Clarkey Bear to the temporary insufficient rescue!

The First Place We Could Find

(Where I lived after these things happened)

Disclaimer: All characters and events below are exaggerated for the purpose of (my) entertainment.

On Monday 25^th July Eva came home from work, threw her bag down violently on the floor and burst into tears and screamed ‘I have to leave this torturous place!’. As she pulled out large clumps of hair she sobbed ‘I’m loosing my mind! The stress is too much!’

Not wanting to reveal my secret alter-ego as the international Clarkey Bear of intrigue and mystery, I rushed into my bedroom, did that superman thing where I rip all my clothes off and am still wearing some sort of uniform which I imagine know to look something like this:

Then I opened a new tab at superhero speed (in Google Chrome, the search engine of superheroes) and found exactly what we needed. A short term let in Prenzlauerberg! It was available in a week and had two rooms, plus it would only cost us 250 euros each for the whole month. I would have rushed to tell Eva about it immediately, but remembering using my super intelligence that my disguise must not be foiled I changed back into regular person clothes. It took quite a long time actually. And I fell over.

Hufelandstraβe

Eva telephoned the number at the bottom of the advert and before you can say ‘Hi, my name is Eva and I’m calling about the advert you placed online’ (in German), and then write down the details and get a bus and a tram across the city, we were looking around the flat. It was an incredibly cute little flat which the current tenant had been living in for three years. The flat itself was nice enough, but the street is beautiful, wide, cobbled and lined with trees. Restaurants, cafes and second hand shops spilling quirky chairs and tables onto the pavement, tall square apartment blocks above them - similar enough to create a symmetry, but each adorned with a different pattern of balconies, flowers, carvings. Prenzlauerberg is the reason I fell in love with Berlin, and two years later it still looks pretty damn good. (Obviously my photos don't)

It's a street of Kings and less well known superheroes, and I'm sitting in it right now, writing this in a cafe.

The Second Place I Ever Lived in Berlin

In Berlin, you sublet your apartment out all the time to anyone who wants it. If you’re moving somewhere else, you sublet your apartment. If you’re going abroad to study for a few months, you sublet it. If you’re going on holiday for a few weeks, you sublet it. If you’re probably going to be out clubbing until 5 or 6am you give your keys to a stranger on the street so that they… okay, not quite that. Most short-term sublets seem to happen when someone is going abroad/to another part of the country to live for a short period of time – which is great because you’re guaranteed furniture, internet, maybe a TV and probably somewhere that looks pretty good too.

This was not most sublets. In this case the current tenant was ending her lease and moving somewhere new and taking all of her things from the apartment. ALL OF HER THINGS. Obviously this included the sink from the kitchen. Yes, yes, the sink from the kitchen.

Yes, quite. My bed was on the floor. There was a pleasant desk however which looked out onto a courtyard. I could sit there searching for jobs and listening to the beautiful piano music that echoed around the building - one tenant seemed to love playing the soundtrack from 'Amelie', and it made me feel as though I was in a foreign film about a struggling superhero trying to make it in Berlin.

One day, out of nowhere, the soundtrack changed to distressing screams. At first I thought a baby was crying, or that a couple was fighting, but they would last four or five hours at a time and came from only one, adult voice. I never did find out what happened to this wailing neighbour, but after four days she went quiet. I did, however, telephone the police and alert them to her apparent distress. I used excellent phrases such as 'There is a woman who has been screaming, seit, vielleicht, vier Tage'. Well I guess it beats using no German at all?

Still, I think Eva and I agreed that external crazy person for a couple of days beat internal crazy person for two months. And the furnishings just made us feel like struggling artists living in a squat. Albeit a squat we had to pay for.