Ich Bin Eine Berliner

I’m a Berliner now (and a die-hard New Yorker). I wear a hair-tie around my right leg to keep my bike chain from nicking my pants. My bike seat even has its own shower cap for this rainy winter weather. When dodging through cars and people on Friedrichstraße (”ß” makes a “ss” sound) daily, I finally have the guts to flick my bike bell at people who are in my route. They move every time. I’m still biking in these arctic temperatures, too. It snowed for 45 minutes on Wednesday. The front-desk staff at the gym knows my face and always greets me in English instead of German. The ethnically-unidentifiable girl who threads my eye-brows remembered the instructions on how to shape my brows that I previously wrote in German for her. I don’t get as frustrated being illiterate now. I’ve mastered native inflections of how to say “Sprechen Sie Englisch?” Although, I actually understood the lady at the post office today who spoke in retard-slow German. But, most of the younger generations speak in English. It gives America a bad smell. My friends and I have officially named every Saturday, “Sightseeing Saturday” that begins at 2 p.m. I feel so Germanic these days.

On that note, the dark-skinned German men here are full-fledged Africans who escaped from Rwanda or some other hot country. They’re not that diluted-American version that I used to be so fond of. They reel you in with lines like, “hello beautiful princess, would you like to come to my place so that I can make you one of my African queens?” Awkward pause inserted here.
“Are you implying that if I come to back to your house I will no longer be a princess, but a queen?”
“Yes, beautiful princess, I give my wives anything they want.”
“Did you just use Queen and Wife in the plural?”
I’m thinking about putting my African-men fetish to a rest. They have proven non-committal. Besides, I’m already LilQueen1311 – I need a new title that embraces my new ways of domesticity.
I cook and absolutely love to clean!
Berlin has turned me out. I hunt for fresh vegetables like those “broken” women who dig through piles of tomatoes to find the reddest few in the grocery store. I’m that grown-up now, except I don’t actually know what I’m searching for. Once I find the cutest tomato I throw it in a plastic sack and get excited to finger through the zucchini.
After a second-shifts work at the grocery store, I come home and whip up three-course meals for no husband or children. I’ve mastered holding a frying pan with one hand, positioning it a few inches over the burner, while swishing and flipping the contents with Top-Chef-like ease. I put a lamp in the kitchen next to a wine bottle with a dead sunflower. It’s vintage. Strangely, it’s become my territory of creation. Now all I need to do is bake a few beans in the oven to crank up that maternal intuition. I’ll teach my non-African husband who loves me more than I love him, how to cook for me. I’m egalitarian, sorry.

Today, I discovered that you have to pay 50 cents to take a shower at the gym. I thought water came with the gym membership. I’ve been hoodwinked. Damn, can I get a free soap bar? (in Justin voice) When did everything in life become a commodity?