Berlin or Sorry About What We Accidentally Said in Your Language

I’ve often gone off by myself to foreign places many times but recently I went to Berlin with company. My friend Niklas, who I’d met more than a half a dozen years before when the two of us were both travelling in Thailand, made the trip something it wouldn't have been had I been alone.

Back when we'd first met he’d invited me to hop on the back of his motorbike (and I spent the remainder of the night pretending I didn’t tear my dress up the back, shuffling along walls so I wouldn’t have to turn my back to him) and we sped off to a guesthouse to watch Carlito’s Way. Later he would show me Lost in Translation, The Omen and Silence of the Lambs, making it his personal vendetta that I have a proper education about movies. And in Berlin he was the same, ensuring that I was that same wide-eyed girl, learning about things that I’d never have come to on my own.

I doubt that without him I’d have ever found the Through the Window Cinema, and certainly not the window one has to crawl through to enter the place. While in what used to be someone’s apartment, we watched dubbed episodes of Star Trek (realizing that our command of German was worse than we thought), seated on old car seats, as the screen took on a progressively hazier quality as the room filled with cigarette smoke.

Nor would I have gone to Jungle Bar—said to be an old hangout of David Bowie’s when he came over from London trying to escape the influx of heroin in a city where it was almost as rampant—where we drank wine until I found the hole in the plaster of ladies washroom, that someone had labeled “glory hole,” truly hilarious.

Without Nik there would have been no one to laugh at the way I misread a sign for healthcare claims as Kranken Kase (or “sick cheese” in German). This later became our name for the courtyard of the building where were staying. Someone had vomited there, and this combined with the smell of the garbage bins on the hot days put us in the habit of taking great gasps of air before leaving and sprinting through the smelly area, me the non-smoker always somehow trailing behind.

Alone, I never would’ve inspected a box of VHS tapes on the sidewalk and come across one entitled Fessel Mich, the title of which in North America is Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Nik and I spent the week whispering the German words at each other and giggling, until we realized that the German translation is actually somewhat more X-rated and we had to look at each other guiltily, wondering who’d overheard us.

I also wouldn’t have a dozen pictures of my boots protruding from the bodies of stuffed seals, or around stair railings or from beneath parked cars. Though my favorite part was not the product, but the actual taking the picture. With Nik directing me to move a bit to the left or the right, with bemused patrons stepping over my legs in surprise. Then I’d have to get up, wander over and weigh in as to whether the shot was quite right. All the while holding the back of yet another torn dress closed as I leaned in closer to the screen.