When you have lived in a place for a very long time and have seen everything there is to see, there is still something that makes going to town an interesting experience.
I have recently been to Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, which is also known as Kochstraße. It used to be a historical place during the cold war. The things that remind of that time today are some tourist attractions and the one or the other museum. The rest is totally concentrated on marketing and tourism. A Starbucks here and a Thai restaurant there and just because we want our tourists to spend more and more money for the good of our economy, we open up a bunch of bakeries with overpriced pastry.
Besides the tourist money spending magnets there are also some publishing houses and radio stations. But it is not just the tourists and business people that you can find here. There are also the homeless people. They stand in corners on the streets, maybe near the next ALDI market and sell the Motz or Strassenfeger magazine, which is a magazine made by the homeless people of Berlin. Most of the time they get on the underground trains and offer the magazine to the people in the wagons or they just ask for a small donation, while others make music or sing instead of trying to really sell things. This helpless situation can overcome pretty much everyone. Just recently have I seen a young man selling the magazine. He seemed to be not much older than me.
Today on the street, a young, homeless lady came towards me smiling, giving me a rose. I smiled back and decided to be nice, giving her some coins. I was on my way to the Rose Garden which is an area in the Humboldthain Park with dozens of flowerbeds with roses in them.
On my way to one of the benches, I saw a young woman in a beautiful purple dress, posing for her photographer. I sat down and watched her as she followed the photographer’s instructions between the red and pink roses.
On my way home in a train wagon, two people happened to take a seat in front of me. The woman spoke fluent Spanish while the man seemed to be German but replied to her in the same language she spoke. Here again came the advantage of being a polyglot that I have been posting about before.
The man was trying to translate a joke from German into Spanish as we were passing byBellevue station, as the joke must have had something to do with Bellevue. She just shook her head and said that this joke was pretty bad. The man explained that it was pretty difficult to translate a joke from German into another language, before she began to explain the different types of jokes or chistes there are in Spanish.
Even though I have been living in Berlin for more than ten years, I still find a reason why I should go to town, sit on a train of read in a park. Monuments stay the same but things people do are different and interesting to watch every time anew.
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