Last Post from London

Like many visitors to London, I've been finding myself endlessly intrigued and amused by the names of the stops on the London Underground (known to a handful of London insiders as the "Tube"). Most stops, such as Westminster or Gloucester Road, have an obvious relationship with their locations and are simply terribly English-sounding without being especially amusing. But some manage to be both impeccably English and amusing. On the District Line alone (which is the one I've been taking most often to get in and out of Kew) there are the delightfully named Hornchurch, Upney, Upminster, Dagenham Heathway, Bromley-By-Bow, West Ham, and Barking stops. Over on the Northern Line there's the ever-popular Elephant and Castle, along with Balham, Tooting Bec, and Tooting Broadway, all clustered in there together like three slightly childish punchlines to three slightly childish jokes. If asked to name a favorite, most teenage boys would probably choose Cockfosters on the Piccadilly Line, or perhaps (among the more imaginative) Shepherd's Bush, which can be found both on the Central and the Hammersmith & City Lines.

I also must confess to taking a certain puerile pleasure in these unintentionally lewd names, a widespread British phenomenon which, as the New York Times recently reported, is by no means restricted to London (thanks, Ely!). But if I had to choose only one station name to take home with me, I believe it'd have to be Turnham Green, just a few stops away from Kew Gardens on the District Line. This is because a) it kind of looks like Turnip Green, and b) when you say it aloud (and if you're the automated voice on the trains, you do this quite often) it sounds like Turn 'Em Green. And that invariably makes me smile.

The newest Underground line is the Jubilee Line, which opened in 1979 and was substantially expanded in 1999. As far as I know, there are no plans to open a new one anytime soon, but if a new line ever is constructed, I believe it should be called the Buffet Line and should include the following stops (at a minimum): Steakfries, Chutney Common, Lambshanks, Chewingham, Burgerloo, Bluebury, Spooning, Curdsenwhey, Mustardly, and Ham-On-Rye. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.

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I was in Berlin this past weekend visiting friends and eating currywursts. This is the second time I've been to Berlin in the last year, and it's very quickly become one of my favorite cities. This despite the fact that (much like London) it was grey and damp and muddy and bleak this time around (less so last June). But even in the sunshine Berlin is a fairly unattractive city, with lots of bland modern buildings, windswept plazas, lots and lots of graffiti, and, in the east, block after block of concrete GDR-era abominations that still manage to oppress the senses nearly 20 years after the Wall fell. Berlin also has no identifiable city center - the Potsdamer Platz is more like a vast, traffic-snarled black hole than a proper urban focal point - and it has serious social and economic problems. But still I love it, and believe I need to spend more time in it. Unlike flashier cities like, say, Florence, Berlin's charms are elusive. It takes a lot of exploring - best done one neighborhood at a time, as my brother and I learned this summer - to find its essence. It's also a city with many different layers of history poking out all over the place: remnants of the Cold War and the Third Reich are, of course, inescapable, but there are also fragments from the nineteenth century and beyond, if you know where to look. Like New Orleans, life in Berlin feels a little tentative, a little improvised, and this gives rise to all sorts of strange and wonderful clashes and convergences.

For example: I went out walking with my friends Verena and Thomas, their new baby, and a couple of their friends one drizzly afternoon after brunch. We passed a spooky old abandoned (or apparently abandoned) circus that looked like this:


Unexpectedly, we then took a left turn past the circus and through a deserted grove of skeletal trees and emerged amidst a bunch of graffitied ruins. They looked like this:

Even more unexpectedly, we then saw flocks of Berliners out sunning themselves (the sun had come out briefly, though it was still quite cold) amidst the ruins. They looked like this:

And then we saw joggers. And children riding bikes. Old women with dogs. It was like they were in the Public Garden in Boston or Central Park in New York, but instead they were in some grubby, boggy park in Kreuzberg. And nobody thought it was at all strange.

(More Berlin pictures are here.)

I don't mean to give the impression that all of Berlin is like this. There are plenty of posh areas, touristy areas, beautiful palaces, and neighborhoods that would look right at home in some Mediterranean seaside town (I had some amazing Brazilian tomato soup in one of the latter, Prinzlauerburg, yesterday). But it's the sort of city that, I believe, repays repeated visits - indeed, the sort of city that is probably better to live in than to travel to - and if I could figure out how, I think I'd do just that.

PS. I found this map of the Tube with all of the station names translated into German. If you sprechen the Deutsch and know the Tube, take a look - it's pretty great.