Walking around

The weather has been so hit-or-miss since I’ve gotten here.  I think we’ve had a 5-10 minute crazy heavy downpour almost everyday.  I left my apartment right after it stopped raining on Thursday night around 8:10 to go get some more medicinal tea (they have tea for almost every problem you could imagine: I no longer have a sore throat, so I thought I should switch out the Hals-Tee for some Husten (cough)-Tee since it worked so well).  I had planned on walking a few blocks to go grocery shopping at REWE, which is a fairly nice supermarket in the Kultur Brauerei (a huge former brewery that now holds restaurants, nightclubs, and also this grocery store), but as I left Rossmann’s pharmacy the Ersatzverkehr Bus (replacing the tram, whose tracks are under renovation momentarily) pulled up, so I hopped on and went to PLUS instead, which is a dirt cheap grocery store in the basement of a shopping mall.  And while there I must have pissed off at least 20 people, because I am terrible at shopping, especially in stores in Germany that I don’t go to on a regular basis, because I don’t know where all of the items are and the aisles are only wide enough for one cart to go down.  And of course I turned around several times, because once I got to the aisle with sauces (I wanted to make turkey schnitzel in a pepper cream sauce), I realized I had 600g of turkey, when I only needed 400g, so then I had to get twice as much cream.  Then I realized my apartment didn’t actually have a pan to put in the oven, so I circled around the store for the 100^th time and returned the turkey, got ground beef/pork instead, returned the cream, then got the package of spices to make bouletten (flat meatballs).  Oh, and I think in between those two events I got all of the ingredients for chili, but realized the package only called for 200 g of ground meat.  And then when I got to the register, the cashier was yelling at the guy ahead of me because he was trying to only pay for one beer even though he had two of them. 

When I was walking back from the subway stop, I realized how it was finally sunny, so I put away my groceries quickly, grabbed my camera, and went walking up my street and around the neighborhood.  I saw some pretty funny things during my stroll, including a potato sitting on the street, a sign on a bridal store saying “Will exchange wedding gown for an 3-room apartment within a 10 minute bike ride of this shop”, and some poor guy whose friend wouldn’t buzz him into the apartment building, who was calling him a “blöde Kuh” (stupid cow—it’s an insult) to no avail.  So here are some pictures from that walk (the first one was from a few days ago at Alexanderplatz).

How cool is it to purchase strawberries from a giant strawberry inside of the subway station?  I wasn’t there when it was open, unfortunately, but I bought my strawberries a few days ago from a similar giant strawberry outside of the Schönhauser Allee Arkaden when I was grocery shopping at PLUS. 

The middle apartment building (the one without the balconies) is mine.

This sculpture on Helmholzplazt reminds me of the weird red spinning thing at Porter Square that I am always afraid is going to fall down on me.

Homage to my mother—a sticker book for kids about not wanting to go to the hairdresser to have a haircut.  With over 100 stickers!!!

On the way back to Lychenerstrasse I crossed over Helmholzplazt again and literally stopped to smell the roses.  Berlin has some really beautiful parks—hopefully I get to Tiergarten again when it isn’t about to thunder.