Ich Bin Ein Berliner - published in The Friday Times

“Ok so if you make interesting then I make interesting and then you calling in the morning and we talking of renting”

“Danke, danke” and I politely exited from that queer apartment which had everything draped in fabric, including the kitchen which was carpeted. I half imagined the bathtub to have velvet lining. Shuddering while I thought of the creepy apartment and the lady I made my way through the subway system known as the U-Bahn to where the next apartment was situated. I felt the creeps as I thought of the lady with her strange pink outfit and all her hair thrown on to one side of her head and I hoped that the next apartment would have someone sane in it.

The meeting went extremely well with Gunther except the ending soured everything. Just as I was about to seal the deal as he lowered the rent, a big fat, half lion and half cat sauntered into the room.

‘Oh yez, and you must love ze cat, she is our third roommate’
‘Well…..I guess….alright I will tolerate the cat, as long as it doesn’t get on my bed….’ I replied thinking how averse I was to pets in the house.
‘No, no. you must love ze cat. It is our third roommate and you must love it’
‘Well….. I can,t love it but I will tolerate it! I really don’t see why I must love the cat!’
‘No no, you must love ze cat because the cat loves you’

I let it rest at that and gave up for the day. Someone had mentioned that since the wall came down in 1989 the property market crashed because of the large number of East Berlin flats. This has effectively made the cheapest capital in Europe enabling all sorts of hippies, students, anarchists, backpackers to live in the city for extended periods of time. This in turn has lent a very relaxed, tolerant and alternative identity to the multiple centres of the city. Mitte, Friedrichshain, Prenzlauer Berg and Kreuzberg are four such alternative districts.

Such were my first few encounters while apartment hunting in Berlin. I gave up soon after in favour of student dormitories which are far less problematic and more convenient. So as soon as I settled and had registered for the courses that I was taking I decided to hit the city and enlisted the support of my faithful local German colleagues. They suggested a soccer game would be a welcoming prelude to German culture and I agreed. So a game between Schalke, a German team and AC Milan was selected and we made our way over to the stadium en masse the next day. Soccer crazy German fans were decked in their full colours as they fanatically supported their teams. I immediately found an affiliation to the German team and shouted myself hoarse in their favour as well. It is interesting to see how nationalist fervour and spirit is associated with sporting teams and how similar the patterns were to Pakistani crowds supporting the cricket team.

After the game ended in a tie it was decided that since AC Milan was a top class team and Schalke tying with them was an honor and worthy of celebration. Therefore it was decided to celebrate at a café for a few hours. We went to a trendy alternative district of Berlin called Rosenthaler Strasse which essentially is a street lined by café and roadside eateries for a couple of kilometres. We chose a café with a Mexican theme run by Bangladeshi’s and planted ourselves there for a few hours.

‘Now what is a foreigner doing in Berlin tonight!’

Exclaimed an old man from the street. Racism was something I had prepared myself for and was used to as well while on other expeditions in other countries. This old man was harmless when compared to the militant neo-Nazi outfits I had a couple of encounters with in Moscow. The old man has probably been stung hard by the wall coming down and the loss in social security and was quite insistent on finding out what I, a brown skinned individual, was doing in Berlin.

‘I wonder what is a foreigner doing in Berlin tonight?’ he insisted.

‘And I wonder what an East Berliner is doing in the western part of town tonight!’

Cried out a stranger in my defence from a table behind ours.The events of the evening had pretty much summed up the sentiments of the German nation. The re-unification was just as precarious a process as painful a process the division turned out to be. The recent elections in Germany saw the vote bank split down the middle and the division has never been so stark in Germany since the Unification. It is a common joke in Berlin these days that when the wall was up they wanted to tear it down so brother could meet brother. When the wall finally did come down and the East Berliners invaded West Berlin and the rest of the east moved west emptying out East German cities, west Germans cried out, ‘put the wall back up!’

Later that evening the foreigners in the contingent decided that we must spend three euros and take a ride in a Mercedez Benz taxi cab to see what it feels like. A car that is primarily a status symbol and is owned only by the elites in almost all developing countries plies the roads of Berlin as a taxi.

It had only been a few days in this bizarre city. It is quite remarkable because it has so much diversity and unlike many other cities has at least four alternative down-town districts. Berlin is undergoing a transformation and is the upcoming symbol of not only a unified Germany but a potentially larger and more integrated EU. I was looking forward to being apart of this changing city for the next two years already. More than that I was looking forward to seeing the Francisco Goya exhibition that was visiting town for a week and in honour of which the Altes museum had decided to remain open till three at night over the weekend! Untill the latest reports were filed on the web the waiting time in the queue outside was 5 hours.