Life in Berlin

 “Berlin is not the place you go to if you are looking for romance. It is not quaint, it is not pretty in the most obvious, touristy ways. What Berlin is, is this: a place where you can see many (if not all) of the 20th century’s worst horrific historical scars; it is a city that seems to take pride in resisting the urge to sweep its dark past under the rug of gentrification; it is where people go to if they are looking for a taste of the past and a vision of the future.”

–Juliana Alvim 

Berlin is a terribly interesting place to be. It feels like a city with a soul–one that has multiple time periods and cultures folding in upon itself. You can see remnants of a divided Germany, of one destroyed by war, one wounded by National Socialism, one powerhouse of Prussia. You also hear so many languages and interact with people from all over the world with varying ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds. 

We live in Gesundbrunnen, which is just north of the city center of Berlin. We’ve enjoyed the area so far with its plethora of Turkish bakeries, dozens of döner shops, several grocery stores, and large park (Humboldthain).

Our apartment is on the second floor of an Altbau (pre-war building) and it has a ton of space. The floors creak when you walk on them. Dallin mentioned it feels a little bit like A Quiet Place as we try to creep around the house without making noise when Teddy is sleeping. Maybe it’s worth marking which ones make noise? Our shower doesn’t have a curtain, which means you have to sit or stand to wash yourself to avoid spraying water outside the tub. I’ve gotten used to it, but it doesn’t keep me from dreaming about a standing shower with better pressure and warmer water.

I usually teach my students about garbage separation (Mülltrennung) with this catchy techno song. I’ve withheld from singing it every day as we separate our garbage into its correct bin based on what it is made from. It’s good to be back.

Every day in the mid-afternoon, I crash and fall asleep while Teddy naps. One day, I needed a nap at 7:30am (Teddy’s been waking up pretty early here). I have probably consumed 30 bars of chocolate and visited the baklava shop around the corner around 9 times. I’ve had some beautiful runs exploring new trails and finding favorite places.

You could say that I am thriving.

We’ve already had a couple visitors. My mom stayed one day with us and she took our obligatory “we’re in Berlin picture” that I posted last week. 

My friend Morgan visited Berlin with some friends and spent a day with us. We went shopping at the Kaufhof (a five-story department store at Alexanderplatz)and I tricked Morgan into buying more chocolate than she had planned to buy (which as far as I know was none). One of my favorite things in Germany is fancy ice cream bowls (including Spaghettieis), so Morgan and I went to a place with just a single review on Google (“sehr lecker” from one year ago) with the intent of adding a second review after we ate ice cream there.

Unfortunately, it was not good. I want to say it was average at best, but as the days have passed my memory has placed it in the “actively bad” category. The vanilla ice cream was not good, the bits of white chocolate were flavorless (was it actually little pieces of paper?!), the raspberry sauce was actually bad jam? 

We chose not to write a review.

Fortunately, Dallin and I had excellent Spaghettieis at a different time and in a different place.

When my mom was here, we also walked around the Holocaust memorial. It’s an interesting memorial because there isn’t really any information embedded in the memorial itself. There is a little museum underground, but for the most part, it’s a bit abstract. In some ways, that makes sense because the Holocaust is so unfathomable. Some scholars have critiqued this memorial for being more of a German space than a Jewish space (who is really being honored or remembered here?). There’s been emerging research as to how visitors react to particular memorials, such as this one. Relational to this is how Holocaust memorials have turned up in digital media. Some have critiqued the pairing of selfies in somber memorials (such as the project Yolocaust) while others have tried to portray a more nuanced developing tourist memory culture and what freedoms people should have in interacting with memorials.

Dallin and I took Teddy to some East Germany sites this week as well. The East Side Gallery is known as the longest outdoor art gallery, but it’s also the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall. There’s been a lot of development in this area, so some have expressed concerns about gentrification of the area at the expense of the wall as a monument (parts have been torn down to make way for new housing). East Side Gallery is set up mostly as an art exhibit, in that it doesn’t include very much information about the Berlin Wall itself aside from the years. Not very many visitors know how many people died trying to cross the wall between 1960 and 1989–but apparently neither does the internet? I had previously read it was 80 people, but I’ve seen numbers like 140, 327 (this one includes the whole East German border and pre-wall years as well), and 80 on different legit websites, which is a bit confusing. The majority of sites agree on a number around 140, so that’s the one I’d go with.

We checked out Check Point Charlie and the Black Box museum on another day. There’s a temporary panorama exhibit there as well, which we didn’t visit, but I think it’s a really interesting idea and experience. The artist (Yadegar Asisi) has tried to recreate a glimpse into the Kreuzberg area during the 1980s. How better to transport your viewers into a historical period than visually? 

And thus we come to the end of May. 

The German-speaking parts

The mass chaos of the first week bled into the second week but we finally are settling down in Berlin and I already have the feeling not lugging 80 lb of stuff from city to city will be a game-changer. 

Our train journey circled from Berlin to Prague to Budapest to Vienna to Innsbruck to Munich and back to Berlin. I’m not sure Teddy even remembers life before we spent half our days on trains. 

Teddy left Budapest with the unofficial title of Hungary’s favorite baby and we arrived in Vienna without any hiccups. My dad currently works part time in Munich, and since he and my mom were already there, we had arranged to meet up in Vienna with them. We also saw our first Ukrainian refugees at the train station there. It initially seemed a bit odd to me we hadn’t noticed any in Budapest (or any help organizations there) since Hungary shares a border with Ukraine, but that may have something to do with politics or the more gradual trickle westward. It’s so hard to process Russia’s continued invasion of Ukraine and the devastating effects on human life. I don’t really know what else to say except that it’s awful people create such horrors for each other.

It was really nice to have some extra hands around with Teddy in Vienna and we also stayed in a large Airbnb, which meant it was our first time not just having one room for sleeping, relaxing, eating, etc. My parents kindly offered to stay home with Teddy while Dallin and I went out to visit Prater–the amusement park in Vienna. It was maybe our first real date since we had Teddy? Not sure. We went on a ferris wheel, a spinny ride that made me scream but in a good way, a little roller coaster that made me scream in a less good way (but I did not cry), and a scary ride where I literally kept my eyes closed the entire time (and probably would have cried had I opened them).

We just had one full day in Vienna and spent it visiting the Schönbrunnen palace and the Belvedere. It somehow felt like a really long day with both those things (so much walking with a baby carrier+worrying about Teddy being comfortable and getting enough sleep) and by the time we hit dinner, I was emotionally, mentally, and physically fried.

We ate at Vapiano’s because I thought it would be fast and Dallin asked me to get silverware for us and all the sudden I started sobbing–it was the fork that broke the camel's back. So there I was, crying while stuffing my face with average but nostalgia-inducing pasta and wanting to hurry home to put Teddy to bed.

 Even though I cried a bunch at the restaurant, on the walk home, and at home, I had a good come-to-Jesus moment with myself in reevaluating what successful parenting looks like. 

At home in Bloomington, I had so much control over Teddy’s schedule. I saw when he was tired and could put him in his crib as soon as I noticed. Here, every day he would get tired when we were 20+ minutes from home and there was nothing I could do for him immediately. I realized I’d been basing a lot of my personal “success” as a parent in getting Teddy enough sleep each day and all of the sudden I was getting none of that superficial success indicator. In Bloomington, he would go to bed at 5pm and wake up around 7am, and while traveling I’d been lucky to get him to bed before 7pm (and he'd been waking up…before 7am). I know sleep is so important, but I also logistically know that being a parent is much more than just giving your child opportunities to rest.

We left Vienna Sunday morning and arrived at the train station plenty early. My mom was heading to Innsbruck with me and Dallin while my dad returned to Munich for work. However, we apparently picked a very popular train and failed to reserve seats. I had paid extra to reserve seats on our previous trains, and then they didn’t have assigned seats anyways so I assumed this would be similar.

I was very wrong. 

The train was wayyy oversold and there were not enough seats for everyone to sit, so if you hadn’t reserved a ticket (which was listed as optional), you simply had to stand like sardines with the other people who didn’t realize paying 2 euros to reserve a seat was a required option. A kind lady took pity on me as I once again started crying while holding Teddy smashed against other people and gave me her seat. However that seat was also next to an angry middle-age man who refused to give up his seat for the young Muslim woman who had paid to 2 euros to reserve it. While I was trying to nurse Teddy to sleep on the aisle seat, about 20 other passengers got involved and a yelling match ensued. They told him he needed to give up his seat and he yelled sexist slurs back at all of the women, insisting a bunch of ***** couldn’t make him move. A train attendant finally showed up and as soon as he saw she was also a woman, he started calling her dirty names too. Meanwhile, here I am, right there, slumped over an almost sleeping Teddy probably with a breast stick hanging out somewhere, desperately trying to hum some lullabies while–you guessed it–once again weeping a little bit. The man was finally escorted away, and the high stress point of the trip ended for me.

My mom and Dallin didn’t end up getting to sit for most of the train ride, which was a bummer because it was 4 hours of beautiful Austrian countryside and Alps. But we all made it just the same.

Innsbruck is definitely the prettiest place we’ve visited. I’ve been to Vienna and Salzburg 3x each, but nowhere else in Austria, so it was nice to visit another town–one right next to the Alps.

Innsbruck brought us some great running views, a beautiful old town, amazing strudel, overpriced Sachertorte, and cute baby clothes. We climbed up a tower to get an overlook of the city and spent most of our full day there walking around and eating. We ended up eating at the same restaurant two days in a row because we liked it so much the first day. Teddy also had his first experience chewing on bread and it’s one of his new favorite things.

After Innsbruck, we took a relatively short train up to Munich. We honestly just kind of crashed and burned there. I don’t think I have been this tired even with a newborn. I was also having a bit of dejavu to the newborn time because my breasts got leaky all the time again (does that happen with time change adjustment? Or maybe it was related to the frequent mastitis feedings I encouraged Teddy to take?) and I also was getting engorged pretty much every day and I was sore everywhere (but that’s from all the walking/running/bag and baby carrying and not a C-section). 

Besides spending a lot of time lying down in Munich, we got some really excellent food. That feat was made much easier with my parents since they’ve been there so often and had such great recommendations. We also spent some time at Marienplatz and Dallin and I borrowed their bikes to ride over to the English Garden one day while my mom watched Teddy. I felt a little bad that Dallin didn’t get to do very many fun things in Munich because we mostly used it as a resting place, but hopefully we’ll be back in less exhausting circumstances.

Our final train brought us back to Berlin, where we are settling into our apartment and staying the rest of the summer–maybe forever. I’m not sure I can bring myself to pack everything up again. Or really almost everything. I’ve lost two charging cords, a tube of lipstick, and a tiny drinking glass for Teddy, so clearly not everything has made its way back to me when I packed up in each place. My mom came up to Berlin with us to help us get situated (another big help). One of the first things we did was buy a stroller here. My dad had a colleague that let us borrow a stroller in Munich and it was a godsend for some very hot days that did not require us to strap Teddy to our bodies. We’ve made some good purchases, but this stroller sure is high on the list.

I sure do love Teddy. After doing some processing in Vienna, I feel like I’ve been able to enjoy traveling with Teddy more and appreciate what a unique experience this is for us. In Bloomington, he’d met maybe a couple dozen people. Now, everyday he sees hundreds of faces and gets to have all sorts of conversations through smiles and squeals with people on the subway, in stores, and on the street. No more hermit life for him. I still stress out about trying to get him enough sleep (we’re playing catch up from the last couple weeks despite our attempts to provide nap times), but now that we’re in our home base I’m hoping it’ll get easier for things to feel routine. 

The last couple of weeks definitely broke me but have also been really beautiful. I’ve loved experiencing them with Dallin, who has carried all the heaviest literal luggage pieces as well as shared in carrying the emotional baggage I’ve insisted on bringing. It also feels so right to be in Europe together. For two people studying European cultures and languages, it seems like it took forever for us to make it here (thank you pandemic). So even if it’s a hot mess, I’m grateful to be here with Dallin and Teddy. 

Now to settle in for a long summer’s nap.

Summer 2022 Week 1

Like running a marathon, traveling with an infant overseas is definitely a one-time thing (guess we’ll have to stay in Europe forever—it’s too much work to go back at this point). 

I have a fellowship from the Freie Universität to spend the summer working on my dissertation in Berlin and thought I would share some travel highlights for friends and family wanting to follow along. 

Our first few days were, perhaps unsurprisingly, pretty rough. Teddy did great for the flights here, sleeping almost the entire way from Newark to Berlin in the airplane bassinet (what a gift that was). We landed around 8am and headed toward our hotel. We are renting an apartment in Gesundbrunnen for the summer, but can’t move in until May 20th, so we thought we would get adjusted to the time zone and take a little trip in Europe before coming back to Berlin.

The first difficulty was getting from the airport to our hotel, in that I accidentally had us get off a stop too soon. Which meant we got to walk through a park (Tierpark). It would have been fine, except that we had three suitcases, three backpacks, a duffle bag, and a baby to drag through that damn park. 

We showed up at our hotel and it took a while to check in and then we tried to give our very droopy baby time to nap, but he was so disoriented and tired that he just cried for three hours instead. I took him for a little swim at our hotel, after which he managed to fall asleep for a bit. We met up with the people we’re renting our apartment from later in the afternoon and had dinner with them (+met their dachshunds we’ll be taking care of!), which was nice but we were all POOPED. 

We got back to our hotel around 7:30pm and by the time I’d nursed Teddy and put him to bed (he fell asleep immediately), Dallin had also fallen asleep. I didn’t want to miss out on all the sleeping fun, so I also went to bed. I got up around 5am and went running in the Tierpark (much nicer without suitcases), while Teddy slept until 9:30am. We visited church (where I randomly ran into one of my BYU professors there with a study abroad group) and then we came home for more naps for all of us. The rest of the day was resting and recovering–sleeping, swimming, breathing the like. 

It was a much needed rest day because Monday wrecked me. 

On Sunday night, my right breast started aching. When I examined it, I found a clogged milk duct. Or rather, ANOTHER clogged milk duct because I was already on antibiotics from a clogged milk duct in my left breast from the previous week (my THIRD time getting mastitis since breastfeeding). Clearly the breast milk goddesses are angry with me. I panicked a bit about that but didn’t know exactly what to do and had a hard time sleeping with the pain. 

Monday morning came along and we packed up our stuff to take a train to Prague. Except on our way to the train station I suddenly couldn't find my phone. We had magnificently overpacked for our trip (I dropped two of the suitcases off at our Berlin apartment but kept everything else for some reason+added a few extra bags). My arms were aching from the heavy suitcase+two backpacks and two bags I’m navigating–all of which I’ve looked through twice because I literally JUST had my phone. 

I tried really hard not to panic except that EVERYTHING IS ON MY PHONE. 

Our train tickets. 

9000 pictures of Teddy. 

Etc.

I ran up and down the street a few times frantically looking for my phone knowing that our train departure time is getting closer and closer. Finally we decided to lug all our stuff back to the hotel so I could do a “find my iPhone” search from my laptop. I checked with the hotel staff first to see if anyone had found a phone in the last 20 minutes and PRAISE THE LORD someone spotted it outside and brought it in. 

I grabbed it and ran while screaming my gratitude because our train was supposed to leave in 18 minutes and we were 16 minutes away according to Google maps. We went as fast as pack mules can, but my arms were threatening to snap off (what do I even lift weights for if they don’t help me in these situations?!) and I was also generally having trouble breathing. 

We finally made it to the station and had to run up a staircase except that I was broken and did not have the strength to carry my suitcase. Some kind passerby noticed and immediately carried my suitcase up for me and threw it on the L-train with us. 

There I sat. 

Soaked with sweat. 

Visibility shaking arms and legs. 

Aching breast. 

Unable to take in any breaths.

On the verge of tears. 

I didn’t quite manage to calm myself down before we needed to get off at the main train station and once again race like the pack mules we were to get to the correct platform.

We made it with about one minute to spare. 

It was all I could do to not collapse on the dirty train floor and weep in relief. 

Instead, I remained standing and started crying, willing myself to breathe. 

I cannot explain how terrible this morning made me feel. It exposed my weakness of always losing my phone and somehow mentally escalated to the end of the world and me ruining Teddy’s life if we missed the train and had to wait around for several more hours. Teddy was, however, very chill about the whole situation, and seemed to enjoy our 4 hour train ride. Dallin was also remarkably cool-headed about the whole thing and a stabilizing force in my universe.

We made it to Prague and walked around and got food and then tried to put Teddy to bed. However, Teddy was disoriented and tired and not fond of trying to sleep in a new place so he cried for several hours, which broke my poor little mama heart because at home he has been an awesome sleeper and usually falls to sleep without making much of a fuss. 

And then during/after the baby screaming, I examined my right breast again and noticed the area with the clogged duct had grown more angry and red throughout the day. I had stopped by a pharmacy while still in Germany to ask about what to do about a second plugged duct while already on medication for mastitis and they recommended rubbing quark on it (the equivalent recommendation of cabbage in the US I suppose?). I called my US doctor that night and she said if the clog didn’t improve within 24 hours it might be an abscess and I should take medical attention to get it drained. 

I know, everyone wants an unexpected medical procedure in another country.

I was up until 2am reading about abscesses and trying to massage the duct away, also debating if I should return to Germany for medical care there or keep going on our trip as planned.

I fed Teddy as often as he stirred during the night and by the morning, I thought the clog felt a little smaller so we could press forward with the original plan. 

We lugged our belongings back to the Prague train station in the morning to catch our 9:12am train to Budapest. Except when we arrived at 8:52am, we saw there was no 9:12am train to Budapest–only one at 8:56am. Our printed tickets didn’t have a time on them, so we weren’t sure where the myth of the 9:12am train came from–turns out they had changed the time a few days before. Fortunately for us the 8:56am train was delayed 10 minutes so we did make it after all–needing to only panic for about 10 minutes total. 

The train from Prague to Budapest was about 7.5 hours and it was a pretty good time. Teddy napped just fine (he hadn’t fallen asleep in our arms/on us since about 3 months, so I was delighted he adapted to sleeping on trains so well). He also met some train-grandparents–an older American couple was in our car and kept making eyes at him. We ended up sitting with them for most of the trip and they loved holding and playing with Teddy, which was a big help to us. 

Dallin kept insisting as soon as we made it to Budapest, everything would be fine. Turns out he was right. 

Clogged duct? Almost gone, meaning it’s not an abscess and I don’t need to get it medically drained. 

We’ve also just generally had a great couple days taking Teddy around Budapest. He is also the most popular baby in the city by far–it seems like every demographic has wanted to make faces at him, hold his hand, etc. Old women, old men, men in their 20s and 30s, teenage girls–everyone is obsessed. We have been left wondering if Teddy is exceptionally cute (which of course we think he is) or if people just don’t get to see that many babies these days. 

A little part of me hopes that the same women who yelled at me for wearing flip flops in March 2019 are the ones going wild for Teddy. 

A museum curator wished Teddy that he will meet many kind people in the world, because there are so few kind people anymore. Another woman told us how happy and inquisitive he was, another that he had an angelic face, another that he had smiley eyes, and an old man congratulated me on my baby. #Teddyforbudapestpromking