An emotional walk

On days like these, I know why I love this city.

Lately I’ve been doing loooong walks. Just walking around, listening to music, with no particular destination. It seems to be some kind of autumn thing for me. I do like taking walks all year round, but during autumn it almost gets out of hand – the shortest walk I can manage is 1,5 hours. Usually it slips to two hours or more. It’s just the most relaxing thing there is for me right now!

Last autumn, I had the exact same thing in Helsinki. And I waked, and I walked. But the problem with Helsinki is that it is quite small, despite being a “small big city”, and I soon was very familiar (i.e., bored) with all sorts of routes within a reasonable (~10 km) distance from my place. Of course I developed various favourite routes, but nevertheless it really took my imagination some exercise, or then the effort and bore of travelling someplace, to keep it varied and interesting.

Here it’s quite different. This city is SO immense, there’s always some area remotely nearby that I don’t know that well and is interesting to discover or learn to know better during walks. Everything within 2–5 km from my place is already familiar to the point of boredom, so here’s what I do: I skip the dull part and hop on the U-Bahn, and begin my walk straight away in an interesting environment. The U-Bahns and S-Bahns can take you quite far in 10 minutes, whereas the subway network is very modest in Helsinki. And trams and buses take forever to get anywhere. Did I ever mention that waiting is not one of my strengths...?

Today was again one of those days my walk slipped to nearly three hours. Despite having walked dozens of times along the Landwehrkanal, which runs just nearby my place, I’m not bored with it yet. And it leads to Puschkinallee, which for its part leads straight into Treptower Park, so there I had the beginning of my route. I don’t know Treptower Park more or less at all – I’ve been there a couple of times, but I definitely have no clear picture of it in my head. And still don’t! It’s so big and undiscovered to me that I still have many wonderful walks ahead there :) I wandered around in zigzags, according to my “oooh! what’s that over there? / what a nice trail! / I wonder what lies behind that / etc.” impulses and stumbled upon all sorts of things.

”Stumble upon” should maybe be awarded the prize for understatement of the year when it comes to the Soviet war memorial. It’s a bombastic war memorial and military cemetery honouring the memory of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin, and celebrating the victory over national socialism. The Battle of Berlin (April–May 1945) was the final big battle of WWII ending in the unconditional surrender of Germany. Check it out if you have the opportunity, it’s... big.

”The war memorial depicting a Soviet soldier holding a child that he saved and stepping on a crushed Swastika”
From: Wikipedia

There are also a few cute ponds in the park, and guess what I saw there? A stork! This was exceptionally cool, for storks aren’t common in the city, and just two days ago my friend told me with amazement how she had seen a stork in the middle of Berlin :) Or some sort of stork-y bird, I don’t know all that well the differences between storks and herons and cranes and what other kinds there might be.

As I wandered ahead, I noticed the cutest bridge ever, and to by excitement it was open. It took me to the most wonderful little island ever, in the middle of Spree. The island is called Die Insel der Jugend, which means “the island of youth”. I don’t exactly know what it was, but the whole moment was just so overwhelmingly wonderful it almost brought me to tears. I was on a beautiful small island, surrounded by glistening water in the yellow street lightning, with frozen grass and leaves rustling under my feet. Bliss.
Check out some wonderful pictures on the island’s web site: Insel der Jugend / Treptower Park.

I continued to walk along the Spree, and where did it lead me? To Spreepark! It’s an abandoned amusement park whose owner fled the country to Peru some ten years ago, leaving the bankrupt amusement park behind. I had heard of it, but all I knew was that it was somewhere in or near Treptower Park. Deserted places like that always give me the creeps. It was really weird to imagine how that particular place had once been filled with people amusing themselves in e.g. the ferris wheel, which now lay in the the gloom completely abandoned and just waiting to slowly fall apart. Creepy and sad – and yet somehow very, very fascinating.

This city is just so much more than just the bars and clubs of Kreuzberg and the cafés of Prenzlauer Berg. <3

Blogging in darkness

Whoa, sorry for the blogging break! I can’t even blame it on being busy, because I haven’t. Well, this week has actually been somewhat active (I held a presentation on the Berlin blockade for my German course and made a day trip to Leipzig, among others), but otherwise I’ve been busy procrastinating, tops. Some sort of autumn coma going on here.

The clocks were turned backwards on the last weekend in October, due to shifting to standard time, which to me means that the sun sets an hour earlier. I have to say I’ve been quite dismayed and disheartened by the early and profound darkness. Finland is so extreme with its lightning (it’s all the time light during summer and dark during winter), but in Germany it actually gets dark in the evenings during summer, so I somehow assumed that darkness during winter would also keep to a moderate level. Boy was I wrong! In addition to the standard time, things are worsened by the time zones, something I hadn’t thought about at all: when the sun sets around 5 PM in Finland, the time is only 4 PM in Germany. Ok, the sun sets around 3.30 PM in Helsinki and at 4 PM here, so the day is still longer here and basically I shouldn’t have anything to complain about. But nevertheless it just somehow feels a lot... darker here. I guess it’s due to the lack of snow and decent street lightning or something?

Well, luckily I assume that the worst part is soon over, and with a sigh of relief I’ll have to conclude that it has lasted only a short time. Even November has been nice and gentle to me, to some point: it’s been quite warm, the trees have still kept on to their beautiful leaves, it hasn’t been terribly rainy, and even when it has rained, I’ve managed to enjoy the melancholic beauty of wet streets and leaves in yellow street lightning. Only during the last two weeks or so has the novembery November been depressingly present, and now the temperature is already dropping fast. Next Wednesday it should be snowing, so I have really high hopes that winter’ll be here soon and replace the darkness with a lovely blue light! :)

Now that I think about it, it’s crazy how the weather has changed in two weeks! Now it’s maybe –3–4°C, and exactly two weeks ago it was +17°C (!!). Of course, it was exceptionally warm then, but still! That Sunday I made a day trip to Potsdam by bike and it was absolutely fabulous. It was my first visit in Potsdam, but unfortunately I still can’t tell you much about the city as it was so dark that I didn’t see much :D And Potsdam certainly hasn’t invested in city maps, so most of the time I had absolutely no clue where I was. I guess that trip was more about the journey than the destination :)

I would have liked to see the Sanssouci palace and park, but as said, it was pitch-dark, so I had to give up on that idea. Well, the main reason I wanted to see them in the first place was the name, so I guess I’m not that passionate about the whole thing :) But I wonder how French names for places always are so sympathetic? Sans souci means “without a worry” – sounds quite stress-free to me :) Then there’s Monbijou Park, where the former Monbijou Palace used to exist: mon bijou means “my jewel” or “my piece of jewellery” – how romantic ♥ The third example that comes to my mind is the park Mon Repos in Vyborg, Russia. (Apparently there is also a palace by the same name in Germany!) Mon repos translates into “my rest”. I guess the normal association would be a place where one relaxes during holidays or something, but for some reason I find that the name has a beautiful and sad tone to it: it makes me think of someone’s last residence before death – the final, yet peaceful rest on earth.

In this melancholic feel I end this post and drag myself to bed for the final rest of this week. Good night, sleep tight.

Recipe: Roasted pumpkin and garlic soup

I made this soup already in September, but it’s still pumpkin season, so I have a hunch it will be making a comeback in the near future.

I love roasted vegetables! Roasting just gives them such an earthy sweetness, it’s absolutely irresistible. Pumpkin is available everywhere for a very reasonable price, and so the thought of a soup made with roasted pumpkin was all too tempting to be ignored. When I thought of roasting also garlic, and of course adding pumpkin’s best friend, sage, I had no choice but to start cooking immediately.

Roasted pumpkin and garlic soup
Serves 4–5

ca 1 kg pumpkin, peeled and cut into even-sized cubes (keep the seeds!)
1 whole garlic, head trimmed off
1 huge onion, chopped
2 celery stalks, thinly sliced
200 gr sour cream
1 dl white wine
vegetable stock
sage leaves
salt and black pepper, to taste

1. Preparation: Place the pumpkin cubes, pumpkin seeds and a couple of sage leaves on a baking tray with a generous piece of baking paper, sprinkle some vegetable oil, salt and pepper over them. Wrap the garlic along with a dash of olive oil in tin foil. Shove the pumpkin and garlic in a 180°C oven for about 45 minutes. Roughly turn them over once, so that they roast evenly.
2. Sauté the onions and celery in a pot.
3. Add the white wine and let it simmer on low heat until the alcohol has evaporated.
4. Press the garlic cloves out of their shells and add them to the pot. Throw along also the pumpkin pieces, sage leaves (maybe 5–6, taste your way through as they can be quite strong in taste), vegetable stock and the sour cream.
5. Purée the soup until smooth; if you have the energy and pedantry you can thereafter pass it through a sieve in order to get a really silky consistency.
6. Check the taste, add e.g. salt, a dash of lemon juice, honey or other spices, when needed. Serve with your home-roasted pumpkin seeds and crispy butter-fried sage leaves. Yum-my!

Sigh, again an incredibly dull and ugly food picture.
Photographing inside at dark sure doesn't bring the best out of the looks of my food.