less than zero

Good lord it was cold in Berlin. We got snowed on! - A first, including times when we’ve actually ‘gone to the snow’. Lovely snowflake shaped snow like this:
and this .

There’s nothing like sub-zero temperatures to get you excited about London’s current 7-9 degree weather (or as a very small child said in a café the other day, ‘Its quite mild today, daddy’. I don’t know if it’s the accents or what, but children over here seem incredibly mature).
From what we saw Berliners don’t use umbrellas when it snows (I guess because its not technically wet). As proponents of the ‘when in rome…’ school of travel we decided not to use one either, but then when it was really, really snowing, we were happy to see at least one lady under an umbrella – it looked like she had just had her hair done – a very bouffant Iron Curtain-era affair.



In Berlin we stayed in the old east – which somewhat ironically is now the desired place to live. When the wall came down a lot of people just up and abandoned their apartments (what did they care – they were owned by the state and anyway they looked like this:



so a lot of artists and students took advantage of the situation and moved in rent free. They were eventually given squatters rights and now the area is home to loads of cutting edge cafes, bars, clubs, galleries and shops.

Ways to tell you are in the old east include the fact that trams run here (the west got rid of them shortly after the end of the war, declaring them ‘so 1942’) and through the pedestrian traffic signals – known as the Ampelmann.


The green ‘walk’ Ampelmann was apparently used to cheer the comrades along as they marched off to their jobs of a morning – you have to admit he does look quite lively. With reunification the people in change of the traffic lights wanted to replace them all with the more staid west german model. This was greeted by protests and petitions from the people, who essentially said ‘we didn’t have much in stinking east berlin, but hey, at least we had the Ampelmann!' Don't you think it's great that people can find positive memories even of an oppressive communist regime?