Chinese Visa Blues

The first reaction I get when I tell people I'm moving to Shanghai is one of disbelief/excitement/shock, a 'what an amazing city' kind of surprise face.  The second reaction is one of muted horror for the bureaucracy that they assume/know I will face.  I've laughed it off; I mean, i've moved to Britain and Britons like their red tape, queues, more red tape, more queues.  

But now, less than a week and a half before my flight, I'm a prisoner in my own flat waiting for the DHL delivery man to drop off my visa paperwork so I can walk into the Chinese visa office, pay a fee, drop off my passport and pick it up four days later.  Every car door sounds like a delivery van and I run expectantly to the window to see the bin men, a granddad with his daughter, a moving truck (laughing at me?), a delivery of dog food to the neighbours. I may as well be 16-years-old again sitting next to the phone willing it to ring merely with the power of my mind.  

The embassy has little (read: NO) sympathy for me and my employer has taken to avoiding my emails. Woe is unrequited visa love. 

Fingers crossed, fingers crossed, fingers crossed. 

Photo Boothiness

For reasons I do not understand but still fully appreciate, the city of Berlin is chock full of old school photo booths. They're everywhere, they're cheap and they're a haven for drunken night out photos. Which is what we did. 

The photo booth at Checkpoint Charlie was particularly vintage chic: 

 Three people, three drunken episodes, three sets of photos:

Berlin has got it right.

Berlin

In Berlin, I found another city impossible not to love.  This is probably a moot point to make as it’s also the worst kept secret in cool European cities--everyone loves Berlin.   I’d been wanting to go for years but due to my brush with the German train police five years earlier, I was a bit reticent.  But considering the fact that my coworker Kathryn, had never been on a plane before, we thought it only philanthropic to help her cross this threshold.  

Thus, Kathryn, Lindsay and I were relieved when Interpol’s flashing lights stayed quiet and I crossed the German border into our weekend away.  Lindsay did all the planning as she’s a bit of a city expert and late into Friday evening we checked into our Air BnB accommodation—a huge, brick walled beauty of a studio apartment in the heart of trendy Kreutzberg.  A set of gigantic double doors led into a courtyard with a series of apartment buildings facing it.  The noise from the candlelit block of bars and restaurants was within touching distance and yet, a world away. 

A weekend is hardly enough time to wrap your head around a place particularly in a place like Berlin. As such, I dubbed our weekend the whirlwind taster tour. First stop, the memorial to peaceable times and reunification at the Berlin Wall: 

 

 

 

 And the buskers who hustle in whatever ways possible in order to make a living:

Second stop, Checkpoint Charlie, the former demilitarised zone separating East from West Berlin: 

 

 The beach that now resides there:

 Next to Berlin's Currywurst museum: 

 And the Ampelmann shop, homage to East Berlin's flashing green man: 

 We may have also found ourselves in Trabi World, a museum-cum-gift-shop paying homage to East Berlin's attempt at a car. Over the course of its existence a number of people tried to smuggle others through the border in the bottom of these diminutive vehicles:  

 Between it all, we made it to the Topographies of Terror museum, a recollection of the horrible history of World War II and a stark reminder of how easily it all happened, and could again. We passed various sculpture parks with various talking heads:

And even made it to Lindsay's favourite bar slash record shop where we watched Louis Suarez take a chunk out of Giorgia Chielleni's ear during a particularly violent World Cup match. We doubled over to various neighbours with beer gardens, a thing the Germans know how to do very well. And in 48-hours, that's all she wrote: 

We'll be back!