Before I start, Mum and anyone else interested in the preservation of the English language, you must watch "Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Carro and Robert Gottlieb."
I am awake in a strange place called Berlin, which would have taken me 3,600 hours to get to if I had walked, but I did it in 30 hours, including stopovers. I made three sets of friends on my journey by asking random people where they were going on stopovers and then annoyingly attaching myself to them, as I have a fear of getting lost. They didn’t quite take my hand but suffered me because I turned on the charm and was so interested in every word they said.
My first victim was Paul Irvine, who made the mistake of announcing to all of us as we went through security in Adelaide that he does this every 6 weeks. That was the opening line I needed. "Ooh," I said, "how interesting..." He was very good-looking, except he was wearing those ghastly grey track pants that old men wear when escaping from rest homes. He had thick grey hair, which always helps older men look good unless they dye it, and very twinkly eyes, which would have been too small except he was a master at twinkling them by using a routine of different twitches.
Every six weeks, my best friend Paul flies to Barcelona to be the chief engineer on a boat that is worth half a billion dollars and has a full-time staff of 35. Paul likes his boss, who spends most of his time playing cards and roulette in the casino on his boat, where there is a large whiskey bottle in the middle of the lazy Susan. Paul has never seen anyone use any of the six Jacuzzis, swimming pool, jet skis, etc. Paul is a seafarer and has spent his life at sea but is retiring at 58, despite there still being such a lot of sea to see. He's sold his villa in Mount Eden and is going to live in Kerikeri with his Dutch wife and two children who are young, as he started late after wasting his time on an Italian girl who wouldn't leave her mother to come to NZ despite how much he twinkled his eyes.
After Paul has delivered me safely to my gate 89, I sit on a smooth internal rock and chat with Thomas. He is very large and white and takes up much more of his rock than I do, and his hair is in a man bun and misses being ginger because it looks like it had just the extra couple of minutes in the toaster. Thomas tells me there are two centers in Berlin, the East and the West, and all the different suburbs have different flavors, and what makes Berlin so wonderful is the public transport system, which is what my Polish friend Gosia said as I tried to lift weights in my old life. I'm putting the first verse of the poem here as in many ways it applies to Berlin too.
To Gosia from Brzozow
Gosia says her country is shaped like a heart
And from Poland she never will part
for her heart it’s still beats in the market square,
to the tune of a people whose history she shares
A history so sad it would be easy to cry
but to cry would not honour those who have died
Those who live on, they try to be gay, though most of the year the skies are so grey,
To lighten the dark, they make themselves bright; high heels, pretty dresses just a delight
like the buses and trams that go round and around making her city a merry go round
And the people they share eyes that are clear eyes that see into your soul so they hear
The truth of your words,
for time they have not
to listen to pleasantries; a whole lot of rot
"Public transport systems are the arteries that make cities breathe and live; otherwise, you have chaos like in Ho Chi Minh City," Thomas says during our 5-minute lesson on the rocks in Doha airport. He tells me that German children officially start learning English at 8, but his daughter, who is 4 and a half, only wants to speak English as her favorite program is My Little Pony, and she prefers it in English.
He says the French are still mean to the Germans because 80 years ago, one person went a bit crazy. He says if he goes to France, the French make him speak French, which he can't. Thomas and his partner are separated but get on much better without the pressure of living together, and I tell him he's lucky his wife isn't a narcissist like Charley's wife. He doesn't know what a narcissist is, so I say someone who puts herself before her children. I tell him my son's wife sees her girls like the little Japanese spitz she trails around; accoutrements to enhance her. He looks sad in a large German way, which involves hanging his very heavy head and not looking up for a moment.
The more shit that happens, the more humor comes to the rescue, we agree while sitting on the rocks. He sees me write and asks me to send my writing to him, so here's a heads up, Thomas: sitting on a rock with you, looking out over the airport of sand in Doha, was a moment I will put in the box of tender moments to reread when I only have enough time left to run through the highlights of my life.
My next victims are Pater and Maliah. They are real Germans. Maliah is tall and very fine and wears those pukey brown pants that Canterbury farmers wear when going to town. She has golden olive skin, though I have yet to meet a golden olive. Her eyes are green, which she accentuates by wearing a sweatshirt of the exact same green, and she has a fine, aka thin, blonde ponytail. She does all the talking while her dad, dressed in a plaid blue shirt with a white singlet under it, scowls in that Germanic way that tries to look manly, interesting, and cool.
Peter and his wife decided NZ was the place to be 25 years ago, so they uplifted their two girls from Germany when they were 8. Maliah says NZ is very boring, and as soon as she could, she left to live in Cyprus. Her sister went to Berlin, her father to Fiji to become a tiler, and her mother to Launceston in Tasmania to be a professor. Maliah says Tasmania is impossibly more boring than NZ. I am going to have a drink with Maliah tomorrow in Alexanderplatz square. She is going to show me spring in Berlin, which she says is quite unlike spring in NZ. I don't know if Peter, her dad, will come as he is quite grumpy and has a lot of downy white hair down the back of his neck.
The three of us traveled in a taxi together, and when they had gotten out of the taxi, the driver pushed his translator and said to me, 'You have beautiful eyes,' and took a picture of me. I am unsure if this habit is German or Turkish, but I'm sure if I had been a Turkish woman, he would have stared straight ahead. He gives me his card in case I need a lift to the airport, but I wonder if this is a delicate way of offering a sad middle-aged woman some Turkish delight. I wave shyly but determinedly to show I am a strong, independent woman with blogs to write and French to learn!
The hotel is modest and friendly and looks like our old dental clinic in Wellington. The bell old man says the hotel can never be pulled down. I can't see why for the life of me, but maybe they do try to save what's left.
The little Chinese girl in reception spouted German at me with such deep guttural purrs I thought she was growling at me. It is impossible to know anyone's nationality here as everyone seems to jump around the chessboard of Europe as we do Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. The chessboard these people play on is a smorgasbord of the true wonders of what creative humans are up to. The offerings are so different on every square of every country, and the people I see around me put it all together like an exotic dish with spices or a tiara with sparkling jewels made from the traditions of artisans whose creations carry the dust of hundreds of years of learning who you are, like Bella knowing she's born to retrieve ducks.
Languages, mannerisms, scarves, boots, belts, bags, hats, coats long and short, woolly and shiny, jewelry, tousled hair, waistcoats, pants with big pockets, and as blousy as hot air balloons, backpacks with ribbons on them are all colored brightly. If you were to look up to the sky, you might think millions of angel children were spilling their paints over Berlin on their way to school.
The current trend is maxi-length skirts with bobby socks over stockings and white trainers or old-fashioned school shoes with straps. Crop tops are everywhere, but not on me! People seem to be talking to each other all the time in huddles about important things or laughing. They are not on their phones; they are too busy living. They are like nests of chirping birds on all the streets. Clumps of cyclists like partridges on wheels cruise about without helmets and in ordinary clothes, not special clothes that make them look like blowflies. Berlin is like a great cake that has been baking for thousands of years and is still baking, and everyone, for just a moment in time, has a turn to add the tiniest pinch of je ne sais quoi to make it sweeter or more sour. I eat some delicious chicken drumsticks, spinach with sauerkraut, kumara chips with fig, and a glass of red wine. There are no cooked greens on the menu, only deep-fried cauliflower. Don't tell Boydie.
I am going to bed now. Tomorrow, I am going to try to dye the grey clump in my hair and fix the wheel of my bag, which broke off. I can't see myself limping on the train to France with a three-wheeled heavy bag full of heavy wooden breadboards (what was I thinking?). I feel like a baby who has just been born but already has important problems.
Enjoy the photos! xx
Thomas, the man on the rock in Doha.

Peter and Maliah.
Mr. Turkish Delight

Assortment of snaps from Berlin:
Hi Sweetie what a wonderful blog that let us really understand what you are up to - using your extreme charm to fully discover the potential of the interesting life around you. Marvellous. I remember always getting quite a strong sense of the happiness of the people in a city by just watching how much they laughed and interacted. The contrast between people on the tube in London who always seemed to be having a high old time with people on the tube in Japan was stark - they did not look up once. I hope you get your grey hair tuft dyed and your bad wheel fixed - I don't know which is worse - at least you…