Tales from a perfectly typical/typically perfect weekend

Everybody has a friend like Magpie. Everyone has THAT friend, the one with the soft leather gloves, the real Coach bag, the wardrobe bursting with knitwear of which every piece is cashmere. The one with the perfectly suited boyfriend; the best dressed couple you know, the JFK and Jackie of your phone book. (albeit, hopefully without the tragic and blood stained pink Chanel end.) While it would be easy to hate this friend we all have, the fact is, we don’t. I know I don’t. I want to. She’s too clever and well put together to not want to hate, but alas, the fact is, she is brilliant. Ere go, we are friends. Berlin and I were lucky enough to play host to her this weekend. I had been very much looking forward to her trip because she understands, mirrors and sometimes surpasses my obsessions with vintage clothes stores and food.

On Friday night we went for dinner at Henne. Henne is a chicken restaurant in Kreuzberg that serves, you guessed it, chicken. Chicken, cabbage salad, potato salad and bread. That is it. For the record, along with beer and remarkable looking men, I am adding chicken to the list of things that Germans KNOW. The meal, served in half chicken portions, is milk fried. Imagine if you will, southern fried chicken, but add the delicious flavour of a roast, some german zeal and you are probably still not able to imagine even 20% of the deliciousness it possesses. We (over)ate our chicken with side orders of kraut and kartoffel salat (best potato salad ever. hands down.) and drank delicious creamy beer from white, girly sized ceramic steins. The restaurant itself looks like the inside of a log cabin, complete with red gingham table clothes, antlers and deer heads mounted on the walls and hundreds of beer bottles lined up on the picture rails.

Saturday was food markets, lunch made almost entirely of cheese, looking at beautiful shiny things in beautiful shiny shops, happening across an American Apparel rummage sale (where all the broken, returned, stained items from AA shops across Europe go and are sold for a few Euros) and joy of joys, a I found a new pair of leggings and a deliciously soft long sleeved (super, super long sleeved – hence its initial return) white vest. We bought apfel strudel, saw some buildings, sat down to eat our strudel near said buildings, coined a phrase (strudel perch: any public spot where one sits to eat something.) At home we had a dinner made almost entirely of cheese (it was a cheese day really) and incredible spelt bread we’d bought at Winterfeld Markt. Then there were bars, tequila, sand on the floor tiki huts and the long and lengthy discussions of Magpie’s upcoming dissertation proposal for her Masters Degree at the loveliest and fanciest university in England, quite possibly the world. (I told you she was clever!)

I won’t lie to you and say that anything happened on Sunday morning. Sunday morning was spent sleeping off the aforementioned tequila. I was woken early in the afternoon by a phone call from my big brother and his awesome wife. (more often referred to simply as 'my sister' but I can't talk about my married brother and sister without veering off into undeserved redneck territory.) If there is anything better than the hilarity of a drunken couple calling you from the eleventh wine farm they’ve hit that day, I haven’t heard it. It was brilliant. I also love that that they get drunk and call me. It’s like I’m their married drunk dial. It fills me with a tremendous sense of self importance. Anymore, after the phone call, we proceeded to get on with the most typical of Sundays: a lazy brunch, meandering around the neighborhood and wandering around the Boxhanger Platz Fleamarket. (Spotted: Art beast selling his wares. Be still my beating heart.)

Then it was time for Magpie to leave. Sunday night transport mayhem ensued and the painless 25 minutes journey to the airport that should have been morphed into a treacherous, heinous monster of a trip that entailed six trains (SIX!!!!), biting nails, feeling a bit sick, making several flimsy contingency plans, obsessive clock watching, sprinting through the airport, begging the staff to let her check in past the allotted check in time, rushing through security, and by all accounts, making the plane.

So. That’s it for the visitors. Berlin and I are almost about to part ways. I leave on Friday. Boo and hiss.