The Perv leaves

My pervy co-worker is leaving today, after a small office party. This is the man who 1° always makes terribly lewd jokes I don't understand in my general direction.
2° squeezes, strokes and squishels his female collegues as a jest.
3°once cornered me in an elevator and playfully grabbed my bottom.

Now he is going away for good.

"Slap him", says my boyfriend. "Let him get drunk at his own party, make bad jokes, and when he tries to touch you or anyone else, slap him."

"Throw a drink on him."

"Tell him his behaviour is unacceptable."

I think I will talk to him. Tell him it's not funny when you don't understand the language perfectly. That it's awkward when you're an intern and he works there. And more than that, that touching people without their consent is appalling behaviour.

My French colleague told me with a Gallic shrug: "Let's hope for him he never works in America."

Yes indeed.

raining all the time

Don't know why
There's no sun up in the sky
Stormy weather
Since my man and I ain't together
Keeps raining all the time...

I love that song, especially sung by Lena Horne.

RAIN RAIN RAIN.

Random news and bits and pieces:

Only 5 weeks left in Berlin then I'm going back home...It went by really fast. Now I have guests every weekend, will try to keep up with my friendships here and a lot of lobbying work to do. We shall see.

Planning to spend NYE in Venice. I never celebrate NYE, being so stuffed at Christmas I need a week to recover from indigestion. My grandmother was always the soul of Christmas for me, so this year should be very different, and quite sad. Maybe I should start celebrating NYE!

My grandfather is not doing well at all. My mother is not sure he will still be with us in November, but if he is, I will probably go to London to help take care of him or do daily visits at the hospital. I hope I will see him. I have great affection for him.

I'm looking for good American fiction to read, can anyone recommend something contemporary?

And with this, I go forth through the rain.

A diamond as big as the Ritz

An old picture of me which is the closest I can get to the EAT PRAY LOVE look. The "I look so natural and free-spirited! When in fact I took hours to find this flattering angle!"



Last night I was tired after work and decided to go see a shitty movie. That movie turned out to be Eat Pray Love. I had listened to the book while running and not really gotten into the whole guru-following, yoga-practicing balooney idea that spirituality was something you could wilfully acquire. Anyway, I just wanted to see Javier Bardem and James Franco.
It turned out to be the film première, and to celebrate it, some German magazine called HAPPY had organised for glasses of sparkly wine to be distributed around. All the women in the theatre were rather tipsy then, and giggled extremely loudly. I struck up a conversation with my two neighbours, who were speaking bad French to each other, and we quickly decided that we liked each other. Funny how that works.

So the movie was very depressing. BEAUTIFUL LANDSCAPES...JULIA ROBERTS AND HER GIGANTIC MOUTH...Finally some Javier Bardem.

The story of Liz Gilbert is supremely relatable. I suffer from depression, I know almost no one who hasn't felt trapped in their lives at least once, this is good material. I may hate the mumbo jumbo of the ashram episode, but I could certainly respond to her other themes. Food is my antidepressant of choice...

When I left the movie house, I felt very unhappy. Vividly unhappy for the first time in months. I simply did not want to go home. Going home meant going to sleep, and that meant coming closer to waking up and going to work. I decided to drink a cocktail at the Ritz.

The Ritz Hotel in Berlin is right behind the Sony Centre and Potsdamer Platz, formerly known as No Man's Land. It's now a land of hotels and office space. I swept inside and ordered a Virgin Berlin. My bike was waiting outside and I don't drink and drive...

It was a perfectly soothing experience. Lavish, extravagant, dumb. Sipping my 11 Euro cocktail, I sank into the thick leather bar stool. I think I waited for an hour for my melancholy to go away.

Years ago my sister and I would sometimes dine with our grandfather at the Ritz for Christmas. We would wear our nicest clothes and people watch: older men with ravishing young women, plastically enhanced bimbos, and the occasional family treat scene, like us.

I miss my sister so much. Sipping my Virgin Berlin, trying not to go home, feeling low, I thought of her in America, and felt strangely comforted.

I rode home gently, feeling at peace.

A wonderful spiritual experience A nice drink in a nice bar is sometimes all it takes.

Sex in Berlin

I know why people read this blog...Because of the sex. Well, I am here to pander to those so-called baser instincts. I visited the Museum of Eroticism in Berlin, and boy have I learned stuff.

The museum is mostly about pedagogical information. Confusingly, it also presents a collection of antique erotica and paraphenalia. There's a sex shop on the ground floor with very nice and helpful salesladies, in case you didn't understand the exhibition section on toys.



An 18th century dildo, in ivory. It's very decorative!



The BDSM section was not very informative. It was mostly a photo op ploy, with sniggering tourists taking pictures of themselves within or around the contraptions. I didn't like the way this was shown at all.




As usual, my photos are atrocious but to be fair, the lighting was bad.



The two great things about the informative sections were how homosexual sex was always included in the videos, not as a separate thing. So for "kissing" or "erotic massage" you would see gay couples as well as straight ones. There were interracial couples shown as well. A whole wall of plaster molds of penises and vaginas was titled "every size is right" which I also thought a good message. Surprisingly the snickering tourists usually went silent in front of the wall, maybe busy comparing themselves to the different models.

A safe sex video was well-made, with STD descriptions and a catalogue of symptoms. Very non-judgemental.

Finally, a bit of hands-on action with the following photo where you can see a German incitation to look for and feel the G-spot. Two mannequins with realistic inner body parts were shown, one for women and one for men. I enjoyed how sheepish the tourists look when looking for where the prostate was. For all their swagger, they seemed very ignorant.






This was about how nature looks sexual. Cue pictures of rocks.

Finally, a bit of information on how to understand men and women. The museum really went against the usual clichés, and refusing the submissive woman/aggressive man dichotomy.

All in all, I thought the museum was odd but useful in its way. People go there for the giggle factor but will probably leave slightly less clueless.

Office talk: what makes a relationship work

Oh look, a sweet strawberry stand. They are all over the place in this season. Just give two euros to the nice strawberry people, and eat your Erdbeeren in the subway. Sommer in Berlin!

Let me rephrase that.

What makes a relationship work?

First of all, I'm never quite sure how you're supposed to understand the word "work" in this context. Is a working relationship one that lasts forever? Doubtful, no? Because I'm sure that we've all had relationships that did not last but which could be defined as having worked.

(Just typing the word relationship makes me think about my sister who mocks my "serial monogamy" and I miss her so much even summer strawberries can't really compensate)

I've been thinking a lot about this topic because ever since I've become a German working girl, I've been listening to my co-workers chat. And boy do they chat. And they chat about relationships. Men. Break-ups.

It's like a wave of stereotypical oestrogen; it's like I've become one of the GIRLZ: braid my hair! tell me about how your boyfriend encourages you to diet! und so weiter!

So all they do is complain about their relationships. None of them work, yet they stay in these apparently miserable unions, bitching and bitching about how boring/predictable/slobby/bad in bed their Männer are.

So once in a while I'll open my trap and ask the question: why do you stay?

Maybe what makes a relationship work is realizing that nothing is perfect, as one co-worker told me. "Of course, it's not perfect. But it's better than many other relationships I know. At least he respects me."

Or maybe it's shared passions, like the co-worker who is a photography geek like her boyfriend.

Or maybe just fear of the unknown.

I have no idea what makes a relationship work. I know what worked in all my past relationships: learning how to become an adult with someone you trust, discovering adventure and passion with someone you admire.

When the nosy and nice co-workers quizz me I can tell them about my past. I like remembering the funny, teenage years with H and the thrilling, rollercoaster years with X.

So I can talk about that, but not about my boyfriend. Not about how I feel, how it feels. Because it's all so fragile for the moment. Life is so fragile at the moment.