Die Autobahn hat kein tempo limit

Ich höre, aber ich spreche nicht
Ich fahre, aber ich sehe nicht
Die Autobahn hat kein tempo limit

Hier, kann ich nicht fliegen, aber ich bin frei
Da ist kein rechts, und kein links
Nur geradeaus, immer geradeaus

Ich tanze Bilder
Ich spreche mit einem Lied
Meine Kunst hat auch kein tempo limit!

Das Bett ist kaputt, aber die Matratze ist in Ordnung
Die Tür ist auch kaputt, aber ich kann sie reparieren
Räder können gewechselt werden, Windschutzscheiben können geputzt werden

Ich habe viele Dinge kaputt gemacht
Und ich habe geweint
Aber fahre ich jetzt, fahren, nur fahren…

Also at the Pantheon

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,25503970-5001021,00.html

Reading this it made me chuckle, because my "Australian experience" at the Pantheon was quite a contrast, but not less exciting. At the time I was too busy day-dreaming and didn't blog it, but it is too good of a story to not tell.

Ro (as in Rowena), my Australian travel companion at the time, and I, spent quite a busy day roaming through Rome, as you do, sight seeing, eating pizza, speg-bog and what not, and totally forgot that the Pantheon had a closing time. After negotiating tiny medieval corners and surviving the July sun, we finally managed to get there. Unfortunately, the gate had closed a few minutes before we got there. It was obviously time for another slice of gorgeous and plump and cheap and melting Porcini mushroom pizza. As we ate at the square in front of the Pantheon, we could not help but look at the closed gate with lament.

A group of homeless people had gathered infront of the Pantheon in the meantime and made their beds for the evening. Some of them pretty much fell sleep almost immediately. One of the men somehow started to crawl on top of the woman next to him, and started fumbling about. She started protesting and trying to push him off, with no avail. This alarmed me and my companion in a very very disturbing way. It seemed like no one else either noticed or cared, and it looked like we have had to take the matter into our own hands.

Kiwi chick and Aussie chick with pizza in hand marched up and confronted the scene in our very blatant Antipodean accents.
"s'cuuuuz us but arh yew or-ryght?" we enquired, ready to tear the would be rapist apart.

At this, the woman promptly pushes the man off her (he fell back on his back and went straight to sleep too) and struggled up, and screamed in delight:

"Yaah! Ium or-ryght! He's mee-boyfreend, wyr juz foolin around heey? ... yew guys Aussies?"

Looking at her boofed out hair and broken front tooth, we were actually speechless.

"Yew got any ceegarettes?" She piped.
"No sorry, but you can have my pizza." One of us offered.
"Ffank yew daarlin. Its so hard meeting another Aussie here - I been in Rome seex years juz muck'in around cos I lost mee passport, good aye?"
"Sorry mate we gotta go." We said.

As we fled, she yelled out at us:
"Aussie Aussie Aussie!"

And we replied as quietly as possible:
"Oy oy oy..."

This kind of Stadtleben

Week 3 of my official residency in Berlin begins in ernest.

Some things are already settling in routine, like going to my daily German classes, the late rises to the irrepressible spring sun, bike riding down to the bank by the canal to indulge in a David Mitchell novel amongst the grooming swans and Berlin's beautiful and unemployed people, not wanting to check my emails (and my bank account), weeknight catch ups at easy-going gigs here and there with my new random acquaintences, Tuesdays bartering at the Turkish farmers markets; 'Happy Brownies' dinner party at the English Bookstore on Reismannstr on Fridays; and Sunday evenings making volkküche at the teahouse where my Glaswegian co-chef and I try and out do each other with ingenous vegan creations from the most basic and usually half rotten ingredients. I have a feeling that the summer will be gone before I even know it.

In usual Baroness expediency, I found myself a sunny little room in a retro 4th floor apartment just off Kottbusser Tor on my third day in Berlin, half a block from the canals in a leafy street dotted with op-shops, little cafes, half open experimental fashion boutiques and microgalleries. My flatmate Suszanne is a German girl who is a jewellery designer (though in these days of financial hardship she minors in Garden design as well). Suszanne 'ran away from home' aged 17 to West Berlin from a fishing town up north a couple of years before The Wall came down, and everyday she provides a little more insight into that illusive Berlin psyche to me with her openess about emotional and political subjects, and a relief to me because at the beginning I really thought the language and cultural divide were far more pricklier than its now turned out. And she intorrigates me in pretty much the same way I do her: ''So, is New Zealand crazy too?''.

You can tell that she is a designer by the way she's decked the place out. Everything in the house has both aesthetic and functional dymentions, like the dome shaped shower curtain (resembling Marie-Antoinette's corsets) which she sewed up herself, can be pulled up like a ship's sail with tiny thin fishing strings, with magnetic buttons sewn to the hem to ensure a stable fix to the bathtub; The (fake) diamond chained toilet paper holder is strengthened by a plastic tube through its middle to ensure a smooth roll; The stylish 60s radio in the kitchen acts as a perfect contrast to the bachelorette pad's feminine energy. The rest of the building is fashioned in art nuveau style, from the elaborate front door and the chequered marble tiles to the beautiful frostings on the stair case window glass, which, after a night at the Happy Brownies gathering, spit out beautiful sparks of everchanging fire works as it sillouetted the amber and silver lamps from the court yard..

My new bedroom is rectangularly shaped like my old room in Shoreditch, but basically twice the size and half the rent. Why I have such accommodation luck in my short life I do not know, but I hope it never runs out!! My huge desk overlooks the apartment across the road, the balconies climbing with ivy, and the assortment of neighbours would pop out to sunbathe or smoke every so often while I work on head-splitting German grammar.

My life in London already feels like a life time away. The hardest thing, particularly in the first one and half weeks, was to adjust to a life without crowds, cues and stress. The amount of space here seemed at first all too much, and I felt compelled to fill it somehow. The amount of time now I have to myself seemed to be too vacant at first, and I felt compelled to jam it in with work, committments, and distractions. See, the cultural shock thing and the language barriers I can handle, but its the lifestyle change that's hit me the hardest. The speed and intensity of London had left me a little strung up and neurotic. I've had to teach myself to sit in a cafe and savour my coffee slowly and watch the world's punks and their dogs go by, without wanting to get up and get to my next destination. I've had to learn to stroll instead of march on the streets, and learn that when people greet you with a simple smile and very little small talk is not a sign of disinterest, but a way of understanding this shared meditative pace of Berlin's day life. It actually is incredibly hard, and now that I am slowly getting there, I am finding that I am letting go of little hang ups I used to have, and perhaps just getting a little further in feeling more and more comfortable in my own skin... Meditation? Ja...

The almost full time evening German lessons are going rather well. I think being in a total immersion environment has given me the right motivation and the tools to finally 'click' on some of those crazy grammatic rules and phrases, but like most new arrivals in my class, its a long way to go. Its amusing though, being in such a diverse class of mixed mother tongues trying to negotiate their ways around the brick like consonents.

Tung, the Vietnamese Restauranteur, for example, sounded like a choir of chickens on mezzo-soprano with mosquitos on baritone and some out of control triangle, and Alviro, the Spaniard with both a natural and a Barcelonian lisp (who's name was enough to suggest that he might just be the original carrier of the Swine virus) sounded like a deflating balloon across thin air. So I'd hate to think what I actually sound like with my torchered Kiwi Monovowel.

I guess in a way with both pronunciation and grammatic difficulties, the only easy thing to do in German so far is flirting via text message, where one has the excuse of dropping as much grammatical fuss as possible.

Some of my favourite words in German:
Gummistiefel - gumboots
Krankenwagen - ambulance (but literally, the sick car)
Messer - knife
Handballmannschaft - handball bats
Bonbons - lollies/candies

And some of my least favourites:
Staatsangehörigkeit - nationality
Gerschirrspüller - dishwasher
and
Liebe - love (yes, still working on that hang up!)