Of fiery German women, my fixation with fixtures, Indians’ best kept secrets… and the photo I missed! ~ Berlin and Copenhagen May 2011

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Going to a new place without a guide book has its own thrills. Like landing up in the Arctic Circle wearing a banyan and a pyjama and getting whipped up by the icy winds? ;-) No, I am not talking about that extreme an idea.

When I got off at Copenhagen station and walked up the road to my hostel, my eyes feasted on the sight of a group of cyclists whizzing past – all very formally attired and going to work. Yes, I had heard about Copenhagen being a paradise for cycling. But what did that mean? Perhaps you go to your local grocery store on the bike. Maybe even college students skimping on their modest allowance bike it down to their college. Surely, it couldn’t mean that men and women remained faithful to their saddle when they had the option of driving in their car to their workplace in this city that was the seat of many an international agencies… or could it? Wouldn't it be, err..how to put it, a little unbecoming of someone having the status an Ambassador (in India we even have a car that takes its name from this high office) to trudge it to his or her diplomatic enclave on the lowly bicycle?

Back home in Bangalore, a popular ad for a shopping mall showed a man clad in formals making his way to office on a bicycle. The tag line said "do something different", but actually it was more than that – it was exotic stuff. The problem was that someone wouldn't have to be just 'different', but in equal measure crazy to try cycling in formal attire on Bangalore’s busy roads. Murderous exhaust of a thousand polluting vehicles would snuff the life out of anyone who would attempt it; survivors would then be blasted by honking vehicles, loud enough to frighten a cyclist and make her leap off the bike. In most cities in India, it is mostly the security boys and errand boys who, to make ends meet, opt for bicycles as their mode of commuting. If the CEO of the company came on one, he would be mistaken for them.

In the evening, as I walked the sidewalks of Copenhagen, I soon found that there was nothing novel about the group of cyclist I had encountered in the morning. There was a steady stream of cyclists zipping down the cyclepaths. Ladies wearing stockings, men in their evening coats, all returning from work… and also the odd professional cyclist in his cycling shorts. They all zoomed past and got the breeze in their face, smiling in the spring sun, the ends of their mufflers flying in the wind.

The Rosenstrasse memorial at Berlin

I cycled down Berlin's roads too, sometimes as part of a cycle tour group or by renting a bike. Same fresh air, great cycle lanes, a sparkling river skirting the roads ... and one more surprise. At regular intervals, cycle lanes snaked into parks that seemed like dense forests.

Yes, forests! The parks provided me moments of tranquility. Oddly enough, some of the parks had memorials to some very fiery events in Berlin’s chequered history. One such memorial at Rosenstrasse was about a demonstration during the darkest days in German’s history and it told a story about the courageous and bold German ladies of that day.

"In February 1943, Hitler ordered his forces to round up hundreds of Jews who had married non-Jews and have them deported to the death camps,” Kiraan, our Irish guide, said. Their shocked wives swore they would do whatever was in their powers to halt the deportation. And so they marched up and down the streets at Rosenstrasse shouting ‘give us our husbands back’. So adamant were they, Kiran narrated, that Hitler decided not to antagonise them. Many of the victims were on their way to the camps when the trains were halted and turned back.

There were other surprises for me, mostly very pleasant. I stayed at Youth Hostel (also called Hostelling International) in Copenhagen and Berlin. At both places, the lobbies were so swanky they compared with those of the best hotels in India. Late in the night, at the Dan hostel lobby (Copenhagen), a singer sang 70s melodies, guys played pool, girls played cards and drank. Those who were together got cosy. Compare that with the mood at Delhi Youth Hostel (by far the best equipped Youth Hostel in delhi) where if you reached the hostel after the stroke of 9, you had to sneak up the staircase without making a sound.

But what really amazed me were the toilets and bath rooms. First striking difference: fittings that sparkled and were “all there”! Maybe an explanatory note will be needed for the ALL THERE comment. What I mean is that the fixtures – showers, taps, tissue-paper reel support fitting – all of them were in their right places. In youth hostels in India if the tap was present and the sink didn’t choke, you were lucky; if there was a tumbler (we Indians don’t use tissue papers) you had hit a jackpot.

As an aside: It is the foreigners who come to India that I really feel sorry for. In the Delhi youth hostel, the few toilets that had a fixture for holding the tissue paper were so badly manhandled (by whom?) that the fixture could never support the tissue reel. Either the reel would have fallen down and would lie wallowing in a pool of water and things-best-not-discussed or be placed at such a far place that you would have to do some acrobatics to sit on the pot and fetch it.

Sometimes you could never find the reel, and so if you landed without carrying any tissue paper at 10 o’clock at night at Chanakyapuri (that’s where the hostel is located) your only real option was to grow a tissue paper tree. 😱

Again, at the hostel at Delhi you had to figure out the hot water flow (for some reason the hot water tap provided hot water only after you kept it on for acouple of minutes) and use your hands with great dexterity to see that you didn’t get scalded (once the hot water outlet was open, it got too hot if you didn’t start the cool water outlet soon). Or, as would be the case more often, you had to make sure you didn’t lose your nerves when howled by the people waiting out in the queue (when things got worse, people knocked at your door so hard you would think they were trying to break in). Actually, I quite missed the hollering-while-bathing in Europe… you could sing songs in return and the people outside could only fret and fume (Psst!! Don’t tell this to foreigners – that’s our best kept secret to de-stress ourselves).

But really… the smart fixtures at the hostels in Europe made such a difference! For instance the shower taps worked in this manner: there was one for the flow control, another for the water temperature. The temperature one had a marker that read the temperature corresponding to the position of the tap while the flow control one had plus and negative signs and an “economy” marker around midway to indicate what could be an optimum level to have a good bath and conserve water at the same time. If you had the tiniest bit of the environment on your mind you would stick to the “economy”. (Ironically, the youth hostel in Delhi was situated just besides a water conservation agency, but leaking taps and dysfunctional connections ensured that all hostelites followed a water non-conservation movement).

The Little Mermaid at Copenhagen

By the way, studying public toilet design was the very raison d’etre of my Europe tour. While showing a friend around my city, I have become habituated to planning the trip so that the toilet break coincides with a trip to the mall, where there is the option of using the restroom. On a badly timed trip, though, there is no option and we have to tread up the broken footsteps of a ‘smelly’ public toilet. How can I tell you how much my heart revolts then… but there is no redemption.

Back to pretty Copenhagen: Undoubtedly, the biggest surprise was at the “public toilet” near Little Mermaid. But let’s talk about beautiful things first… the Mermaid itself. A very unassuming statue that’s beautiful for its elegant shape. The area around the Mermaid is wonderfully landscaped. I had cycled down to the place from my hostel near Tivoli Garden, a few miles away, and so there was an added pleasure in rolling on the grass.

Ahh... so back to the matter of the rest rooms. After getting my feet wet scrambling through rocks to reach the little mermaid, and then sitting on the benches enjoying the chill, I could do with a visit to the rest room. I looked around.

As I looked, a bus full of revelers – men in formal suits and ladies in long flowing gowns – tumbled out of what seemed to be a hired van, decorated with flowers. They seemed to have come straight from some close friend’s marriage celebrations and decided to take in the evening sun and the lapping of the waters by the sidewalk. Laughing and shouting, hand in hand, and poking fun at one another, this burst of revelry was as unexpected as it was welcome for the onlookers sitting around. Then all of a sudden the men, numbering some eight to ten of them, left their partners behind and made a dash for the rocks. Next, you could see a jet of liquid spurting out into a trajectory before it hit the water below! The girls were just laughing from the fun of it all. Boys will be boys, and when there is the open riverside, what better place to pee. I didn’t take a photo though. I had learnt earlier that discretion was the better part of valour, and more so in a foreign country.

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Photos

A pretty girl in a pretty city
My friend Angeles outside the “freetown” of Christiania in the Danish capital Copenhagen. So merrily did I hop around in the borough’s colouful streets that I missed the “no photography” sign painted on the buildings. I realized that only when I photographed a bunch of rowdies (were they drug peddlers?) who snatched the camera from my hand and deleted all my photos of the tour till that moment. Compared to the crimes the freetown has seen I think I got off lightly.

Smile, baby, you are in the photo
A lady taking her baby out with her for a walk at Tiergarten Park, Central Berlin, close to my Youth Hostel. She readily obliged to be photographed. It was easy to roam in the park and forget you were in a big city.

Germany’s darkest days explained
Kiraan, our friend and cycle tour guide at Fat Tire Bike’s “Third Reich tour” guided us through various episodes leading to and during the WWII (yes, Berlin is full of them!). His interactive style made us feel as if we were living the events. He also marked our maps with “top things to do” and (jokingly) told us to steer clear away of the fiery German ladies (see the Rosenstrasse gathering note).

I took the road more green!
My group at the "Cold War" tour cycling on Berlin's canopied roads.

The Little Mermaid and me.
A sunny evening with the Mermaid at Copenhagen.

Revelry
A marriage party jazzing it up at the Little Mermaid promenade.

A public toilet with a wonderful smell
This charming rest room near the Little Mermaid statues was designed to look just like the rest of Copenhagen’s fabled building facades. It smelled of forest trees.

My group with Carissa’s “Cold War” cycle tour.
Berlin can always do with some more of my poses, can’t it? ;-)