Tale of the Fishwife

“Yes! Joy, joy, with flying Feet the she-Englishwoman comes! But alas, the generous she-Female is too late: where now is the fated Fishwife? It has ceased from its Sufferings, it has gone to a better Land; all that is left of it for its loved Ones to lament over….” —Mark Twain, from his essay “The Awful German Language.”

As I approach the end of my second year of living in the trendiest city in the universe, I think that it’s damned high-time that I accessorize my omnipresent wooly cap, ever-changing facial hair and vintage sunglasses with a weblog. I am motivated to do this, you see, because just this past weekend the NY Times’ travel magazine did a fair bit of gushing over poor and sexy Berlin.

If you’ve read the article, you’ll no doubt agree that the sentences were all put together into sturdy, admirably readable paragraphs. Of course, if you actually live in Berlin, the article is mostly cute, and it provides for lots of chuckles and some real belly laughs, too. As an example, for anyone who prefers not to read the Times, no English speaker who’s been here for more than a month would deign to actually read the Exberliner. That the NY Times used the Exberliner’s publisher and editor as primary sources for their piece is hilarious for two reasons that I can think of: firstly because most of the Exberliner’s articles read as though they’ve been written by former ESL students, and secondly because it’s pretty obvious that the magazine is just a vehicle for advertising and to get more affluent expats to use the services of their english speaking real estate services, Exberliner Property.

Exberliner Property might be a very good service, I can’t really speak to that. I can say, however, with some confidence, that their magazine is a stinky stinkfest. Every english speaking expat who’s lived in Berlin for a spell knows that the best information about living here is found word-of-mouth or, barring that, on one of the many very good Berlin-based blogs. What the Times and everyone else does get right about Berlin is that there is loads and loads to do here. And if you’re a teetotal, lots of it can be done without the very, very cheap beer that seems to accompany every event (including the morning commute on the U-Bahn).

I’ll bet that if you’re a burgeoning hipster living in Bed-Stuy or a retired hipster living in the lilly-white neighborhoods of Connecticut, living in Berlin might seem pretty romantic. It is. Sometimes.

That’s where this blog comes in. As I mentioned above, there are already numerous blogs documenting this most unbelievably cool and hip city, so really, this place will be my little diary—an electronic journal used to document all of the fabulously trendy moments that come with living in the hippest city this earth has known since New York City in the 1980s.

For now, though, I’ve got to jet. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment, you see. It’s in the very unhip, although exceedingly affluent neighborhood of Wilmersdorf (there’s hardly any graffiti on the buildings over there!). Thankfully, because I’m married to a wonderfully edgy woman, who also happens to be an EU citizen, I pay very little to see a doctor here. When I lived in New York, working ever so hard and all of the time, it used to kill me to see my dollars get whittled away from my pay check just so that I could visit my HMO doctor for our little 2 1/2 minute consultations every time I had the sniffles. Of course, my pay checks were much more regular and much larger than they are now, but I was willing to give that up when Gotham became so uncool.

Oh, before I close, I just want to give my friends and neighbors who don’t live in this city an idea of exactly how hip the doctors are here. The first question they ask (sometimes in English, sometimes auf Deutsch) when you visit them is, “What does your shit look like?” And they don’t even laugh when they ask it! How fucking cool is that?