Phonsavan and the Plain of Jars: On the Road from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng

 

The sloping river banks and colonial French architecture of Luang Prabang were tugging at our hearts as we bumped out of the city in the direction of the Phonsavan. Our expectation of the next destination looked a lot less appealing than where we had been reclining for the last week and even the name sounded leaden in comparison to the chirruping ‘Luang Prabang’. We had been told vehemently however that Phonsavan and the ancient stone ‘jars’ spread across the Xieng Khourang plateau were a ‘must-see’. Also, considering that our destination after that was to be Vang Vieng - the river side town saturated with hostels, booze and cushioned bars supporting drowsy backpackers watching Family Guy and eating chicken burgers – we felt we ought to get some culture out the way first.

Smoking languidly at an empty bus stop past the scheduled departure time, we would have missed our coach if it hadn’t been for the frantic cry we heard behind us: 'Phonsavan! That one there!' We turned to see three girls, red-faced and strapped to backpacks, racing across the station. We grabbed our bags and joined their rush towards a coach with the words Phonsavan scrawled faintly on a lined-piece of A4 stuck to the windscreen.

We found seats at the back of the coach next to a French couple and their child, all with loose cotton clothing covering rich, mahogany skin. The woman had thick blonde hair that hung free over her shoulders, as did her daughter, who was laying, wriggling across their laps with her legs splayed. The man had a large nose, that looked - in the French fashion - more noble than grotesque, below sparkling black eyes and a mat of charcoal hair speckled with grey which descended down his cheeks into a four day beard. As the woman produced a small wicker pouch of sticky rice and began wrapping balls of it up into dried seaweed, the man launched his nose into the face of his daughter, repeatedly intoning in an alarming rumble: ‘Hallo Baby! Hallo Baby!’

One of us followed the example of the red-faced girls in front, pulling the curtain to and trying to fall asleep, while us other two craned our necks passed the feasting French too look at the landscape beyond. Our coach was soon ascending into the mountain range. The road we were taking was known to be particularly stomach-churning but the world outside was worth any sickness. Great clefts of mountain rose up around us draped in the thick, green forest: awesome towers of foliage clumped together in a range that peaked and loomed all about us, our broken road clinging to the edge. We were heading South East to the province of Xieng Khouang; an eight hour journey to Phonsavan, the capital of the region. A few hours into the journey we were granted a better view of the swooping valleys bellow us. We stopped at the Lao answer to services: a few huts selling stale biscuits and miniatures of the national flag. Stepping stiff-legged off the coach amongst this ramshackle little hamlet, I wondered whether the trucks laying tarmac and globalisation had arrived unwelcome, thundering through what had been a quiet and content little village. Or whether alternatively, the arrival of the trucks had been celebrated, the freshly lain tarmac offering an easier way of life for industrious mountain dwellers.

By chance we found ourselves sitting next to our French neighbours on a log looking over the valley. We had bought some biscuits that didn’t crumble when bitten so much as dissolve as soon as they made contact with your tongue. The little French girl, sucking on the remains of a slice of papaya, looked up at our snacks with covetous eyes: we in turn looked morosely at our cookies and enviously at the remains of her fruit.

As we came down from the pine tree mountains and entered Xieng Khouang, a landscape of bare fields stretched out from the coach. The province is dominated by cattle rearing, and the Hmong cowboys in their flamboyant purple hats are supposedly a common site racing across the meadows, and as dusk rose we scanned the horizon avidly hoping to catch sight of one.

Darkness came before a sighting however, and when we arrived at what we thought was a second round of services our shrunken and cheery conductor informed us that we were in Phonsavan. We were last out of the coach and by the time we had retrieved our bags all of our fellow travellers had dispersed into the night. The town was quiet and looked empty. The main strip extended far into the distant darkness at both ends, lined by balconied buildings with advertisement signs protruding from them. The conductor pointed us down a perpendicular road from this central strip and soon we saw a yellow signed emblazoned with the words GUEST HOUSE. Out of this little building light streamed onto two white plastic tables with chairs about them, upon two of which two Laoation women sat: one young, one old.

‘Sabeidi’ we chorused and the young one sprung up and took us into the building, smiling her brilliant Laoation smile that balled her cheeks and squidged her eyes into little slits. She presented us to our room: about the size of a double bed, and taken up almost entirely by a queen sized mattress which was stained and a little damp to the touch. The room cost a dollar a night however and the novelty of this inspired a certain thrill and eagerness within all of us to stay there. While two of us struggled with mosquito nets a third went off to find the toilet, and returned, slightly ashened faced, and told us he could hold it.

Leaving the nets in a tangled mass on the bed, to stretch our legs we wandered further down the dry road we had come up on. There were less and less buildings as we went on and soon we were standing between two expanses of darkness, which we imagined must be fields in the daylight. With the glare of a phone one of us rolled a joint and sitting in the ditch we smoked this, remarking a few times how quiet it was. We then returned to the hostel and had a supper of Beer Lao (a wonderful beer, disappointingly locally brewed by Carlsberg) and Orios. We had a few course of this, tripling our trifling bill, and eventually went to bed merry and content.

After a mug of thick Laoasian coffee for breakfast we headed to where we were to catch out mini bus out to the Plain of Jars. This is an area of the Xieng Khourang plateau peppered with hundreds of cylinder shaped rocks with their middle carved out, estimated to be dated back to the Iron Age (500 BC – AD 500.) The jars vary in size, ranging from 1 to 3 meters; different types of stone has been used, and all but one are utterly without markings. The Jars are situated in almost 100 clusters, some of these with as many as 400 jars, others with just one solitary jar.

During the Vietnam War, between 1964 and 1973, Laos - and in particular the Xieng Khourang plateau - was subjected to intense bombing from US planes subsequently referred to as the Secret War; an attempt to break the suspected the traffic of arms heading towards Vietnam along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Over 9 years the US dropped more than two million tons of ordnance, thus when visiting the jars you are also visiting the most bombed part of the planet per capita in the history of the world. The land is plagued with craters carved out of the land like the work of a vicious, giant ice cream scooper. An estimated 80 million of the American bombs failed to explode and therefore UXOs (unexploded objects) have remained a mortal threat to the people of the region ever since. When visiting the plain you often have to walk along narrow fenced paths to keep you off un-cleared land.

The Vietnam War – referred to as the American War in Vietnam – left a deadly and lingering hangover in Laos, long since the protestors packed up the placards in Washington Square and returned home. There are tens of casualties every year, almost exclusively locals, and a large amount of children. The U.S. Government spent nearly 17 million dollars every single day to bomb Laos. Since the end of the bombing, it has paid on average 2.7 million a year to purge the place of its deficient yet deadly arsenal, snuggly embedded in Laoasian soil.

As one might look at the lumpy, muddy ground of the plain, and feel the thrill of imagining the slumbering potential carnage that lies under it - like Sartre and his rickety bridge across the canyon, walking alongside the paths I habitually felt the tugging urge to leap over the fence and run hysterically across the mine field; naturally, I didn’t - so when inspecting the jars, the only real interest we felt was in finding out what the hell they were. The clusters we wandered about weren’t particularly impressive themselves. Queerly placed prehistoric rocks, do not a Stone Henge make. Objectively, they are neither beautiful nor remarkable. Some intact, some bent, some full and proud, some large, some small. Some you can sit in like a throne. The amount of them is impressive to think about, but they don’t provoke any reaction in your gut. What is interesting, is thinking about who went to the effort of arranging them there in the first place, and why.

And no one really knows.

Research in the 1930s found that the jars related the stones to prehistoric burial practices, this theory was later supported by the discovery of human remains, burials good and various ceramics around the jars. Archaeological data collected during UXO clearance in 2004–2005 and again in 2007 claims that the stone jars initially may have been used to distil the dead bodies, following in the form of traditional south-east Asian royal mortuary practices. In contemporary funerary practices connected to Thai, Cambodian and Laotian aristocracy, during the early stages of the funeral rites the corpse is placed into an urn, marking the transformation of the deceased from an earthly to a spiritual state. The idea is that those from the higher tiers of society are cremated so to release their soul on its journey to heaven, while the souls of the poor are condemned to remain on earth.

A yet more exciting explanation has been provided by some of the locals, who tell of a great battle that was once waged on the plain by two rival clans of giants. The jars were arranged for the subsequent feast of the victorious King Khun Cheung, to be used as glasses for the celebratory drinking of lua hai, Laotion rice wine.

 These innately dull jars, like the bomb crater that could be mistaken for bunkers on an out of use golf course, are imbued with mystery from the context and uncertainty that surround them. Giants on the plains and planes in the sky have given this largely unimpressive stretch of land an interest and significance to tourists; foreign wars and improbable myths. While backpackers and groups of Japanese tourists take pictures and use some of the more humble looking jars and rubbish bins, geo-political battles continue to rage, as mining companies from China and the States clammer to scour the Lao earth once more.

We thought little of this all as we ate our supper of fried pork and noodles that night. When we had finished we wandered down the main strip of the town. With the detached buildings and stretching flat landscape beyond, the centre of Phonsavon feels like the setting for a shoot-out in a Western. The road seemed to go on forever as the houses got smaller, and less like houses, and the space between each one grew. We walked, further and further, passed empty department stores with grinning clownish mannequins, gas stations, receiving less friendly and more quizzical looking locals, cigarettes in mouths, dirty and hot, working, sitting, chatting. Dogs barked at us in barns, and if we had continued to walk we would have come to the plains, the bomb sites, and eventually the mountains.

But we turned back. The next day we would be in Vang Vieng, and as we strolled back to the hostel for more Beer Lao and Orios, we weren’t sorry to leave Phonsavan, but enthused about rubber tubes, zip-wires and getting shit-faced on buckets of iced whiskey.

 

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014

The Sound of Music and Rain in Salzburg

When the airport of a city or town is named after a local but deceased celebrity, upon arrival in said city one can expect a challenge in avoiding the pasthumous paraphernalia and celebration of the eponymous home-grown hero.

For example, touching down at Liverpool’s John Lennon airport, one can expect to be inundated in the city center with the numerous seedy joints with by-lines claiming to be “John’s favorite bar,” hotels with names such as “Hard Day’s Night,” and promoters lingering on each street corner with the intention of luring hapless tourists on trips to Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields.

I expected similar scenes upon arrival at Salzburg’s W. A. Mozart Airport ...

Read the full article on The Expeditioner.

Bertie Digby Alexander
Berlin 2014

Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz

With its six limestone pillars, tall, narrow windows and somewhat loomy facade overlooking a section of green lawn, Berlin’s Volksbühne manages to be something of an eye-catcher on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, a square – or rather, a triangle in simple geometric terms – that practically vibrates with history and architecture ...

Please follow this link for the full article. 

Ich bin Fremd hier #25

On occasion, when riding the U or S Bahn on the commute, something takes me back to my state of mind that I occupied when I first came to the city, both those two holiday weekends and in those first few weeks living in hostels and searching for work. It might be when I struggle with the handle bars that open the doors or the old fashioned carriages or when I go to a station that I have rarely been to since those early days. But more often than not, it comes upon me for no discernible reason: it is like my mind has just slipped for a second, forgotten where we are, and defaulted back to life before in Great Britain. Back to a time when I lived in my own country and Berlin was utterly strange to me.

Ich bin Fremd hier.

A year on from writing those words, I sometimes wonder now how much of a stranger I still am in Berlin. How strange is Berlin to me now, now that I call it home, and have done for the last year? This question often proves too tricky, and so I instead consider how much I dislike the title. I wince when anyone reads it in my presence, or worse yet, repeats it back to me. I was drawn to the word ‘Fremd’, as much I am to the French one ‘etranger’, although not because of the English translation of either, but because what other connotations arise in the mind of an English speaker upon hearing them. I like the title Ich bin Fremd hier for that intentional effect. I like it also for the one I brought about unintentionally. The words that refer to me in that phrase are capitalised, while Berlin isn’t mentioned at all. The idea of ‘me in Berlin’ was – and most likely still is – more interesting to me than Berlin itself. I likewise cringe when I think of my ideas of sending it to ExBerliner, thinking they would think themselves in need of the chronicles of a young expat who thinks he can write and believes himself to be as intriguing as the city he has ended up in.

I find it hard to put a value on these words. Do any readers care about the little experiences of one First World immigrant?

The first four months of my time in Berlin expand upon reflection whereas the following nine seem to stretch thin over the streets of Marzahn, warm walks along Hermannstraße and slow hours at the office. This should not be put down to me acclimatizing to a city that drinks beer like coffee and smokes pot like Marlboro Lights. Instead, as often is the way, I was thrown against – and throwing myself against – foreign, bold characters and unknown, vibrant places on a daily basis. I didn’t have the choice off where I wanted to go and who I wanted to spend time with. I didn’t have the choice to be comfortable. And uncomfortable always makes better stories; and better stories loom larger in the memory than pleasant hours.

This is not to say that oscillation and variety isn’t still part of my life in Berlin. I am spending time with new people, in new places, and the next few months contain as much potential for surprise as those first four. But I am also spending many more hours on the same street corners, drinking the same beers and opting for conversation with friends above dancing with strangers. There are more pleasant hours, and less great stories.

I am glad to say that life still is exciting however, and fears that I might as well be in Birmingham as Berlin - those fears that swept on me when riding the S7 late in the evening last winter - have dissipated for the most part. The twists and turns of my life I see in terms of a Bildungsroman strung out over 600 pages, as opposed to a Dan Brown thriller. The peaks, troughs and vacillation will take form upon reflection, and often may go unnoticed in the present. It is from the vantage point of the future, where compression and consolidation is possible, that the changing shape of days can become defined, and meaning can be placed upon them. (I mean, how long was David Copperfield at Salem House with Mr Creakle, and how many pages does that period of his life occupy in the novel?)

Looking at my own life in this way may seem largely egotistical. It mostly likely is - not much has changed since I came up with the title for this series of posts. And yet it also helps to view one’s life not as the preliminary to something - not ‘pre-drinks’, as I once sagely described the university years to a friend - but as the thing itself, as the adventure proper. It is just as likely that you have already past the greatest thing in your life, as it is that it is waiting for you around the corner. Indeed, it is possible that you are currently going through it. Nostalgia, triumphant hopes, daily routine … in these terms we see our life, mostly. The golden days and the realisation of triumphant dreams settle into mundane necessities and frustrations.

I have come to Berlin. That was my dream.

But I grumble that Lidl is closed and that I have to work tomorrow.

I have come to Berlin.

Vodafone are still being a pain, as well.

But I came to Berlin … I recently passed the one year mark, and I am not going anywhere. This isn’t a thing now. This is life. 

Yet only on occasion am I buoyed up by the wonder of that fact. The wonder of my situation. This is just life now.

But there is no ‘just’ about it. I live in Berlin! This is it. This is as real as life is ever going to get. There is nothing else. And it is pretty cool here.

But, the louder voice says, the necessities and frustrations are little different from those I would have had in London. Perhaps this is true. Perhaps they are little different from those I would have had in Buenos Aries, or Johannesburg, or Yangon. And perhaps most of us are doomed not to be able to see beyond these for the most part. There are a lot of people who come to Berlin who are unsatisfied. They expected to find what they were searching for here, be smacked around the head with it, and live with the euphoria of having found it every day. But what they are seeking here is more elusive than it was at home. At least at home it had a name and they could see a fuzzy picture of it. Here it hides around every corner, ducking every swoop of the torch. All the drugs, sex and art can’t quite make up for its absence. All of that and more cannot fill the hole.

‘We are all slaves, all we can decide is what we are enslaved by,’ someone once said. ‘We are all prisoners, but some of us have a window,’ another has said. How unfulfilled are half the people that smile? How disappointed? How underwhelmed? How large would it be, if you collected together all those holes inside one carriage on the U1?

In the early days, I felt my own hole most keenly when on the train passing the phallic tower at Ostkreuz, and at Schlesisches Tor when looking at the mural of the man with a suit but no face. But I was given guidance on how to fill it. One morning on the train, taking my nose out of my book of German poetry I was struggling with, I looked up and saw further down the carriage a child kneeling on the seats that lines the sides, looking out of the window, nose almost touching the glass, little hands gripping the sill. Pointing and staring and grabbing its mother to make sure she saw it before the train passed on.

This is it. This is what life is. And it is awaiting our engagement, now. We need to write our lives with the same vim as we read them. And we need to remember that writing them is more important than reading them. We need to keep our focus upon the page we stand on, however heavy our eyes are.

It is not terminal to be a faceless suit commuting to work. But neglecting to look out the window is criminal.

Bertie Digby Alexander

   

Ich bin Fremd hier #24

December 31st was bright and clear and I was happy to be out walking through the city putting up posters for the language school. Red was making arrangements for a party in our flat that weekend, and I had returned to the Hauptstadt after my gander in the countryside with a renewed sense of vigour, determination and optimism, that naturally fell into place comfortably next to the approaching New Year. It was already a day for new starts, I thought, a day for lists and intentions, and in my head I sketched out my hopes for the year ahead, planned down to the month.   

In honour of this spirit and the beauty of the city that day, I came to an abrupt halt on Oranienstraße and ordered a coffee at a good café on the corner there. This café is made in a style that is found throughout Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain and Neukölln, and particularly frequently on Oranienstraße. Oversized antique furniture, a lot of wooden tables, walls either bare and flaking or sprayed with big eyed murals, loud and queer and shouting things such as ‘KABAAAM!’ and ‘Blue Coffee Club, Berlin.’ Shabby-chic, scribbly, lots of magazines and newspapers, mismatched chairs. Hipster Mummies and wrinkled vagrants and dreadlocked cyclists cluster and perch and recline on stools that are too comfortable to be called a box, but smooth enough to be seen sold for a small fortune at a Flohmarkt. The staff are surly, speaking quick German or patronising English, and are sure that there life and work is better than yours. These places are cheap, with good food and serious coffee.

I sat outside and had a cigarette with my coffee.

I then walked down passed Görli and then over the bridge at Schlesisches Tor. A girl from Liverpool had got in touch with me that day, telling me that she was moving to Berlin that day. She had been part of the Easy JetSet coming to Berlin for a while now. She had been to the popup raves and the warehouses and had interrogated me over LinkedIn in regard to which clubs I went to.

A beautiful day to arrive in Berlin.

The city was looking its best. The water glistened a sparkling blue, and the sky was clear and open ahead. It was Berlin at its finest, and coming from the cows and woods of the hinterlands, I drank the city in with revived vim. On the bridge I paused in one of the pockets that stick out from the pavement on the side facing Mitte. It is the view from this little spot here that makes the first segment of the U1 such a delight to ride. Rumbling along in the train, coming out of Warscahuerstraße you can look left over to Treptow and the two giant men wrestling in the water, and the terrace where I had smoked cigars at the office Christmas party. Looking right, as I was no, you get the stretch of the Spree leading into the heart of the city and the brilliant Fernsehturm shimmering like the river in the light. Looking down and right you have East Side Gallery (a stretch of remaining Wall covered in murals and graffiti – shouty, messy and disappointing up close, but nice enough from the tracks) stretching out along the bank, and to the left the little coven of willows that dropped down to the water. Coming out of a club down there before, I had looked out in the misty night and watched the orange trains roll over the red brick bridge, their lights reflected in the water, as beautiful a view as that which they offered.

I dithered that afternoon, moseying about the city, putting up a flyer now and then, and it was until I was on the S7 back to Mehrower Allee that I realised it was actually quite late, and there supermarkets in Marzahn were likely to be closed. I contemplated a New Year’s Eve drinking nothing but Liquor.

It was already dark when I got off the train and the supermarkets were indeed closed. Boys were clustering about street corners and over the ‘meadow’ where I had once see the rabbits dancing, lighting fireworks, sending them into the air or throwing them at the ground to make no more than a sharp bang. Packaging and burnt out remains of fireworks were scattered about the place and over the Platenbuaen the crack and bang and occasional whoosh of fireworks sounded.

Thankfully the little shop just a three minute walk from the front door to our building was still open and I bought some beer there. The family that worked here and the peroxide chuby who worked at one of the sterile bakeries nearby where the friendliest people I met in Berlin, and the old chap at this shop had even once spoken to me in English, straight off, which elsewhere in berlin would have irritated me.

Red had spent the day brushing, scrubbing and hoovering the flat. It now shone like a child fresh out of a hot bath, and Red sat languidly smoking in an arm chair, gazing at me with her green eyes and demanding praise. She looked as beautiful as the flat, which she had managed to transform from a stick scrap yard to something that was now fit to host a party. God knows what she had done with the piles of junk that usually sat about the place. The rabbits were in her bedroom.

‘Ha? So? Good, ja? And you haven’t helped me at all! Now you must sit with me and we play 

drinking games until everybody arrives. Until somebody arrives.

Once I had showered we started playing a drinking game, the rules to which Red kept changing in her favour as we went along, leading to me feeling a little tipsy when the first guests arrived.

I was the only non-German there and most of the guests all knew each other. There were probably about 30 people there. People brought loads of food and I met up with eating and drinking and smoking furiously whenever I found myself outside a conversation. Suitably lubed up with alcohol. It seemed like people began speaking to me in and either English of German I began to have a lot of fun.

At one drinking game I remembered drinking ouzo from the bottle, and playing up to the crowd and repeatedly loosing. I kept face, I believe, by drinking the spirit without flinching, while the others spluttered as soon as it touched their lips.

At one point it became firework time and a group of seven or so of us went down to let the first ones off outside the building. Even through the ouzo it was cold. The sound of fireworks cracked and cackled around the city, and the air was thick with drifting smoke. I was handed a firework. I told them that it was my first time as they lit it for me. Just let go when it gets hot, they said. I assumed by ‘it’ they meant my hand. Well my hand didn’t get hot for a few moments, until in a rush of flame it heated fast, the firework roared and tugged itself out of my hand and flew off, upwards but at an wonky angle. There was no letting go involved. I was thrilled by the whole thing, but the others told me that there weren’t enough for me to do another, but maybe later.

At some point, I remember going out on to the balcony back in the flat, looking over the lights of the city, and someone counting down from 10. I do not remember what happened when we got to 1, and how I filled the first few moments of 2014. I was however later outside again, with fireworks again, in the patch of scraggly and that stretched between two clusters of tower blocks. The smoke that came from our fireworks drifted languidly across the grass and about the trees that stood brittle and gnarled about the place. You could not see ten feet in front of you, and when another firework was let off the red and green flashes that lit up the fog was lit a session at Quasar, or some NASA launch. I drifted off into the fog, and turning round saw my fellow revellers, whooping and leaping in the fog. Some hooded and bundles up, others in just a t-shirt and skirt, leaping, and jumping, carolling, and wolf-whistlers. Some held stacks of long fireworks in their hands, other bottles of sekt, I could not identify any of them, they were just black silhouettes, dancing, disappearing in mist and then emerging from it again, as if dancing through a cloud, or drowning in a hour glass.

I tried to call to them, or at least one of them, to come to me so they could see themselves. But none of them heard me and I eventually had to return to them. Someone suggested climbing a tree. I was soon climbing a tree, and then later making my way up to the flat, and then falling into hysterics at the foliage that we soon discovered was clinging to all of us, between our shoulder blades and the small of our backs, and for a long time we clung to the banister of the stairwell and laughed.

Nothing is any clearer after that. My ouzo partner had passed out on the sofa. Someone was being sick in Smokie’s room. I was talking about music with someone and then I was listening to music with someone. I was running out of rizlas but found some more. There was certainly a disagreement about something, and I remember speaking slowly and loudly. I was out of filters, and so began making roaches. I was then out of rizlas again but I was offered straights. Someone was looking at me funny and people were taking the food away. Red was telling me something that I had to remember for the next day. She kissed me on the check, took my lighter and then she went somewhere too.  

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014

Ich bin Fremd hier #23

I had often said to myself that I should find a way to rise above my excuses about a tight budget and simply travel more around Germany. Dresden, Munich, Cologne, Leipzig, Munster … The list of German cities that I wanted to visit was growing each week. ‘I am in Berlin for fuksake, this is what money should be spent on.’

Dreams of weekend excursion around the country remained dreams and it came to pass that I was to first leave Berlin after arriving there almost four months earlier on the 23^rd December, heading towards Oldenburg which was close to Bremen in the North West of the country. In a flurry I packed my things that morning and left Red smoking in a pile of wrapping paper. Once past Alex, the S7 is a beautiful route over the city, in to Charlottenburg which feels like a foreign place, and any trip there for whatever reason has the air of an excursion. It was a bright and clear afternoon, and I was buoyed by the feeling that I was going on holiday. I was to spend a week with my friend and her family. We would stay with her mother who lived with their dear old dog, deaf and mournful looking. Seeing this old dog seemed to be the principal (if not sole) aspect of the trip that my friend was looking forward to. She was still going home though, and being with her, I revelled in the joy of travelling home for Christmas.

Over the next the week I met what appeared the entirety of my friend’s extended family as well teems of her friends from school and charming neighbours. Despite the success with the funny man at the Alexanderplatz Weihanchtmarkt, my German was still very shaky, so there was a lot of smiling on my part, in an attempt to make up for my lack of comprehension. Eventually the mother resorted to her own English. This at first upset me, but it evidently made sense. 

Out in the county I was fired up by the landscape. It felt that I had finally reached the real Germany. Germania, if you will. Not somewhere I had really intended to go, but somewhere that I felt a nagging compulsion visit, seeing as I was living in Berlin. When it rained here I smiled at is as the face of a northern European winter, the elements racing across the land; it was not the damp drudge of spitting rain in the city. And when it was fine, under the clear sky, the fields we drove past, and the cows that grazed in them, joyed my heart as much as the kookiest Berlin bar ever had, or the silkiest cobbles of a Neukölln street.

This was real life. Hedges before my eyes, whereas before there had been screens; children and old people when usually there was hipsters; hearty food and tea, where there had been Sternies and weed.

As there should be at the best Christmases, there was a lot of eating. I am not sure if my friend’s family were putting on a special effort in the name of hospitality, or it was standard practise, but each morning I came down and saw breakfast laid out like a banquet. A wide assortment of cold meats laid out on plates, cheese on wooden board, buns, rolls and croissants piled high in wicker baskets. There were bananas, grapes and slices apple, hardboiled eggs, cereals and little ellies and sauces in dainty little porcelain dishes. Despite my attempts to rise as my friend did, I always found the three of them around the table before me, sitting patiently and smiling. Once I sat down no one held back, so I had no fear of over stepping the mark when I piled up another meat and cheese sandwich on my plate, another couple of Brötchen smeared with cream cheese and blackberry jam, another hard-boiled egg with salt and pepper. Let the Italians keep their espressos, the French their pain-au-chocolate and the English their greasy fry ups – I am for the Nordic way, cold hearty meets, plenty of bread and cup after cup of thick flowing coffee. Indeed, these meals seemed to me more extensive than the meals on either Heiligabend (Christmas Eve) or indeed the two days of Christmas that followed which were sweet but muted affairs.

We ate very well outside my friend’s childhood house too. We had a boozy brunch one day at a friend of hers farmhouse in honour of one of the daughter’s 30th. It was a beautiful old farmhouse with a large kitchen at its centre, with a great wooden table in the centre and other rooms sprouting off from it at each corner. It was a party house and full of people from all ages, passing around plates of hash browns and quiche, quails eggs, muffins, cookies, Scotch pancakes, Mediterranean salad, and all other sorts of delicacies and stomach liners. Champagne was poured out freely, as were mimosa, Irish coffees and glasses of particularly fine bourbon.

After the first plate of food, a full tour of the farm commenced. Smelling the shit and visiting the cows I was pushed to think that I really did need to leave the city. My mother always said that she was a country girl at heart and I thought then that maybe I really was a country boy, most at ease amongst the fields and the mud and views. The idea to work on a farm seemed particularly attractive. To be away from screens and working towards something constructive, something you can see and hold and eat, using the strength of my body and working in accordance with nature. Where bad does not stop play, but does define the rules. To fulfil the hole inside my body I must return to the land, and begin truly responding to the seasons.

It was bitterly outside though, and at one point I slipped on some cow shit and fell to the floor my hand splashing into a mucky puddle. By the time the tour was through I was content to return to the warmth inside and try some of that fine whiskey.

One day we went up to the North Sea, wet and grey and windy and completely captivating. Unfortunately the shack that usually sells fresh Krebb im Brot was closed, but we had a nice time nonetheless, wandering up the grey beach and up on to the bank where the rain spat in our ace and the wind tried to pull us up and throw us down on the stretching, puddled beach. Both that day, and another we drove through Eat Frisia, which sounded like somewhere from the Dark Ages, though looked as beautiful as any Victorian pastoral scene.  The second time we drove through East Frisia her father was driving us to Groningen, in Holland, for the day. One of the clearest days after Christmas her father took us to Groningen, and then walking along the curling alley ways and colourful ships, over the cobbles and under low hanging ceiling and windows, we are Frisch Herring im Brot, and Belgium chips with heavy dollops of mayonnaise, ketchup and mustard. On the way back her father suggested Currywurst. We laughed off the suggestion of more food, and he was happy to let it go until it came out that I had never actually had Currywurst before.

The matter was settled, and in a small little kiosk off the main road, hot and sthick with the smell of grease and curry, I had my first Currywurst. No turkey, no sprouts, no chestnuts, no Quality Streets 

…. But I didn’t begrudge that at all. In fact I didn’t even consider it so much.

God it was nice to be out of Berlin. But eating the curry wurst, I smiled. The warmth I felt for my new home of Berlin, had come about from being away from it, as is so often the case. And the gut warmth I felt for it in my mind, was both a little surprise, and the course for a yet greater overwhelming sense of hope, generosity, and Christmas cheer.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014

Ich bin Fremd hier #22

The air was biting cold but there was still no snow. ‘Oh it will come!’ Red told me as she stirred another vat of Glühwein. ‘You wait and see!’  She refilled my mug and started badgering me again about buying a winter coat. ‘You think this is cold? Na, ja! This is nothing yet. You must buy boots, too.’

Money was tight. I was using socks for gloves and wearing three jumpers in the evening. In the end I did buy a big puffer jacket that was neither as warm nor as nice as the great Chicagan one I had a left at the first hostel. I was spared from having to buy boots when Red unearthed a couple of boxes of one of her old flatmates containing the contents of the wardrobe he had left behind. (His mysterious disappearance is a story worth telling, though, perhaps this is not the place). Within the boxes we found a pair of sturdy leather brown boots. Red asked me for only 20€, telling me they were worth 70€ but she didn’t know how to use eBay so was unlikely to get more for them anywhere else.

‘Na, ja! You are not in London anymore,’ she said, pocketing the note. ‘You are in Berlin now!’

Part of me was wishing that I was in London.

Christmas was coming. Berlin was lit up and I was listening to Christmas songs. Carols and pop-classics that both took me back to my childhood and brought into sharper focus the distance I was from it all.  It didn’t feel like Christmas. The sense of expectation that charges advent was discernible, a current of convention and habit, but it was wayward and uncertain too, and I looked ahead at what promised to be a very different Christmas. Alien, even. 

I hadn’t been able to afford the flight home. Red would be having her mother, sister and brother-in-law around to the flat for the day, and was upset when I told her I would be staying with a friend’s family in a village just outside of Oldenburg. The prospect of not returning to the UK for Christmas hadn’t fazed me at first, but as advent progressed I yearned to be with family, even if only for an evening.  The first Christmas after I left school I had aired the idea of not spending Christmas with my family but instead doing my own thing with friends. My father had sat me down and with gentle firmness told me that he would be greatly upset if I didn’t spend Christmas at his. Christmas was a time for family. That it was his step-father had said to him when he had once opted to forego home one Christmas. ‘He sat me down and told me that home is the place that you are supposed to be at Christmas, and it was an insult to my mother not to return. He gave me a right bollocking.’ He looked hard into his middle distance before returning to me and the table, and hurriedly said, ‘Not that that is what this is, of course.’  

I had resentfully consented then. When the day came around I was happy enough to be there and it was as lovely and uninspiring as always.  

Talking to my father from Berlin, he seemed pretty relaxed that I wouldn’t be coming home this year. ‘A German Christmas! How much fun. You will have a great time!’ Funnily enough, his first Christmas away from home had been spent in Germany, when he roughly the same age that I now was. ‘People club together at Christmas,’ he said. ‘And a different family is made for the day.’

I had spoken to my sister on skype that week. She asked me again how long I was staying in Berlin. I had been taken aback, as I often was when people asked me that question. What had maybe seemed like a trip, an Autumn Adventure when I left had slowly solidified into just life. And the question sounded to me as odd as it would if was to ask her: So, when are leaving London?  

I spoke to my other sister, for who Christmas was still the best thing. That evening she was going with my dad to a village carol service. I knew which one. We had been there a few times together and even once been to the Christmas Day service there. I had always enjoyed carol services. Especially the one at school which marked the end of term. There would be mulled wine and mince pies afterwards, and the parents would have coffee, and we would run about, collecting our things and revelling in our liberty. On that evening, at least, everyone was in a good mood and generous of spirit.  

I remember once my father and I going to a carol service together at my sister’s school when I was still quite young. Both of us were smart as a carrot and though he was jolly, going in and shaking hands with contemporaries of his, he would turn stern and sombre when the first regal chords of the service began. He would sparkle again when it was over and we would hang around the coffee and biscuits while waiting for my sister; slurping, munching, laughing.

Christmas at university was different again, turning childhood pleasures into revelry. We would get a lot of alcohol in and wear stupid hats, everyone cooking their own speciality from home, and then sit around listening to The Darkness’ Christmas Bells and Coldplay’s Christmas Lights. I remember after one party we had, one last cigarette before bed ended up with me staying up another three hours, collapsed on the sofa and finishing of the red wine, and then when that was done, the Baileys. I slouched there chain smoking and watching Christmas YouTube videos: scenes from Love Actually, Abba with a snowman, Another Blooomin’ Christmas … Returning South on the train the next day I didn’t feel so fresh. I listened to Ttchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, looking out the window and waited for the snow to fall.

*

I had looked forward to December in Berlin since I had arrived and it didn’t disappoint. Streets such as the Ku’Damm and Unter dem Lindem were lit up with white fairy lights and streamers, and crystal lights sat frosted about the gnarled arms of the trees. On most streets in the city, somewhere steam would be billowing out from a wooden hut or kiosk offering honey glassed nut clusters and sticky cinnamon buns. Children were excited, naturally, and the streets in general buzzed in celebration of the glowing nugget of warmth that is nestled in the bleak Berlin winter.  

Though not one fairy light lit up the office at work there was a Christmas party fit with a Curry Wurst fountain and open bar. Someone also brought some cigars, and as I sat huddled with my new colleagues on a terrace looking over the Spree, a large glass of red wine in one hand and a cigar in the other, I chuckled to myself, puffing away, and thought, if I am lucky enough to enjoy luxuries such as nights like this, then I really shouldn’t complain about a meagre salary and wearing socks for gloves.

(Having said that, my dearth of socks was becoming a problem. I don’t know whether it is because of the shape of my feet, the chemical compound of their sweat, or the way in which I walk, but socks rarely survive a month in my care before becoming terminally poxed in holes. One day after work, my feet still damp from the morning commute, I couldn’t take it anymore and rushed into a department store at Alex to buy some socks. I was late for my language course and in a flurry when I was unable to find men’s socks anywhere across the three floors. I eventually found a pile of children’s socks and seeing that those were recommended for 2 – 5 years olds looked bigger than my rugby ones at school I flung them on the counter and rapidly paid for them. I thought nothing of the queer, smirking look the young girl at the till gave me until I went to put my new purchases on the next day and found them not to be socks at all but little winter tights. I have no problem remembering the word Stumpenhusen now.)

The language school had gone all out for Christmas with holy and tinsel arching over each door and looping down the corridor. Glen would come into our lessons with a selection of Santa hats for us to where while she took pictures and we smiled enchanting ‘Frohe Weihnachten!’ The dog Maya had been fitted with a bell and Santa hat too and could be heard jingling up and down the corridor throughout the lessons.

I walked through the tacky and plastic Weihnachtenmarkt at Alexanderpaltz each day to get to the language school. One evening, I decided to put off class and explore the market. I had been told to avoid this one as it was the most overpriced and commercial market to be found in Berlin (Alex also hosts a particularly gaudy Oktoberfest in the autumn, amongst the other delights that are to be found there throughout the year.) In all its glitter and tack however, the market charmed me nonetheless. I bought a steaming mug of mulled cider (I balked at the cost of the Glühwein) and wandered contentedly through the stalls, passing a little ice rink that had been set up the centre. I contemplated buying a warm scarf for 10€, decided against it and moved on, instead settling at a large, circular wooden table with eight or nine stools placed about it.

I was soon joined by a scruffy looking German with thinning hair and a ratty, scraggly beard.  He began speaking to me in German. I replied as best I could, and was joyed when I discerned no surprise or anxiety in his eyes when he heard me speak – a look I had come to expect at the moment a native first heard my German after expecting me to be a compatriot. Indeed, piecing together my stuttering grammar, this continued to speak to me in German, though a little slower and a little louder, as naturally as if there was a rollocking going on about me that impeded my comprehension, and nothing more. He spoke fluently and rambunctiously about life in Berlin, and the Christmases he had spent living as a child in Marzahn (of all places!) To my surprise I found myself not only being able to understand what he was saying, but also able to articulate the questions and remarks that naturally came in to my head. So buoyed was I with my first proper German conversation that when he  offered me one of his cigarettes I took it eagerly, casting a side my previous rules to avoid smoking before 7PM, and toasted the occasion with a triumphant billow of smoke up into the night.

This man was jolly, with droopy eyes, and talked to me in a way that made me feel that he viewed him and I to be off the same stock, with the same outlook on life, and could take the same simple pleasure in drinking mulled cider alone at a tacky Christmas Market. I was happy to be of that stock that night. 

I arrived at the class over an hour after the lesson had begun, as had happened a few times before when I had stayed at the office late. Speaking German to a real live German while drinking mulled cider was a better way to spend an hour than either in the office or in German class. Walking down the corridor I saw Glen’s face poke out of the kitchen door, looking a little harassed and ashen, strands of her white blonder hair hanging limply over her brow. Indeed, her whole demeanour was in stark contrast to my merry and rosy humour.

‘Oh Bertie, it is only you. In! In! Come!’ and she gestured for me to join her in the kitchen – which was the size of a small lada – and closed the door. When it was shut she said:

‘Did a Spanish girl come up with you?’

‘A Spanish girl?’

‘Yes. A Spanish girl. Have you see one?’

‘No. Why?’

‘A Spanish girl is coming to speak to me. I cannot see her again.’

I asked what the Spanish girl wanted.

‘A refund!’ she spat out. ‘Naturally! Demanding a refund because she now can’t make the lessons. Alzo! Where are we to find the people to replaces her half way through the month. We won’t, I tell her! How would we do that?’

She glared at me and for one moment I thought that she was actually looking for me to provide her with a solution.

‘She is on her way here now. Again!’

I tried to make the sounds of appropriate sympathy and indignation. ‘I should be gone by now but we were having my grandmothers Kuchen in Room 2.’ I now saw on the side next to us next to the sink were the chunky remains of what looked like a banana and walnut cake next to a jug of Glühwein.

The sound of bells was now heard coming faintly down the corridor. Glen took a sudden intake of breath. She whipped the door open, leaned out and was back in with the door shut in under a second. Held by the scruff of her neck was the fluffy Maya, hatted and belled and seemingly too startled even to yap. Glen dropped her on the floor.

‘She will know I am here if she sees Maya. Have some cake!’

She said the last in the same frantic tone as the rest that permitted no argument. I wanted some cake anyway and so took my coat off and sat my bag down on the floor.

‘I have eaten too much already’, Glen said.

She got a fork for me and I began digging way at the last three chunky slices. She absentmindedly picked up a fork herself and began transporting gloops of creamy banana into her mouth, a doleful expression hanging in her face as she ravaged through one of the slices.  We ate in silence and I waited for her to let me know how long we were to stay in there. When a knock suddenly rapped on the door behind her followed by the turn of its handle and its creaking opening all three of us jumped. In a moment of hysteria Glen sprung in front of the door and slammed it shut again, the third slice of cake falling to the floor.  A startled cry was heard from the other side and then more knocking at the door. With cream smeared over her scarlet lips Glen pushed her back against the door, her arms spread wide about it and her feet anchoring themselves where the walls met the floor. ‘Occupied!’ she screeched releasing a few pieces of banana from her mouth. This was too much for Maya who now began barking excitedly. She eventually noticed the cake and went quite eating that, and soon the knocking stopped too.

Then, as if nothing had happened at all, Glen poured us both some Glühwein and we remained in the kitchen bit longer finishing the cake, Glen and her dog with twin smears of cream around their mouth. Neither of us mentioned my class going on next door. This was definitely better than class.

The Weihnachtmarkt at Richardplatz was as sweet and delicate as the one at Alex was gawdy and brass. This was the beautiful part of Neukölln, and I was always thrilled to go there. There I went with my German friend who I was to be spending Christmas with, her sister and a third girl. All of them bundled up, and blonde. In particular, it had imagine going to a market with these girls that had me so excited for Berlin in December, and so I was very content as we wandered through the crowds, sipping on cinnamon mulled wine and glazed nuts.

Joy and festive cheer came from our kitchen at the flat in the form of copious amounts of Glühwein and a small Christmas tree decked in purple tinsel that Red had brought and was constantly being knocked ever by Milla as she gnawed at its little trunk. Red would play German carols and the flat began to feel very snug. Red wanted to have a large Christmas party in the flat. After my last day of work before Christmas she texted me on the way home asking me to bring provisions for the night.  I have a pathetic anxiety about supermarkets and dreaded anyone, let someone as demanding and picky as Red, to shop there for them.

Thankfully the Rewe in Marzahn was usually quiet. I was wearing my big new puffa jacket and despite the cold outside was now sweating as I turned up and down the aisles in search of Thai salad, looking like a fat, synthetic goose. I was despairing, and considering hanging it all when the music began again. It had felt like an instant of Christmas each time it had played in November though I wasn't sure it was supposed to be festive. All jingles jingle, after all … It certainly wasn’t the song I had thought it was at first and my stomach twisted in new surprise each time this became apparent. The jingle was jaunty, and whistled and sounded just like a Christmas song ought to sound. But I didn’t know it.

I stood in front of a shelf of bottles trying to find Red’s drink of choice and grabbed one calling itself 'cherry likor’. Was that the same as liquor? It also had the word syrup, lower down on the label, in big letters. On the shelf below there was a darker, more expensive bottle called 'Sour Cherry'. I didn’t think that would go down well. Her phone was almost out of battery. I didn't dare another call. I had already made a fool of herself with the frozen vegetables a week before. I read her message again to check I hadn’t forgotten anything and heaved the basket up towards the counter. I rarely got these shopping trips completely right, but somehow whatever I brought back would be enough for her to make some kind of feast out of.

My first step out of Rewe fell into an icy puddle and I froze where I stood as the cold crept around my ankle, through two pairs of socks, some child’s tights and a sandwich bag. I walked on, slowly, swearing as her toes accustomed themselves to the cold. The Christmas lights crowning the heads of the tower blocks ahead of me were a throbbing, nauseous green. They pieced through the fog, above the other twinkling multi-coloured and dancing decorations that shone on the windows.

I was coming up to a stall that had been erected the previous week. It was steaming and I could smell chocolate and nuts. A woman, tall and tightly wrapped up, was standing at the counter speaking to the man inside who tied something up for her in parcels. Around her legs wobbled two little children, the same size and in identical ivy green snow suits, making them look like little aliens, or giant gherkins that had sprouted limbs. One toppled over, unnoticed, as I approached them.

I was only a few feet away when a little dog sprung out from behind the legs of the woman, and hopping around the struggling child on the floor began growling and snapping at her. It was on a lead which was a neon-red, like its collar and shining in the night. The woman turned to her with a blank, questioning expression, and from her hands the red lead seemed to extend indefinitely as the dog came closer to her, snarling from its scrawny throat. I stumbled back guiltily from the family, and the shed, and the smell of chocolate and nuts, and hurried on towards the green lights, fearful that they would engage me in conversation.

Back at the flat there was no party. Just Red and one of her guys. Smokie had flown back to France earlier that week. There was an array of brightly parcelled chocolates sprawled across the table amongst wrapping paper and a wide assortment of gifts for her family and friends. Red sat me down next to her and went through each one, as the guy looked wearily on. Later someone had the idea to put on The Nightmare Before Christmas.  I hadn’t seen this film since I was very young, and had wanted to watch it again ever since. The memories I had of the film were vivid. We were with my parent at some Christmas drinks party, or dinner, and the children had spent the evening upstairs playing hide and seek. When a dispute broke out the games screeched to a halt and someone put on the film. I remember my sisters voicing their concerns that I was too young to watch it. That naturally fired up my eagerness. What kind of cartoon Christmas film could I be too young to watch?  

With the skeletal and monstrous figures, and their twitching insect-movements, droning anti-Disney songs, the whole village created by Tim Burton awed me with a sense of danger and lust. Could things really be this different, this dark, this alien at Christmas? Could something as familiar, as safe, and comfortably as Christmas, have such a sordid underbelly, glazed with apprehension, uncertainty, and fantasy?

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014