One way that I have adapted to life in Berlin is that I’m much more likely to go shopping at street markets than I was in Weimar – principally because there was only one in Weimar and, well, it never really entered my shopping patterns to go there.
Here in Berlin, I wouldn’t call myself a regular, but I do hit up the Winterfeldtplatz Markt at least once, if not twice a month – depending up on what’s going on. It is, for example, where I went on Christmas Eve in order to buy a fresh chicken, a bunch of vegetables, and other assorted goods to get through the long holiday weekend.
Today I had a hankering for one of my favorite things at the Winterfeldtplatz Markt: Tiramisu. There’s this stand that’s there most weeks, run by Il Mercante Del Sud/Ristorante Lucano, that has the most wonderful Tiramisu ever created – and I wanted some.
So I had it – along with a cup of coffee – thus getting a huge shot of caffeine, which will be sure to keep me going through my evening ahead.
But I’d also brought a book along with me and I wanted to sit somewhere and read, so I found myself at a coffee shop, Impala, where I got a caffeine-free latte with lactose-free milk. With an order like that, you probably do not want to be behind me when I am ordering it.
The book that I’m reading is Gypsy Boy, which is the amazing tale that I mentioned last time – but the further I get into the book, the less willing I am to read it directly before going to bed. It’s a tough, hard, read – and I do not mean the words are difficult, but the content is disturbing, and I find myself needing to put the book down every so often and taking a breather, much like I did with Augusten Burroughs’ Running With Scissors.
After that, I headed home – realizing that there’s a 24-hour supermarket at Nollendorfplatz – I hadn’t realized that the Kaiser’s there was open 24 hours, but it’s nice to know that within a 20 minute walk of where I live, I can shop whenever I want, as long as it is between 7am on Monday and midnight on Saturday – just not Sunday or too early Monday morning.