Now Is the Winter of Global Discontent
January - April, 2020
We had every intention of traveling in the beginning of 2020, but for the first few months we were simply too busy. Mazz was relentlessly applying and interviewing for jobs back in the United States, with a seemingly never-ending torrent of application packages on top of her regular workload. We had no idea that by the time the dust would finally settle, traveling anywhere would range between irresponsible and illegal.
The only trip we actually tried to take was a last-minute weekender to Switzerland to visit our friend Shelly. She lives in Zurich and was planning on taking the train to Basel for Fasnacht, considered by many to be the biggest and best Carnival celebration in Europe. There was still one room open in the local backpacker hostel and flights weren’t too expensive, so we decided it was a good excuse to get out of town for a few days. The festivities sounded pretty interesting as well: The Sunday after ash Wednesday was the Chienbäse parade, in which people march through the streets at night carrying burning bundles, some of which have flames as tall as the houses. We were warned that any clothes we wore were probably going to get singe marks and burn holes.
Then, the Friday before we were set to go, the entire Carnival festival was cancelled, the first time the festivities wouldn’t take place since World War II. Airlines weren’t letting people reschedule flights for free yet, and the hostel wouldn’t refund our money since we booked “during Carnival,” even though Carnival was cancelled. So, we basically lit €300 on fire in our own personal Chienbäse ritual.
The other trip we had planned to take was for Mazz’s birthday, in which we intended to fly back to Rome, meet up with our friend Giorgia, and drive up the coast to her vacation home on the peninsula near Porto Santo Stefano. It had been months of dreary, cold, gray weather in Berlin, and we were aching for a little taste of sunshine and warm weather. When Giorgia would have to go back to Rome at the end of the weekend, we had planned to spend a few more days in Tuscany drinking wine. But after eating the costs of that failed weekend in Switzerland, we cautiously chose not to buy any more plane tickets for the time being. This ended up being the right move. One week later, right around the time we were planning on chilling in the Italian countryside, Italy closed its borders, and anyone coming back into Germany had to be quarantined for two weeks.
Mazz’s birthday came and went, and the excellent dinner we had in Berlin at Hallman & Klee turned out to be the last time we’d eat in a restaurant for an improbable amount of time. By March 12th we decided to begin our own social distancing, even though the government hadn’t mandated it yet. By the 16th, Germany and all of the surrounding countries closed their borders, and more and more intense stay at home orders were being issued to the public. Still, the people in our neighborhood were slow to adapt: Groups of men still congregated and loitered together, teenagers out of school were having “corona parties” in the park, and no one stood two meters apart in lines. Germans already have a hard time with the concept of both not crowding in line and respecting others’ personal space, so even as of this writing a month+ into COVID lockdown, many people where we live still just don’t/won’t get the concept.
But even though many people didn’t seem to be acting like there was a pandemic socially, others went into resource hoarding mode. Toilet paper, beans, and canned tomato products were the first to go, as early as the 1st of March, and in many stores these items didn’t return until April. Once we began to run low, Kirb went on a jog and stopped in 10 different grocery and drug stores looking for TP and every single place was sold out. At the giant Kaufland grocery store in the Neukölln mall they had filled their entire aisle-long toilet paper section with lawn furniture, indicating to customers that they seemingly never intended to stock toilet paper again.
Thankfully, it only took a couple of weeks for more people to start taking the threat seriously in Berlin and begin to stay inside. The first month locked away indoors has been one of the longest and most unrelenting stretches of blue skies and sunshine we’ve ever seen in our dreary Pacific Northwest lives, so staying indoors has been extra tough. Spring is coming particularly early this year, and all we want to do is be outside, when all we’re supposed to do is stay indoors. Going out for walks or bike rides is important for mental and physical health but fraught with peril, as seemingly everyone else in the city has the same plan, so keeping distance in any place worth walking is frustratingly difficult. Kirb was using this time to get back into jogging, until a Dutch study was released that said running or jogging next to other people basically sprays you with their liquids. Now he’s keeping his exercise routine indoors, even if the current consensus is that the Dutch study may not be entirely applicable or realistic to the current crisis.
So, we spent the late winter doing our part to distance socially: We didn’t see anyone aside from each other, only going out to get groceries twice a week, and otherwise staying indoors like responsible citizens. Mazz worked from home; Kirb sort of did some “work” but mostly found ways to fart around in his jammies.
Here’s how we passed the time.
Learning How to Make Indian Food
When we first moved to Berlin it became clear that we wouldn’t have the same access to the amazing variety of foods we had in Seattle, so we learned how to make a bunch of our favorite Thai, Vietnamese, Sichuan, and other Asian dishes at home. We’d both been wanting to try our hand at Indian cooking for a while, and being locked away indoors for an indefinite amount of time seemed like the perfect excuse. We downloaded two acclaimed cookbooks from Meera Sodha, “Made in India” and “Fresh India,” both of which sounded like good introductions to demystifying the cuisine. At first we were worried that our neighborhood grocery stores weren’t going to carry the ingredients we needed, especially the spices, but then we remembered that one of the four corner stores on our block was a little Indian market. We never really went in there because the beer selection was bad, but now that we require spice and lentil diversity, it has proved to be an invaluable resource. Surprisingly though, the majority of ingredient lists for these recipes can be sourced easily from our nearby German grocery stores.
Indian food consists of a wide variety of goops, and most of the ones we’ve cooked so far start with sautéing onions, maybe with an aromatic like cinnamon sticks or cumin seeds thrown in, and then adding chopped garlic and ginger. After that, there’s probably some tomato or coconut product and a generous pile of spices to guide the train into Flavortown. Goops aren’t necessarily the most photogenic group of foods, but boy are they tasty.
Our experience so far with Sodha’s cookbooks has been overwhelmingly positive. The Cauliflower, Cashew, Pea, and Coconut Curry is a flat-out winner and will effortlessly slide into our regular rotation of dinner dishes. All of the recipes pictured above ranged from good to excellent, with the exception of the Roasted Broccoli with Almonds and Cardamom, which is coated in cream cheese and aromatics before being baked and just tasted…wrong? Weird? Not right. We’re going to keep cooking our way through both books and finally feel like we’re getting a handle on the cuisine.
Trying and Mostly Failing to Bake Bread
For some reason, quarantine turned an inordinate amount of shmoes into upstart bakers, and Kirb was no exception. Aside from banana breads, he’d maybe baked a couple of loaves in his entire life, yet the need to stay indoors compelled him too to take up baking. It took a few weeks into staying at home for any of the grocery stores to be stocked with flour or yeast again; our friends Rowan and Belle had stocked up on both very early on in the pandemic as they knew baking bread and sweets with their small child would be a good way to kill time, enjoy a warm treat, and stay fed. Apparently, lots of people in Berlin had the same idea. Once Kirb got the ingredients, he found a recipe online that sounded easy and got to work. There was some older yeast still in the cupboard, so he figured he’d use that first. The dough didn’t rise, but he baked the leaden clump anyway just to see what would happen. Not knowing it was wrong, he used the oven setting with the fan, and the oven got too hot and the bread burned. The first loaf was decidedly not good, arguably gross, but he ate it anyway out of stubbornness.
Even though he had fresh yeast from the store, he tried another recipe for yeast-less bread our friend Michelle had posted online. Her loaf looked delicious, and Kirb wanted some of that. Maybe it was the box of baking soda he used that had been open in our cupboard for five years, but something about that loaf didn’t quite taste right. It wasn’t terrible - similar to Irish soda bread - and when toasted with butter and garlic salt it was a fine enough thing to eat with breakfast. But it wasn’t a fraction as good as the bread he could just walk across the street and get at the French boulangerie for €2.
A little disillusioned, Kirb decided that maybe he shouldn’t be chasing the perfect loaf. There was another way to make fresh bread that was much more satisfying: pizza dough. Another friend had posted a picture of a cast iron pizza he had made that looked incredible, and linked to the youtube recipe. This time, we worked together and experimented with the process, seeing which flour worked best for the dough and which pan yielded the best crust. This recipe requires cooking the pizza on the stove first before finishing it in the broiler. By the third pizza we had gotten the process down pretty well, and were rewarded with a much better treat than a boring old loaf of bread: more pizza than we could comfortably eat.
Supporting Our Favorite Local Businesses
Small businesses are facing especially tough times, and many of our favorite bars and restaurants have been forced to adapt in order to survive. Though we don’t go outdoors much, we’ve made an exception for trips to buy supplies from local eateries, virtually all of which now offer items to-go. Barra, our favorite upscale restaurant in Berlin, now sells chicken sandwiches and donuts from a counter at the front door. The Neapolitan pizza place W down the street from our house now sells out of a converted window on the side of the building; Motif wine also slings bottles from a barricaded doorway. Lode & Stijn, where we have enjoyed some very good and very expensive birthday meals, is now a grocer for local farms and businesses. They only let one person in the shop at a time, and offer a variety of fresh produce, sauces, local beers, and their outstanding fresh baked bread.
It’s been especially helpful during this time that Mazz is well-connected to local businesses on Instagram, as that is how we have learned the ways in which they are changing and what they are currently offering. One sunny Saturday she saw a post from W about their sister restaurant called the Shed, which had a window selling pastrami sandwiches and natural wine only a few blocks from our house. We’d never seen the place before, failing to notice that it had replaced a formerly very mediocre Italian joint. The Shed’s pastrami sandwiches were killer, with everything made in-house and perfectly balanced. The French wine that the cook recommended for us was exceptional as well, and now we have a new favorite spot in the neighborhood.
Getting Nice Things Sent to the Apartment
The very first thing we did when starting our self-quarantine was order a jamón on Amazon. Things have changed a lot in Europe since we moved here in 2015, and now you can have an entire cured Spanish ham leg sent to your house for €30 without needing to smuggle it home from Barcelona in your carry-on bag. We’ve always felt bad about ordering anything from Amazon, and this time was no exception, but man, we wanted that ham. As news spread about how awful Amazon was treating its workers amid the crisis, and how its owner - the richest man in the world - was asking the public to pay for a fund to support his exploited workers, we decided this jamón was going to be the last thing we ever ordered from that terrible fucking company. We don’t want to be preachy, but you should probably pay a little more and lose a little convenience and not support them either.
When everything sucks, it’s important to treat yo self. Since we can’t travel, go out to restaurants, buy anything in stores, or do just about any of the things we normally do for enjoyment, the best option was to have little presents sent to the house. With Amazon now off the table, we found a solution that both gave us the treats we desired and helped local businesses. MORE Natural Wine is a service in Berlin that sources bottles from a variety of local shops and importers and then mails them to you within the week. It’s a win-win: We get to keep trying new, delicious wines without having to go into the wastelands, and our money is spent supporting businesses who actually need and appreciate it.
Socializing from Afar
Having lived abroad for years now, we know full well that video calls are essential for beating away the isolation blues. When you really miss the people you love, being able to see their faces while you have a conversation - even if only on a computer screen - is a functional stand-in for the real thing. Now that everyone is separated physically, video calls have become much more regular with our besties around the world. Though the conversations are generally some variation of, “We’re surviving,” it is always nice to interact with the people who mean the most to us.
There is something new and exciting in video and teleconferencing that we discovered because of the pandemic, though. We’re always trying to convince our friends to play Catan with us, and it wasn’t until we thought about figuring out a way to play with two separate boards and multiple cameras that we learned the Catan website lets you play remotely with others for free. Even better: playing in person requires at least three people, and though there is always one Kirb and one Mazz who want to play, there is not always a third friend available. In the online version, we can play with the computer as the third player, ruthlessly ganging up on them with the robber and never trading resources the way you can’t with a human opponent you consider a real-life friend.
Escaping to Our Own Private Island
In addition to becoming amateur bakers, we also went full-in on our generation’s other pandemic zeitgeist : Animal Crossing New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch. This game is, without a doubt, the most impeccably well-timed release in video game history, and it is wildly popular for good reason. In it, you control a villager on a remote tropical island, where you build a home, make crafts, pick and sell fruit, landscape, and embark in other wholesome activities. The more you play, the more items you acquire to personalize your island and your home. There is nothing violent or mean-spirited in the entire game, and it is purposefully designed for players to be patient and take their time. Everything about it is calming and relaxing, like designing and maintaining your own little virtual zen garden. The game is wildly creative, provides a feeling of escape without leaving the house, and is actually fun for people of all ages. It’s hard to imagine a video game better suited to succeed in the current, bizarre climate.
This is the first video game we’ve ever actively played together, and we both love it. We are creating everything communally, taking turns passing the controller and deliberating on every new design element. Our character “Boni Raitt” is an androgynous template for all of our gendered and genderless fantasies, and our island, “Chonkytonk,” has become a true labor of love and cooperative creativity. We have put a ridiculous amount of time into this game already, and don’t plan on stopping any time soon. We can’t travel to real places for the foreseeable future, but at least we have our little digital island getaway.
Like many people across the world, our lives are in flux and we have little-to-no grasp on what the future will hold for us. At this point, we don’t know how long we’re going to be in Europe. We don’t know what employment looks like for either of us in the long term. Though we’re both pretty ready to be back stateside with our families, we don’t know if coming back to America in the midst of a crippling economic depression is either smart or realistic. Even before the pandemic, we had been living in limbo for months, and honestly, it has been pretty unpleasant. Now, that uncertainty has stretched out into an indiscernible amount of time. We’re trying not to let it get us down. At this point, there’s not much more we can do than sit around inside with a nice glass of wine and water the flowers on Chonkytonk. What a time to be alive.