This place is mad.

When I got off of the tram to board the U-Bahn, a teenage boy suddenly lay down in the middle of the stairwell, causing the flow of traffic to come to an abrupt halt and people to step around, over, and on top of him, yelling what I can only imagine were both insults and affirmations of cheer (depending on the facial expression of the speaker). On the platform, a drunken man was trying desperately to get the attention of a group of middle-aged friends sitting on one of the benches who looked like they had stayed out far too late and just wanted to get home. As I sit here and type this now, outside my window is a girl dressed in a green cape, white leggings, and a purple sequin-covered pirate’s hat playing a small accordion to herself as she journeys down the road.

In contrast, just eight days ago in London, I raced commuters through the maze of Bank Station, ducked through the arms of people on the sidewalk to try and reach my destination, got soaked to the bone in a surprise downpour, and chased a group of red giraffes through Woolwich Arsenal (though admittedly that one doesn’t happen every day).

London is mad, I’ve heard it said. Yet while that city has had years of relative peace in which to calm itself down and sort things out, Berlin, I have realized, is still fairly new at this. It’s hard to believe sometimes that just over twenty years ago, things here in my neighbourhood east of the Wall would have been very different. If I were Berlin, I too would have been longing for the day in which I could simply go mad without consequence. And when that day came, I would be celebrating my newfound freedom too, albeit a little shakily.

So next time you find yourself worrying about what the lady across from you on the train may be thinking of your wardrobe, or your inability to stop yourself from giggling out loud at a passage from Wodehouse you happen to be reading in public – consider a city break to a place where anything goes. Because no matter who or what you are, it is likely you will too.

It’s incredible how common fears have the power to influence actions: for example, I prefer to sleep with a bit of light in the room to allow my eyes to see things closer to the way they actually are. However, there is none so remarkable a story as the case of the Jüdischer Friedhof Weissensee in the north of Berlin, spared from destruction in WWII because – get this – the Nazis believed it was haunted.

There is something so wonderful about the thought of the so-called “fearless” Nazi officers running and screaming like little girls from the cemetery at the sound of a snapping twig or squirrel in the trees. During their regime, it was the one place in which the Jews who worked there were still free to carry on with life as normal for the better part of the war, serving as an almost untouchable oasis of calm in the midst of the storm that was the rest of Berlin.

I strolled the stone paths for what felt like hours yesterday, absorbed by the peace, tranquility, and natural beauty of the site. Then suddenly, I heard a man’s voice.

I turned around. No one was there.

I continued to walk. The voice persisted as though it were right next to me, yet far away at the same time. It was speaking in German very loudly and quickly.

The faster I walked, the louder the voice became. There was still no one in sight. I walked until I reached the end of the path.

Ahead of me, I saw long brick wall separating the cemetery from its surroundings. Beyond the wall were two high-rise apartment buildings. There was a man talking very loudly on his mobile phone on one of the balconies.

As if I’d just put on my glasses, everything made sense again.

(Side note: if ever the opportunity passes your way, I strongly recommend you dedicate two hours of your time to watching In Heaven, Underground, directed by Britta Wauer. Just a suggestion…)

“How’s your German coming along?” my friend’s mother asked me a few weeks prior to my departure.

“Great!” I responded. “I know how to say ‘the dog drinks apple juice’!”

“That will come in really handy.” She tried to give me an encouraging smile, but unfortunately the sarcasm was too strong to go unnoticed.

I, however, was not to be deterred. I decided then and there to make it my goal in Germany to get myself into a situation in which I would need to use the phrase in its entirety.

What I was not prepared for was the likelihood of the situation falling straight into my lap – on a day when I was entirely unsuspecting of it.

Yesterday afternoon I found myself in a quaint cafe on Frankfurter Allee with my laptop doing some job hunting. I had just finished texting my friend in London with an: “It’s so hot today! I’m really thirsty. Off to get some Apfelsaft!” and chuckling to myself, thinking of the word, which had become humourous to me ever since setting myself the supposedly unattainable challenge. Little did I know that shortly after I had ordered my drink, a lady would walk in and take a seat at the table next to me, followed by her dog.

I carried on typing for a few moments, not really thinking anything of it. Then, before I knew what was happening, the dog sauntered over to me.

“Hallo,” I told it, reaching down to stroke its fur. It sat there at my feet, sniffing around the tiles. So caught up was I in the moment – there is nothing so charming as a friendly dog – that I forgot about my Apfelsaft, and the fact that there was a dog within thirty centimetres of it. It wasn’t until the dog sauntered away that it occurred to me.

This was my chance. This may be my one and only chance.

“Psst,” I whispered to the dog, causing the owner to look up.

I gave her a warm smile as though I had done nothing. She smiled back.

The dog looked up at me. I beckoned to it discreetly under the table.

It didn’t come.

“Apfelsaft,” I hissed, holding up my glass. “Would you like some?”

The dog stared.

The owner looked up again. I put my glass down abruptly. “Ich liebe die Hunde,” I felt it necessary to attempt. She seemed to understand and replied instantly, though I had no idea what it was she was saying. I smiled and nodded as though I did.

My chance had passed. I would have to find another dog, in the vicinity of another glass of apple juice.

An hour later, I packed up my things. “Tschüss,” I said to the dog on my way out the door, a bit dejectedly.

“Tschüss,” replied the owner, waving.

Good thing I now know a few more practical phrases.

I may not always be the most astute individual that ever walked the planet, but surely – surely – they don’t have special change bureaus and textile shops especially for “idiots”. Right?

Schmuck (German): jewellery, adornments

Oh.

Right.

Okay. I admit it. Who’s the schmuck now?

So far, today, I have:

-gotten so excited about ordering my first coffee in German that I forgot to eat breakfast

-caused a lady to roll her eyes and say “whatever”

-accidentally walked into someone’s private office

-seen a young woman covered in fake blood, lying atop a Canadian flag on the sidewalk

-fashioned my cardigan into a makeshift bag in order to carry my groceries home as punishment for blanking on how to say “can I have a bag, please?” in German at the supermarket till

This afternoon as I strolled eastwards across Unter den Linden, sweat pouring down my face, it struck me:

I am a complete stranger here.

It’s amazing how a language can have the ability to both include and ostracize; in my case, the latter. I remain lost in my English thoughts, internally rejoicing each time I spot a word or phrase I understand, drowning myself in children’s books, determined to master this language and survive.

I know more German than I did yesterday. This can only mean one thing: by tomorrow, I’ll know even more. Bring it, Day 2 – the phrasebook and I are ready.

Hope you enjoyed the limited-time only January posts as well. Keep reading and keep enjoying!

Admittedly, I did not know much about East London before moving here back in April. I did not even know of the area in which my advertised room was located until I went there to view it. However, my first day as a resident offered me some great insight into what it would be like: I moved everything into my room only to find that my laundry rack had been stolen from the back of the van while the trunk was open. And a few weeks later, our Dominos Pizza was stolen from the hands of the delivery guy as he walked to our house, and then in July, a group of local teenagers set our recycling bin on fire. Since then, I have had to call 999 (the UK’s 911) twice for separate reasons, and a mangy neighbourhood cat has decided that our house is its new favourite restaurant.

Yet all this has caused me to develop a strange affinity to the East. So much of an affinity that when I saw the ripped up notice above our garbage bin, speckled in whatever had splashed out of tenants’ garbage bags as they missed their target, advertising ‘ESTATE MANAGEMENT AGM: ALL TENANTS WELCOME’, I marked the date and time in my calendar and was one of the first people to arrive at the venue, located above ‘Legendary Fried Chicken’.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking: “Oh no, Lindsay.”

Yes.

The first thing I noticed when I walked in was that I was the only girl there. Not only that: I was the only person under the age of 55. I nervously wrote my name and address down on the sign-in sheet and took a seat in an empty chair – right at the front.

My main agenda for this outlandish way to spend a Tuesday night was to speak to someone about the proliferation of motorcycles on the pedestrian-only boardwalk at the front of my estate. Lately teenagers had taken to riding their bikes at inhuman speeds around the boardwalk with seemingly no regard for the senior citizens or children who used it for the innocent purposes of walking home. I wanted to make the council aware of the issue and discuss ways in which it could potentially be dealt with.

However, when the co-chairman of the board stood up to welcome us all, clad in tight purple bell bottoms and a matching purple tye-dyed shirt, I had a feeling that motorcycles were not going to be top of the list in tonight’s discussion.

“Tonight we vote for who our new representatives will be,” he announced, and before I knew it, a slip of paper was making its way down the front row. An angry resident stood up to demand why the board was never elected – who chose them? Why should he trust a board whom the residents had no say in bringing in? Another person stood up to argue that the appointment of the board had indeed been approved by residents, and the system had never been challenged before, and on and on it went, until the slip of paper got passed to me.

“Can you please second the nomination of Bob?” the man in purple leggings asked me.

I looked around the room nervously, all eyes on me.

Who?

Realizing I was the only person in attendance who had absolutely no idea what was going on at this meeting, I took the pen from him and signed my name. Under “Address”, I wrote half of the first line, hoping they would not be able to figure out the rest, though I knew that everyone here already knew where it was – they had likely walked past it on the way.

“Thank you. Okay, we’ll pass these nominations on to the Board, and they’ll decide.”

“But who is the Board to us?” the same angry resident stood up and demanded. “We never elected them!”

“Oh, give it up!” someone else yelled.

The room broke out into chaos. It was at that point that I decided to scramble from my seat, shimmy between the tables of the Board, swipe a free cookie from the plate in the makeshift kitchen, and bolt out the door. I ran all the way across the boardwalk, a motorcycle whizzing past me on my left, up the stairs to my room, and shut the door.

Oh God – I hope Bob is level-headed and rational, I prayed as I leaned against it, panting and shaking. In other words: don’t let them come after me.

“Hi there, you all right?” the sales clerk asked me during my first week here inside a jewellery store on Oxford Street.

I whirled around to face her, horrified. “Actually – no,” I replied honestly, feeling a lump swell in my throat.  “I just arrived in London and I don’t know my way around. There are so many people on the street that I had to come in here to take refuge.” I could not believe that my face had given away the truth about myself.

If present Lindsay had been around that day, however, she would have given her younger, newer self a nudge. “Psst,” she would have whispered. “She’s not actually asking you if the things in your world are all in order. She’s asking you how it’s going.”

“Seriously?” Past Me would have said. “Then why didn’t she say so?”

“She did,” I would have patiently explained. “But you’re in Britain now. That’s how they do it.”

Same goes with the time my co-worker sent me an email in the early days of working. “Whilst you’re doing [boring work task], would you mind also doing [other boring work task]?”

I sent him a reply: “HAHAHAHAHA! Certainly, Shakespeare!”

If only Present Lindsay had shown up.

“Hey,” I would have whispered in her ear before she pressed ‘Send’. “In Britain, it’s still common to say ‘whilst’. They hardly say ‘while’.”

“But it’s 2009,” Past Me would have remarked.

“It doesn’t matter. Don’t tell them how and when to use their own language.”

I had always thought that all words were used and spelled the same in Britain as they are in Canada. We spell “colour” with a ‘u’. We tack in the extra ‘l’ to “travelled”. But it’s come to my attention over the months that Brits will not only slap an “st” onto a word I wasn’t aware we’d shortened, but they would say they have realised the importance of organising their luggage when travelling by aeroplane. Or be “gutted” that their car hit the kerb and they got a flat tyre. They would probably agree this whole thing has made them quite sceptical about the evolution of Canadian English. On the one hand, we are adamant in agreeing with our colonial ancestors on this matter, but on the other hand, we’re unable to help but feel that Noah Webster made the words that much punchier. We can’t seem to make up our minds as to which version we should use.

I remember receiving an email from a professor of mine in second year. “It’s important to realise the significance of the invention of the cathode ray tube,” he wrote. He, like me, had been born and raised in Southern Ontario. But while I had learned how to spell “realize” in the 1980s, one hundred and twenty years after Canada’s Confederation, he would have learned in the 1950s – when Canada was still flying the Red Ensign. It’s possible that over the years, as Canada has moved away from its pre, inter, and postwar connections with Britain to the importance of building our relationship with the United States, its attitude towards spelling shifted accordingly. We are, after all, their neighbours upstairs. Like any roommates, the time spent sharing each other’s space eventually leads to acting, dressing, and talking like each other.

Canadian spelling sometimes reminds me of my attitude towards fashion. This season, I like the minimalist trend, but not the smoky eyes. I like heeled lace up boots, but not calf-length skirts. We like “rumour” but not “criticise”. We like “aluminum” but not “catalog”. We’ve learned to make our own rules about it – quietly, of course, so as not to offend anyone.

We’re not British anymore, nor are we American. We’re the little brother who’s come into his own. Funny that it took a trip to the parents’ to see this clearly.

As a final farewell to the carefree season, my friends and I decided to pick up and go to Ireland two weekends ago. As much as I had been familiar with the lyrics of ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’ by U2 and occasionally heard of sporadic riots occurring in cities that seemed very far away, I admit I didn’t know very much about the place. I knew that some people spoke Irish Gaelic, but I ignorantly didn’t expect it to be on road signs in the same way that French and English are in Canada. I knew that they drank a lot of Guinness, but I didn’t know the factory in Dublin produced nearly 83 million hectolitres of it. I knew that relations between the Irish and the British had a history of being bad – but I didn’t know it was, well – that bad.

Our tour guide was a lovely fellow from Galway who worked part-time for the tour company we were with and owned his own tour business on the side. He liked to talk a lot as we drove, the bus struggling to fit down the narrow, winding streets of County Cork, regaling us, in a rambling, repetitive sort of way with stories and facts about the places we were seeing. While his blathering was punctuated with the constant question “d’you know what I mean?” (as common to the Irish as “like” or “you know” would be to a Canadian) they also included nonstop reminders that the English robbed Ireland of everything they’d ever owned.

Well, perhaps England’s were not the kindest series of gestures.  Not only did conflict within the 12th century Irish monarchy cause the Normans to sneak in and invade the country, expelling most of the native Gaelic Irish residents to make room for themselves, but in between beheading his wives, King Henry VIII implemented the “surrender and regrant” policy, allowing Irish landowners to keep their land only if they swore loyalty to him and promised to abide by all of his English customs. And his successors ensured that relations would continue to sour, so heavily that by the Victorian era, penal laws had gone so far as to restrict the Irish from owning any plot larger than about two hectares in size. And of course, what substantial crop could survive in such a small space but the potato? So the potato they ate, until even the vegetable itself turned against them by contracting a plant disease.

If you were the Irish, I reckon you would not have been too pleased with the arrangement either. However, the fighting ancestors of today’s generation were adamant that fairness would be achieved, and eventually it was – to a certain extent. Twenty-nine Irish counties were collectively granted republican status by the 1930s, but seeing as no group of people can ever be in full agreement on an issue, thanks in part to a unionist majority, the remaining ones became what is known today as Northern Ireland: part of the United Kingdom.

As Bono and The Edge made clear to us, some are content to live within this setup – but some aren’t. The repercussions of Ireland’s complex history are still tangible today, and occasionally make the headlines.

One would think that such tensions remain solely in the radical spheres. But it was clear from the situation on the bus between our Galway guide and two of my friends sitting next to me that were born and raised in the UK that that is not the case.

“I can’t take it anymore. I just want to stand up and yell ‘I’M SORRY’!” my friend said to me after yet another series of bitter comments directed at the English.

On our first night in Galway, we all went out for drinks together. Us, the tour guide, his fellow tour guides, and the remainder of the bus had a great time, talking, laughing, clinking our glasses. We joked with him about his bitterness toward the whole situation, and he joked back.

In a strange way, it sort of reminded me (to a much lesser extent) of this situation. Everyone, on a personal level, wants to get along.

Perhaps if Guinness had been available in no man’s land, fighting wouldn’t have resumed the next day.

Winter = [cartoon man holding umbrella over his head]

Spring = [same cartoon man holding umbrella over his head]

Summer = [same guy, same umbrella]

Autumn = [same guy, same umbrella, maybe a few brown leaves whipping him in the face]

But 2009, the year I arrived, turned out to be a year in which the weather was uncharacteristically good. To someone who didn’t know any better, I thought that was normal. Now, however, as I stare out the window at the soggy trees cowering from the relentless wind against a backdrop of grey skies, I realize everyone was right.

August 2010 has had quite the effect on my moods. I find that when I wake up in the mornings, I’m rearing to go upon seeing the sun shining in through my window. An hour later, I’ve suddenly found I’ve had to turn on the light to finish doing my makeup. By breakfast, raindrops have begun to speckle my window. By the time I leave the house – it’s pouring.

But then I emerge from the tube onto street level. All is sunny again. My soggy umbrella drips onto the drying pavement. I board the bus, feeling happy, and arrive at work. I go upstairs to make some tea, head back to my desk, whistling to myself, before I happen to glance outside. It’s clouding over. Before I know it, I no longer want to talk to anyone, I’m shivering by the open window, and my lunchtime plans to pick up a soy latte from Exmouth Market are ruined.

I’ve heard it said that London is an unfriendly city. I’ve also heard it said that it’s one of the friendliest. I do believe this all depends on what time of the day you ask.