A general haze of contentment

This was quite a nice weekend. The weather in Berlin has been lovely; I don't think I've seen a cloud in three days. On Thursday I headed south into Kreuzberg, a neighborhood in the former West Berlin that was right up again the Wall and kind of served as a place for squatters, starving artists, disillusioned students trying to find themselves, and that sort of person in general. A lot of those people have moved on since the reunited Berlin has put a lot of money into rebuilding some of the more impoverished parts of the city. However, Kreuzberg is still home to a large concentration of Turks, the guest workers who came to Germany in the fifties and sixties, when the country was rebuilding itself after the war and needed workers to supplement its depleted population. A lot of them stayed and started new lives here. I don't know if people know this - I didn't myself until I started taking German - but German citizenship laws are different from those in the USA. The fact that someone was born in Germany doesn't automatically make him or her a citizens. The parents (or maybe just one, I'm not sure) have to be German as well. So there's a fairly large population of people who were born to Turkish parents in Germany, have lived all their lives in Germany and speak German as a native language, but they're not German citizens. Naturally this policy has led to a lot of tension in recent years.

Not to get into long political discourses about things which I only superficially understand, however - I went to Kreuzberg on Friday in order to go to the Turkish Market. Twice a week, there's a large outdoor market where Turks sell fruit, vegetables, bread, cheese, fabric, and various other things. And I did some shopping and people watching. It was really neat to see the mix of people, with head-scarved Turkish women milling about with tiny white-haired German women and lots of little bilingual children running around. I was also really excited to see that there was a stand selling Turkish Delight (I didn't have enough money, but it's definitely on the list for next week) and simit. Simit (I'm not sure of the plural) are these large hollow circles of bread - think a bagel, but rolled thinner and formed into a bigger ring - coated with sesame seeds and then baked, so that the sesame seeds get all toasted and delicious. I used to buy them in Syntagma Square in Athens, where they were just sold on the street for half a euro, but I've never seen them at home. And they have them here! So that made me happy.

And then I pretty much just spent the rest of the weekend walking around and enjoying the nice weather. The Berlin marathon was today, and there was also something yesterday for in-line skaters and bicycles. I stood at the Brandenburg Gate and watched them preparing the racetrack. There were little food stands set up, so I also got to try a Berliner Weisse. It's a local specialty drink: a light-colored beer to which slightly flavored syrup is added. I got one with red syrup (you can also get green). I think it was raspberry-flavored. Anyway, it tasted quite good, although it definitely seems to be more of a summery drink.