more interesting saints, even if he did not die in a memorably gruesome way; I liked the imagery where he communicates with birds and animals. In the afternoon Gi. dropped by, so the siblings went off to bond over archery and bouldering as they usually do on the weekends, but we didn't end up looking at the photos from the UK travels as we'd intended.

Rose Hips, Plums and Seedlings

In between working on my Greek-Spanish history essay, exit polling at the Berlin city and local elections, mending socks, and volunteering at an open-air cinema, I've been travelling to the allotment gardens again.

I've also been re-watching the BBC series Tales of the Green Valley, Victorian Farm, and Edwardian Farm, which have nudged me to do more with the allotment garden produce. Unluckily, while there were a few early apples in August, there are almost no late apples this year, so I am concentrating on other fruit.

Rose hips are ripe now, for example. I see them scattered on the garden paths — whether humans, animals or birds tear them off the bushes I don't know yet. At any rate, it feels morally defensible to take them. Before this autumn my only idea for turning rose hips into food was to make jam. But I can't gather enough rose hips to make more than a tablespoonful. This year, fortunately, I thought of turning the hips into tea instead. They are usually blended with other ingredients when you buy tea bags in the store, of course. So today I brewed three of the hips together with half a lemon and about 5 cups of boiling water. The resulting tea tasted nice (fresh, mellow and tangy at the same time) and had a yellowy glow.

For my supper I made a plum compôte with sugar, water, cinnamon, a clove, and the zest and juice of the other half of the lemon. As the fallen fruit itself was past its best days, judging by the musty fragrance, it wasn't a pity to cover up its flavour.

Besides there are pear quinces in the pantry, and elderberry florets hanging in a bag at my kitchen chair, waiting for me to use them... Since most of the family is travelling in the UK, I was thinking I'll try making quince jelly and quince cheese again before they return — this time with elderberries in the jelly, as I like the colour and flavour combination. Hopefully by Wednesday afternoon every sign of the messy pots and implements will have vanished.

I did try eating (fresh and on its own) a Concord grape that had fallen off a vine. But it was sour and it didn't look like 2026 was a good year for Berlin grapes.

It was windy and a volatile mix of sunshine and cloud today, so on the whole a good day to visit the allotment gardens. There were very few gardeners or passersby, but to make up for that many species of butterflies were dancing around the fences.

Lastly, I'm growing rocket (arugula), peas and nasturtiums in an egg carton that I've filled with potting soil and put near a windowsill in my room. The seeds were prodded in on September 15th, many of them sprouted over the weekend, and today I began thinning out the arugula seedlings to give their fellow plants more room. The sprouts that I removed, I washed and ate for dinner.

One thing I haven't done is to gather Turkish filberts. These nuts are smaller than regular hazelnuts, and often fall from the trees lodged in their baroque, fierce-looking swirled spike husks; and at least where I grew up in Canada they don't appear to be common, whereas in Berlin they're familiar. At any rate, in August parents and their children were crouching around the sidewalks, harvesting them from between the cobblestones and from directly underneath the trees.

Returning to the subject of the failed late apple crop, however, I've ended up thinking that at least there is one positive aspect of the variable behaviour of nature: if this is a bad year for apples, we can enjoy next year's good harvest all the more by contrast. There is something to look forward to.

A Revolutionary's Thoughts While Dishwashing

It's been 10 days since my last student mini-job, but that one (to borrow from the vernacular) was a doozy:  a half hour commute both ways, but then 6.5 hours of dishwashing at a canteen in former Eastern Berlin.

The equipment was fascinating. I keep on yearning for my family to adopt a rule that I read about in books and hear about in real life: that the person who's cooking doesn't need to wash the dishes later. But it's been well over a decade. The rule in our household is still that the person who's cooking is making a shocking mess that needs to be cleaned up as soon as possible. One of my former colleagues, frankly surveying our romantic prospects / lack thereof, once commented that he and I are still waiting for 'our Mr. Darcy's. In my case, I hope that Mr. Darcy will wash half the dishes while I do the other half. ... In the meantime, 1. a dishwashing machine that takes about 10 to 20 minutes to rinse the pottery, glassware, cutlery, etc. once you slide in the tray, 2. a piece of steel wool that takes care of almost anything that sticks to stainless steel basins, lids, utensils and pots, 3. industrial-strength dishwashing liquid, and 4. a powerful spray attachment at the tap, come pretty close.

I liked the colleagues, and not just because they gave me a free café au lait and a bottle of water. I barely glimpsed the customers since the only opportunities arose while I was ferrying back and forth the caddies full of dirty lunch trays and glancing at the counter where customers were ordering their food. But I was horrified by an indirect communication: one of the customers left a wasp, which they had apparently cut in two, on their plate for me to dispose of.

But I emerged from the job with sore muscles (in my lower arm, obviously; but also at my thumb, inner thighs, lower back, ... the list goes on) and fiery new socialist convictions. The radicalized political views are not just based on this job, but also the others.

For one thing, I don't think that people should have to work or spend their lunch breaks in windowless rooms.

For another, is cashier work and dishwashing work, really 'honest' work? Or is it just grubbing that is underpaid by an employer who needs to wring out every last cent of profit, in a market where the company is just not making enough money have large margins, and sometimes made unduly difficult by customers who are badly raised? For example, it was no trouble at all to wash coffee cups, cake plates, and cutlery. But scraping off a whole bunch of food that the customer didn't feel like eating after all, or prying crumpled paper napkins out of congealed sauce, felt like nannying or parenting un-endearing 5-foot- and 6-foot-something babies — rather than providing a reasonable service to a paying adult. As I complained to family afterward, only half joking: I'm not their mother! if they don't want to bother to use table manners, they can clean up their own darn mess!

Thirdly, I increasingly doubt the 'American Dream' narrative about low-paying jobs. Maybe I'm just a pampered princess who is not used to scrubbing encrusted cheese from metal bins. But from my point of view, it would be a far better use of refugees' and economic migrants' time and effort to find something fitting for their specific interests and skills, at times and in places that are practical (not '5 a.m., when few trains are running' and 'across town'). It does not make sense to give them needlessly labour-intensive, dead-end jobs and then ask them to spin soap suds into gold. It's like the household revolution in countries like the UK after World War I: when the mistresses of households began to have to do housework instead of domestic servants (who were hired away by factories or shops), they finally realized that maybe they wanted to cook easier, less complex food and have machines to tackle the majority of the hard work. Hard labour always feels more indispensable when the burden falls on another, and I really don't think that enlightenment, valuable life training, and spiritual contentment come from scraping uneaten ketchup into a garbage bin.

Fourth, I think that the current grocery store system is wildly unsustainable. It's not just cashier work at the register that instills a whole different perspective on how much labour goes into creating a small package of food (sometimes empty calories) that is purchased in a few seconds and perhaps eaten in the same amount of time. It's also stocking shelves. At least the grocery stores here in Berlin tend to order an extensive gamut of eclectic groceries in sets of up to 20 packages. Picture the process of raising the ingredients (farmers, fuel suppliers, fertilizer suppliers, etc.), transporting the ingredients, blending the food, transporting the blended food via train or airplane or truck, dividing the food into the desired portions using materials that also need to be sourced from long supply chains (paper, plastic, etc.), then sorting them out into a grocery store's order. All kinds of work that needs to be done in the middle of the night, over long distances, for very low wages and low profit margins, etc. Then, I as the cashier have to open the package (which can be as complex as Ikea furniture assembly) and familiarize myself with the shop's layout to figure out where that package goes. Then I have to move aside the older packages so that the newer ones go in the back. While keeping an eye on the till to see if anyone needs me to ring up their purchases. All so that someone can e.g. buy a tiny tub of yoghurt that will be eaten up in a few seconds. ... Thinking about all of this has made me more of a zealot about cooking food from scratch using bulk ingredients — locally sourced, if possible.

Studies and Sloe Bushes

This week I submitted one of my university essays, the Greek written and spoken exams are over as of yesterday, and I've restarted the work on the second university essay — a comparison of the 1970s transitions from dictatorship to democracy in Greece and Spain.

On the work front, I did a 7-hour shift with a 1/2 hour break at a grocery store out in Brandenburg, near Potsdam. Waking up at 6:08 a.m. to get ready and catch the train after a night where I was so anxious about missing the right time to get up that I woke up every two hours, learning how to handle idiosyncrasies of the new grocery store like customized buttons and clients who bring back crates of empty water and beer bottles, and stocking shelves — these parts of the job were so exhausting that I've been a little limp ever since. Besides I didn't stay hydrated, so that even the 'isotonic drink' that I made for myself in the evening wasn't enough to quench the perpetual thirst afterward. On the bright side, it was sunny weather, none of the customers or colleagues were unfriendly, the sight of lush trees and leisure boats on the sparkling blue river was nice, and the trains ran almost like clockwork. A customer handed me a Mozartkugel, and after clearing it with my supervisor to make sure it wouldn't be considered a bribe, I ate it as a reward after the written exam. And, of course, I earned a little over €100.

That said, the Greek exams revealed large lacunae in my grammar skills. Besides I'd like to improve my listening comprehension. So I've borrowed from the 'Spanish self-teaching bootcamp' that I set up in 2024 to get into a B1 class at university, and begun a daily schedule of copying out verb charts and listening to Greek language videos on YouTube. Writing the history essay might also help...

To unwind, I went to the allotment gardens earlier today. (There was a cloud cover, but the forecast thunderstorms have not yet descended.) The gardens themselves were quiet and cheery. Two orange-coloured water tank trucks from the city's fleet were watering trees with a generous spray. Sweet peas, roses, echinacea, late-flowering butterfly bushes, marigolds, hibiscus, calendula, and other flowers are still in season; gold-green and blue grapes are hanging in ripening clusters; plums and early pears are ripening on the trees, as quinces and apples follow. Rosebush twigs had been left outside an open gate, and I wanted to take one home with me; but I didn't see anyone to ask for permission.

A gardener was watering his plot with the traditional hose. It's an activity I'm always skeptical of when it's between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. Firstly, my paternal grandfather (who after all studied agriculture, and later planted and tended a half acre of all kinds of decorative bushes as well as vegetables and fruit) always watered late in the evening — when the sun had crept past the garden to spotlight the tall firs behind the neighbour's yard, upslope on the mountain. Besides, growing up in a dry part of Canada, we were always told by the municipal authorities that drip hoses that lie along the soil and gradually infuse water into it are a far more efficient way to tend plants. Of course, watering early in the morning is also fine.

The plot where a gardener generously gave me fruit last week was locked, the baskets hanging at the gate empty. In fact all the 'zum Verschenken' baskets around the gardens were empty; considering that it's not the weekend, when more people putter about in their gardens, and that apple season is not in full swing yet, this is to be expected. But I picked up three sweet, peachy-tasting mirabelle plums that had fallen at the next corner of the garden path.

Along the way home, I glanced at the blackberry bushes that grow beside the train tracks. They have been harvested ruthlessly. But the dusty-blue sloe berries are ripening intact on their bushes; I wondered if this year is the year when I'll finally take a leaf from the British gardener's book and make sloe gin.

The Night Shift

Being a hotel receptionist on a Friday night turned out to be quiet. I was apprehensive traipsing around streets with partying tourists, a champagne bottle broken open with shards pointing upward across a pedestrian crossing and alcoholic foam along the gutter. But the hotel itself was in a calm courtyard, a wispy light rain falling, and the clientele turned out to be eminently well behaved. A room costs over €100 per night, the front desk had tall pink orchids on it, and the lounge had a grand piano, comfortable sofas, and equally pristine laminate wood walls. My supervisor came out from a back office and shook hands, a spare man somewhat older than me in a leather vest, with an open manner and direct way of speaking with people that I liked at once. In the end I handed over room keys for two groups of guests, and showed a young English-speaking pair where to write their address when checking in, but otherwise I had practically no duties except to sit and pass the time. Which was a relief because I thought I'd need to handle abstruse and diva-esque guest requests or learn elaborate check-in or security procedures.

The guests, fellow employees, and a black-suited gentleman who was briskly striding around (the supervisor revealed discreetly afterward that he was the hotel owner), greeted the supervisor and me politely as they came and went through the lobby. Two women guests (one in a sparkling black blazer, if I recall correctly) paused to give my colleague the run-down on their evening in the revue at the Friedrichstadt Palast. After 11:30 p.m. very little went on except for security personnel coming in to chat or check in or out.

My colleague intermittently watched a German TV series about the cop beat in Mainz. The dramatis personae were e.g. a 16-year-old too drunk to go home by herself and her (per my first impression, repellent-sounding) parents unwilling to take the trouble to fetch her, a car driver who performed a suspicious manoeuvre and (when stopped) turned out to have no license, and a young man who dove into the Rhine River on a dare during a bachelor party but found that the current was too strong to swim across. I was sure that part of the dialogue must have been re-recorded in a studio after the original footage was filmed, because most of the criminal 'talent' had excellent diction and the sound quality was unimpeachable. The series was surprisingly didactic, and not in the 'don't do crime' way you'd expect. It instilled the impression that police work is not at all about handing down biblical judgments about right and wrong; instead it's about figuring out which part of the rule book to exercise in which situation, staying cool-headed, and applying compassion where it seems justified. The police officers also repeated that people who have mental health problems should seek help, because law enforcement might want to but can't fix their life situations. If the series itself is entirely ethical, however, I'm skeptical.

So on the one hand I also chatted a little with the co-worker, who revealed inter alia that he'd grown up in the GDR and that there usually aren't any security problems at the hotel except sometimes with a homeless person but that this was manageable. I skimmed the headlines of the Guardian, Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg, the New York Times, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, browsed the websites of The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books, and had brought along Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de mon Moulin — and enjoyed reading all that. Lettres de mon Moulin are really wonderful, engaging to read, original, and descriptive, even if from a non-French-native-speaker's perspective they contain a lot of vocabulary that I never expect to use again in my life. (One of my favourite sentences was, 'Day is the life of beings, but night is the life of things.' — I wrote that down because I liked it so much.) ...  On the other hand, I was also very much engrossed in the police show.

After 5 a.m. a cleaning lady arrived and began to get ready for her shift, eventually wheeling out the trolley in uniform with her supplies. So did another colleague who seemed to do more security-type work. The supervisor told me I could leave 30 minutes early, so I did, delighted that it was already light out but also aware of having huge circles under my eyes. (I hadn't napped the day before, which might have been a mistake, and was woken up by noise and a headache so that I didn't sleep in until noon as I'd planned. That said, it was still delightfully refreshing to be in a position for once to tell myself: No, no, don't go to sleep yet! You need to wake up late for work!) After arriving home and being greeted sleepily by Mama and Ge., who heard me from their rooms, I slept about 5 hours and afterward gradually returned to my essay writing.