My food haunts in Berlin and Paris

My habitude

The creature of habit that I am means I have a tendency to do visit the same places, watch the same series or similar genre, eat the same cuisine and repeat some things without tiring of the experience.

It is like I am comfortable, fulfilled and happy when I find something I like and cannot be persuaded to consider something else.

On my recent visit to Berlin, having stayed in hotels all around the city, I have more recently gravitated to staying right in the centre, Schöneberg, in fact, it would most likely be bordered by the Wittenbergplatz and Kurfürstenstraße metro stations.

Apart from the ease of getting around Berlin from this central location, most of the places I will frequent will normally be within walking distance.

Ebe Ano, again and again

On such place I cannot miss when in Berlin is Ebe Ano at Pohlstraße 52, a Nigerian soul food restaurant that I must say is second to none in all the Nigerian cuisine outfits I have visited in Western Europe.

What it does not have in variety is full catered for in service and passion with what is on offer. The proprietors are a multi-racial couple, the man being the chef majoring in the exquisite stews from the eastern part of Nigeria.

I do the deep dive with a starter of pepper soup or suya and follow that with one of the many vegetable stews that includes any of Bitterleaf, Oha, Ukazi, Utazi, Egusi, Ogbono, Ugba, Okro vegetables with pounded yam, semolina, garri, amala, ground rice or wheat puddings.

Hands and more

The stews are not heavily spiced or too hot for the Western palate, though you are provided a side ramekin of red hot chilli paste, if you want to up the ante.

We go the traditional way and eat with our fingers rather than with cumbersome cutlery, and you will probably see many non-Africans digging in with just as much pleasure beyond the unadventurous rice or jollof rice with plantains and moin-moin into the amazingly exotic.

My understanding is that they have a growing non-African patronage and it is always a pleasure to meet up with friends there. For the taste of something original, different, exquisite, ethnic, inexpensive and delicious, you cannot afford to walk past Ebe Ano without looking in and having a go. I always do.

CDG is an impossible airport

Then, if I do stopover in Paris and have time on my hands, navigating Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) is hellish at the best of times and whoever designed that airport should get invited for tea with Madame Guillotine at the Bastille.

The staff at CDG are well aware of the absolute inscrutability of this airport, my only advice to anyone transiting through CDG is to never be pressed for time navigating this place or you’ll miss your flight. Let me introduce the EasyCDG website which is not affiliated to CDG but is the labour of love of some who knows the CDG is anything but easy.

Getting into Paris

I finally found my way to the RER B trains to Paris with a long wait at the counter-intuitively impossible self-service ticket dispensing machines that up to 70% of the users operated with great difficulty before I boarded the 45-minute train journey to Châtelet – Les Halles in the very heart of Paris.

The station sits beneath a sprawling shopping centre that is being reconstructed, it does have the feel of a construction site with directions a bit messed up apart from the fact that escalators and lifts could be out of order.

Generally, I want to make it out of the Rambuteau exit towards the Georges Pompidou Centre that I have viewed for as long as I have visited Paris but never entered.

Just Café Beaubourg

My rendezvous is the Café Beaubourg [Not a flattering review, but hey!] which is to the left of the centre if you are stood with your back to the centre. This is where I meet with friends in Paris and where I take anyone I meet in Paris for brunch.

The brunch does not come cheap, but the view from a first floor window towards the centre and the square in front of it is one where you can watch the world go by without being disturbed by the charade outside.

It is also a place to reminisce for there I have been with friends some gone away and some long gone leaving me with just the memories and the realisation of how the passage of time brings people through your life like a river flows under a bridge. Sometimes an eddy is created that lasts long enough for one to behold with wonder leaving more than an impression.

Blog - Thought Picnic: A Brunch of Long Memories

These are things creatures of habit are born to suffer, the living and the memory and then a smile and a tear. The moment is replayed in the mind like a film and then we move on from that encounter with the past to be tried again at another opportune time.

Catching up on the times

Back and out

Busy and pressured best describes the last few days at work which began on Tuesday, much having happened and yet we can expect much excitement for the next few weeks.

Who would have thought that on returning to England after 12 years abroad, the job I will have would involve travelling around mainland Europe for the next few months?

Arranging contracts, travel and other essential things was quite frenetic and the day before I went shopping for boots certified for safety – I had grown to love Doc Martens for their comfort but in my house move, I seem to have given the ones I had to charity.

Boots and routes

I wended my way up to Camden Town to the British Boot Company where price, choice, aesthetics, size and design became the battle of do or don’t. With size 12 feet, it was always going to be a struggle to get one that ticked all the boxes. What I eventually settled on was a trade-off, I had to pay well them because the design I really wanted was not available in my size.

Getting home, much as I tried, I failed that test again, the test of travelling light, I still seemed to get more than I needed packed into my case but nowhere near the excess weight I managed to pack a few months ago.

I got help from my nephew to the station and the change at Hammersmith had me asking a lady to please give up the priority seat for my moving on to the empty seat beside her and I was delivered to London Heathrow’s Terminal 5.

Two rotten terminals

Huge and somewhat inefficient I could appreciate the chaos that greeted its opening. There, I met up with an old friend and my new colleague before I passed through customs and security with the need to take off my shoes – the fun in travel is slowing being taken away with these paranoid security systems.

Everyone knows that Paris Charles de Gaulle airport is in need of a radical redesign, it is not user-friendly, it is humongous but badly planned out, I had to walk almost a kilometre to meet up with other colleagues in those interminable terminals and that was just the beginning of the long evening of incompetence on the part of planners  who got our car-hire booking wrong and sent us out to the wrong hotel by which time so late in the night I ended up just avoiding emesis eating a takeaway calzone because our hotel was in the middle of nowhere.

In another story, I will relay how we all moved to another hotel by the third day. Only now have I had the rest that allowed me to run a good soaking bath. Phew! Some will say.

I believe I cannot fly in Nigeria

4 crashes in a year

This is not only cause for concern but outrage, there have now been 11 fatal air crashes in Nigeria since 1995. One can say, the once good air safety record of Nigerian air travel where your could trust that you would get there leaves one in serious trepidation that it is all now more like a getting there on a wing and more prayers than you could mouth as your life flashes before you in milliseconds.

We have lost senior military personnel, precious children, politicians, leaders and everyday citizens to events that are in need of serious investigation and resolution as why air safety records have plumbed the depths of disaster, sorrow and fear.

Hardly a month ago, there was an air crash where senior military officers lost their lives, in the space on just a year there have been four.

There is the possibility that the Sultan of Sokoto was involved in this air crash, however, like all air crashes in Nigeria, we first hear there were survivors, such that history now informs us to fear the worst and hope for the best, till all the facts are out.

Of judgment and action

However, if as it seems, this plane took off in a raging storm and crashed just at the end of the runaway, I can only imagine what foolhardy dare-devilry allowed for this take-off in a tropical storm and the risk analysis that went into this take-off against what might have elicited an alternative expert decision.

That, however, would be speculating on half the facts.

There is a case for grounding all flights in that country with the emergency of getting to the bottom of why these crashes happen from pilot training, aircraft safety, weather monitoring for aircraft turn-around and whether the expert judgment of professionals gets overruled by influential passengers.

I do wish there are many who survived this crash and pray the good Lord grant strength and fortitude to those whose loved one’s perished as they bear their loss.

References

Plane crash near Nigeria capital

Plane with 100 on board crashes in Nigeria

AKO is hardly the best at rush hour

Shopping time for the commuter

In the commuter world, the station is a place where everyone should appreciate the context of time and the instant gratification required by customers to get in, grab something, catch the train and relax in a seat fiddling with whatever was acquired.

I have however come to the conclusion that many shops in Amsterdam Central Station have no idea of the setting in which they are based.

The shops may very well know they have a market but they do not understand their customers, the characteristics of shops in the high street are quite different from those in a train station and very different from those in an airport.

The psyche of a shop

In the high street, you have time to browse and flit around in perpetual indecision till you end up with something really expensive that you never really needed.

When you shop at the airports, the purchases could be impulsive or based on the need to acquire gifts for those back at home – you may not have as much time, but you would hardly be in a panicky rush to get on your plane, except where you do not arrive on time to check-in, in which case you would hardly be shopping.

Corner shops or late night shops are a different genre; they are open until just that time when ghosts have finished putting on their makeup; they are that last refuge to interact with retailers because you have missed the regular shops and just need a quick TV dinner or something that prepares you for the next body engine trouble.

Rush-hour in tardy shops

When in comes to station shops, it requires a completely different mindset and business model – those shops are in premium rent areas, the customers hardly have the time and they definitely want prompt and efficient service, at least, that is my opinion.

For three days now as I have half-rushed to catch my train to work in the rush-hour at because of the newsagents in the station, the experience has left me quite seriously annoyed.

First off all, these newsagents has three shops in the station and somehow have failed to get it right for all sorts of reasons.

A Knock Off

For the want of controversy, AKO [Source: AKO.nl - Online boeken bestellen – In Dutch, the online site of the store] which prides itself as the best bookshop in the Netherlands seems to be failing in its prime purpose at Amsterdam Central Station.

It is almost unimaginable that at 8:00AM in the thick of the rush hour the all the newspapers are yet to be stacked up, at the most accessible store at the East side of the station, half the papers are still on the trolley in cellophane wrapping and chance has it that the one I want is in the pile.

One can go to the West side but the queues are just interminably long, with much more variety, the choices are their to keep you there for longer than it healthy for your heart; further down near Platform 14, the papers are staked up but the price scanner cannot read the barcode, forget the queues, they are long too.

Poor staff management

It is absolute chaos at times, as you find staff that should be at the tills doing other things around the shop and the queues stretch out into the concourse – I would presume the customers have another hour before their train.

In my case, I only have minutes and by the time one has walked to perimeter of the station for what should have been available 10 metres from the entrance of the station, one is almost running for the train – it is utterly beyond the pale.

The other day, they put a greenhorn on the till, he spent minutes charging the wrong price and giving out excess change along with his obvious state of discomfiture, I heard enough of the Dutch in the customer’s frustration when he cursed about how they could have put an inexperienced lad on the tills in the rush-hour.

I do wonder if these stores realise that people who pick up a newspaper really have no time for food parcel queues – in fact, I have seen setups in London where on trust people are able to use a paper dispenser, saving time for them to catch their trains with dignity.

Today, it was the Platform 14 store, a queue 10 deep and just one till available whilst the other staff were stacking shelves with non-essentials, I just could not wait 10 or more minutes to pay for the paper so I put it back.

They can sort this thing out

I am incensed that I ended up having to travel an hour without my paper just because there are three shops in the station that cannot seem to be managed properly with a clear knowledge of their setting.

These shops probably have to open earlier to stack up their shelves in time, they definitely need to have staff manning all the available tills in the rush-hours, the greenhorns should only do the quiet hours, in the meantime they can be stacking shelves if necessary and the prices of all major international newspapers should appear on a price board, just in case the scanner cannot decipher the barcode.

Thankfully, I am not the regional manager of that group of stores, else a good few heads included mine might have rolled for what is just gross incompetence and the lack of attention to the possibility that customer impatience could have lost them a good deal of business.

Not leaving on a jet plane soon

A place off the itinerary

The news is full of passenger woes of not being able to board flights or endless queues at British airports.

A foiled terrorist plot, either intended or imagined, whichever the case, it is causing serious disruption to our way of life and freedoms as restrictions are imposed on the so many who are trying to visit the land of the free – the United States of America.

Somehow, we may never know if these plots would ever have been carried out, but the list of items that have been banned from cabin luggage would make travellers look like refugees who have just escaped a situation with only their shirts off their backs.

No handbags, no glass cases, no liquid medication, baby milk should be tasted by passenger, no contact lens solution, free-range tampons – what is this world coming to?

We soon might not be able to pass urine on the plane as the combination of urine and disinfectants might release noxious fumes.

My advice – cut America out of your itinerary, let them visit instead; then cut air travel out, if you can avoid it. However, this is also a British problem, air travel is no more looking like the fastest means of travel of you are visiting continental Europe..

The domestic science of explosives

Somehow, the banned stuff can be concocted into some sort of explosive to bring down planes, it all sounds like science fiction, and not to say that Al Qaeda seems to be been accorded a status of scientific genius that can use everyday items to create dangerous stuff.

I did not fully appreciate this craze till I went through Schiphol Airport; all the rubbish bin compartments were open and visible, and this was not for the cleaner to empty the bins but as a response to our fear of terror dressed up as being secure.

We need a rethink about all this terror stuff, name-calling and lumping groups together under an Al-Qaeda banner is getting us nowhere, the more we advocate our freedoms the more we lose our liberties to quests for greater security.

Terror mind games

These terrorists seem to create a stampede without anyone realising if the reaction is real or imagined, obviously, democratic governments are adopting more authoritarian slant to governance all in the name of greater security.

The sooner we begin to review the causes of terror and why people take up such despicable causes, we leave ourselves with false sense of security.

For one, the British government has dismissed comments by Muslim leaders that our foreign policies in certain Middle-East countries leave us vulnerable as facile – well, we ignore that view at our great peril.

References

Airport checks 'not sustainable'

Why al-Qaeda's real power may be all in the mind