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.

Berlin: With friends at the Graphic Novel Day

Needs be done

My visit to Berlin in the weekend presented an unscheduled opportunity to provide some moral support to a few friends of mine at an event they were present for.

I had found out through a posting on Facebook that Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, the publisher of Cassava Republic, Sylvia Ofili (She needs a Wikipedia page) and Elnathan John were going to be at the 15^th International Literature Festival.

Through collaborations with the Goethe Institute in Lagos, Sylvia and Elnathan were working with graphic artists to create two graphic novels based on themes of the boarding school experience and the coming out of a young man respectively.

As graphic as it comes

Before their presentation, we listened to Wiktoria Lomasko’s presentation titled “Opposition with the Pencil” where as a Russian, the recent retrogressive reforms to the freedom of expression in Russia had put people like her in fear and threat of persecution and prosecution.

She and her collaborators had found ingenious ways to critique the system through art and illustrations, it then dawned on us how the stifling of opposition and other voices in the public space in Russia could never be a welcome development in the 21^st Century. The allotted hours was not long enough for her piece which was translated from Russian to English, but we began to understand what forces of repression the Putin government brings to bear on alternative thought.

The Nigerian graphic novel

In their presentation titled Imagined Realities, they discussed the inspiration, drive and collaborative difficulties in creating graphic novels and conveying ideas between cultures and distance that meets the expectations of sponsors and publishers alike, whilst opening up a new interest groups and readerships in Nigeria and beyond.

Knowing Sylvia as a writer of socially diverse topical issues and Elnathan as a novelist and satirist, I was quite intrigued by this new direction of storytelling they were charting, both ventures will be completed within a year.

Significant social media friends

Bibi, Elnathan and Slyvia were friendships I formed through social media from my blogging to Twitter. I first met Bibi just over 4 years ago when she was visiting Amsterdam for a few days, Sylvia was reading my blog when I was in hospital in September 2009, and she sent me a large bouquet of flowers on my first day of chemotherapy, the 5^th of October 2009 then visited me in Amsterdam in December.

We last met in October 2010 in Stockholm. I first met Elnathan in Berlin in June 2015 at Ebe Ano (More talk about that in another blog.) We have met again in London before this new meeting in Berlin again.

After their session, we retired to the author’s tent for a few hours of catching and reminiscing, if they had not been partying too hard the night before, we might well have had another rendezvous at Ebe Ano.

Berlin: The price tag misery in Germany

A drift from purpose

Being exhausted from a number of unexplainable things resulting in lacking focus and losing my drive that I was not being as productive as I would have liked, I had to get away.

It is quite possible that having not yet taken an annual holiday in over a year, I have become lethargic and somewhat listless, the concern of what to do for my 50^th birthday in December is beginning to weigh on my mind too.

At this and I planned at the very last minute a weekend in Berlin where it is very possible all I will do is sleep in my hotel and get some rest whilst the world moves on, invariably, this will not help and it adds to my utter discomfiture.

No sleep for the determined

Yet, I still have some of that sharpness in my rather tired head, I have only just caught up on the sleep I lost for a whole night. Occupied by thoughts, I decided to fix my trusty Toshiba NB100 notebook. It runs an Intel Atom CPU and though it is specified to take just 1GB of RAM, at the point of sale, the shop manager replaced it with a 2GB module and it worked and that at no extra cost.

This was about 8 years ago, then it had Microsoft Windows XP which I upgraded to Microsoft Windows 7 and a few months ago I installed the Microsoft Windows 10 Preview which worked for a few days but the WiFi dongle that worked in the earlier version of Microsoft Windows conked out when I tried to update the drivers in Microsoft Windows 10 and with it an inability to boot up.

Nothing I did could fix the problem, even wiping the system and starting from scratch, so insomnia gave me the opportunity to start with the installation of Microsoft Windows 8.1 Professional and the Microsoft Office 2013 Professional, it was slow, especially the Click-to-run aspect that took almost a day.

Not what it says on the price tag

Anyway, I arrived in Berlin and decided to get a German SIM card for my dual-SIM phone, I walked into the electronics shop, asked for a SIM card and was presented with one that gave me a number of call minutes, a Short Message Service (SMS) texts and 1GB of data.

The SIM envelope had €9.90 printed on it, but I was being charged €19.95, at least that was what was on the till. So, I asked then to explain how they arrived at €19.95, the shopkeeper said he knows, but he could not show me how the figures add up.

I guess this is an interesting difference I have found between the United Kingdom and German, in the former, the price tag attached to an item takes precedent, in the latter, the price displayed at the till takes precedent. I was having none of it.

I got a better deal

For instance, so what happens if you go shopping based on the price tags or on an advertised price and find that at the till you are paying more than what the price tags indicated? The whole reason for price tags is obviated if the price of goods you want to purchase remains a mystery. I can understand if you need to barter, but a shop that uses price tags on goods must always match that price with what eventually gets displayed at the till.

In my view, it was a raw deal, and maybe in jest or seriousness, the shop manager said I will remember them after our exchange and dispute, indeed, I will remember them for failing to prove to me how they came to the price they wanted to charge me, besides, as I told them, I will probably get a better deal in town.

I did, for the same price, I got 5GB data, but the Germans desperately need a Trade Descriptions Act something that takes the mystery of pricing away from the price tag being some guidance that might only be proven at the till where you are probably embarrassed to pay up, because that is the norm – one I will never subscribe to.

Quite eccentric and borderline crazy

Traits on the strange

There is a trait I can find so useful and at the same time quite debilitating, beyond seeing, I have a tendency to observe to the point of obsession, my senses are somewhat attuned to a low-spectrum autistic level that I could combine pedantry with facetiousness without thinking of how burdensomely boring or silly it might appear to others.

On the other side of this, I might see things in a particular way, either rightly or wrongly and fail to persuaded of another perspective, which sometimes means I will rather keep my counsel than give an opinion. The worst part of this trait is when I am quick to react to things I should have been slow at deciding on and slow to react to things I should have been quicker to react to.

I embrace this all as part of my humanity, the successes and the regrets whilst trying as much as I can to improve myself.

Noticing the errors in notices

On my visit to Yorkshire two weekends ago, we stopped over in Leeds before spending the night in York, I saw things I could not ignore. I have a penchant for reading notices, plaques, signs, instructions and much else.

Not that I read to find fault, but where there is fault and you will find a lot of that on my blogs because I rarely proofread my drafts before posting and only get to correct errors in grammar and construction much later, but where I find fault, as I was saying, I cannot seem to ignore them.

In the Leeds Corn Exchange, I found the toilets in the basement just as my bladder was indicating it needed emptying. Having done the business and washing my hands, I was drying my hands when I looked up and saw the notice that seemed to start off well. [Wikipedia]

The Oxford comma and after that it all went downhill from there, normally hyphenated words missing the hyphen, American spelling, phonetical spelling, personalisation and number agreement errors. Three sentences on a notice and these many problems?

Assemble on Assembly Street

The Leeds Corn Exchange is a magnificent Victoria building, we were quite taken by the ornate design of the ceiling and obviously, for modern times there are health and safety regulations to adhere to. [LCE Website]

On the landing of the upper floor, having been through some of the shops, not too far from the vintage camera store, there was a Fire Action notice which anyone should take seriously in the event of a fire. Somehow, this notice looked funny and almost like a joke because the assembly point if we were to evacuate the building was Assembly Street.

On first reading, one would really have thought they got it wrong, however, there really is an Assembly Street in Leeds and don’t mess about if you are caught in an emergency just because the designated assembly point looks unusually funny or strange. I also hate to report that stranger things and crimes have happened on that street too. A woman was raped there in June. [Yorkshire Evening Post]

Teasing shower nipples

Now, onto one of the more bizarre traits I have. The bathroom of our not-so-well-appointed room at the Royal York Hotel had what you might call a rainfall showerhead.

A stationary ceiling fixture that apparently rains on you with controls on the wall for flow rate and temperature. However, this also had rubber teats extending from the metal surface that was supposed to distribute the rain shower evenly.

Yet, as with many shower heads with rubber teats, I cannot help but look at the flow and in that identify which teats are not working or distributing water out of alignment with the general flow because of blockages, usually limescale.

Then I pinch those shower head teats which seems to free them of blockages until all the teats were working. I somehow cannot stand the sight of the water flowing out of the teat out of alignment without doing something to fix it.

You can call that finicky or pernickety, but I end up with a good rain shower and it also shows that no matter who well things seem to be cleaned up, some things are just not up the standard expected. In this case, the showerhead, and to someone with my kind of fixation, well …

Thought Picnic: Losing my religion

A new realisation

My Christian upbringing is carved from that which I have experienced from my mother; intense, intolerant, cultist, fearful, stressful, encumbering and consequently presumptuous.

Compared to my dad whose Christian devotion is borne of reason and reasonableness whilst still being an active level-headed member of the laity, I have now found that experience and knowledge leaves me quite understanding of Christian doctrine and some interpretation without much affiliation.

Yet, I have my own stories of stupidity and foolishness that I once thought were demonstrations of faith and conviction with guilt seemingly tailoring my instinctive schizophrenia that vacillated between saint and sinner after each breath. It was unhealthy.

Losing my religion

The sum total of my religion is now tending towards the agnostic, I doubt I will ever become an atheist or apostate, there is too much superstition primed into my upbringing to be so entirely rational as to be humanist, experience of the unexplainable indicates there are things that have no clear expository words to relay to others of an unencumbered mind.

There are intricacies about interactions within humanity and inexplicable circumstances be they fate, luck, destiny or providence that make up a mix that is captured in the past, playing out in the present and unknown beyond that. We are all the more products of every kind of influence, direct or otherwise, conscious or subconscious, by commission or by omission, even by nonchalance, indifference or accident.

Finding a place of rest

This becomes the mystery of individuality and commonality, the maze many of us negotiate through success, failure and stagnation, it is why I am sometimes close but mostly distant, having relationships that last decades and others I have never been able to advance to any meaningful end in which loss and grief has been suffered.

Also in that is the inability to cherish familial ties well enough, the unresolved and unforgiven by reason of not communicating looms at every point that the big elephant in the room seems to be not measuring up in many ways that do give others a sense of dissatisfaction about me as I try to be unburdened by the expectations of others. It is my kind of keeping a low profile.

Blog - Thought Picnic: Fucked-up, but coping well

And yet

Between depression and hurt, the squabbling amongst those who invite me to take sides rather than placate and ameliorate conflict, I am no more sure of who to hold dear or to love. This leaves a sense of the unfulfilled and the unaccomplished, a grasping for something that seems to be out of reach yet driven by the view that anything is still attainable. I am caught in the horns of a dilemma that brings its own excitement.

All the talking and the therapy sessions are running in my head, my discomfiture is one new understanding of the complexity of an individual, the man you see is just a fraction of the man himself.

I started this blog a few days ago having written the first three paragraphs and this was supposed to be linked to the previous blog, I hadn’t finished the third paragraph before I realised that the link that seemed to be well formed as the inspiration for writing did not seem to so well formed after all. I left this blog where it was and went on to write the one before this with a new line of thinking. I returned to finish this blog with a narrative and ending I never before anticipated until now.

Blog - Opinion: Kim Davis is in jail because she is a clerk, not a cleric

Opinion: Kim Davis is in jail because she is a clerk, not a cleric

She is a devout Christian, no doubt

Kim Davis, the clerk of Rowan County in Kentucky is in jail for contempt of court and I think that is right and just.

The reason why Kim Davis is in jail was because she refused to grant marriage licences to gay couples after she had been instructed by the courts at various levels up to the supreme court to do her duty.

Now, Kim Davis would have us believe that she is a devout Christian and I have no reason to question her beliefs, her convictions, her persuasions or her conscience.

She is also a public servant

However, Kim Davis as a public servant is someone who has a duty to perform for which she is paid and for which she should be accountable if she fails to perform her lawful duty. A public office in civil society must never be where to wage religious wars of conscience and conviction.

I say this because any community setting might have the same religion, but rarely have similar convictions or devotions, the imposition of which can so easily infringe on the rights of those who are not similarly adherent.

When I last checked, the United States of America is a democracy and whilst many might deign to wear their religion on their sleeves, it is not a theocracy, it is not governed by religious books or dogma, but by a constitution and amendments to the same along with a body of living jurisprudence that interprets questions of law, rights, freedoms, liberties, causes, policy and much else.

She is clerk, not a cleric

I also note that Kim Davis ran for office to be a clerk and not a cleric, so for the multidimensional community that she serves, she is duty-bound to treat everyone to whom she provides the service of granting a marriage certificate equally, with respect, with dignity and without prejudice.

Yet, I respect the fact that Kim Davis due to her religion, her convictions, her beliefs and her conscience might well disagree with the law that grants the right for same-sex couples to receive marriage certificates, those elements of her devout Christianity do not automatically confer on her the right to disobey the law, most especially a direct court order commanding her to do her job.

She has every right to do her job reluctantly, grudgingly, even abusively if she is so disposed, but the law must be upheld.

We should not mistake Kim Davis’ tribulation with one that represents the persecution of Christians, rather this is a case of stubborn presumptuousness engendering stupidity and ignorance.

Why we have civil law

There is a reason for civil law, it makes everyone equal before the law and allows for everyone to be judged on the merits, the facts and the arguments properly made to defend a position based on extant law and constitutional interpretation along with appellate processes that can be exhausted to the highest court after which the decision of that court is final and it must not be impugned.

If we have a situation where everyone is allowed by reason of their devotion and conviction to act according to their conscience regardless of the dictates of the law we risk a society falling into anarchy. We cannot have public officials acting on the whim without regulation or conduct, where depending on how they feel, what they perceive, which prejudice appeals to them most or what judgement they have in their heads they serve without any public accountability, but to God alone.

This brings me to a blog I wrote on the matter the separation of church (religion) and state, I implore you to read the blog.

Blog - The case for State law over religious guidance

The state must think for itself

The aptly named Lord Justice Laws made a number of pertinent statements in his judgement, which I highlighted in that blog, one that I find most critical I have copied to this blog.

“The law of a theocracy is dictated without option to the people, not made by their judges and governments. The individual conscience is free to accept such dictated law, but the state, if its people are to be free, has the burdensome duty of thinking for itself.”

Invariably, the learned judge is saying the people need the option to decide who makes their laws and this option is exercised through their judges and their governments, it is only then that the people can truly say they are free because the state to which they belong does not have to answer to anybody else but the selfsame people from whom are selected those who are the judges, the representatives and the government. That is human government in a nutshell.

Kim Davis by her histrionics was trying to take this option away from the people and give it to her preconceived higher power of God, she can do that in her own house as an act of individual conscience, but as public servant, the people decide through their representatives and this is the judge.

There was a scenario in the bible where the rulers questioned Jesus Christ about the paying of taxes and in the ensuing conversation his answer was good enough to send his challengers on their way.

Don’t confuse the renders

“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.” Matt 22:21 (KJV)

Jesus as the initiator of Christianity knew clearly the difference between civic duty and religious devotion. In his answer, one must note that he first addressed the matter of civic duty where the understanding of the rules is clear to everyone before talking of God where that might well be a matter of individual conscience.

I make bold to say that what Jesus intended in his answer was without equivocation that regardless of personal conviction or individual conscience, the laws of the land must be respected. The disarray and disorder comes when certain ignorant religious adherents or extremists confuse the instruction by rendering what is Caesar’s to God and what is God’s to Caesar, sometimes not even knowing what is Caesar’s from what is God’s and that is why Kim Davis is in jail.

Obey or resign

As a clerk, she should have been rendering what is Caesar’s to Caesar, respecting the law and doing her job, she decided to render what is God’s to Caesar and well, Caesar does not trade in God’s currency and technically, that is fraud and frauds go to jail.

Kim Davis in my view belongs in jail until she is ready to obey the law as a clerk who grants marriage certificates to all who are legally entitled to one, including same-sex couples, regardless of her conscience or conviction or she should resign and go home to worship her God without interference from the law or the people.

Thought Picnic: Fucked-up, but coping well

“You want to know how to rip the child out of a child? Fuck him.” [Judgement on Bailli]

Just as crude as it is

Following on from the conversation I started yesterday about the freedom to speak the truth regardless of whether it shocks or it is brutal, the excerpt at the beginning of this blog speaks volumes. It does not have to be gender specific, it applies to all children.

Blog - Reflecting on the brutal rape of my childhood innocence

On the matter of child sexual abuse, I cannot say when I read the many harrowing ordeals others experienced that I suffered anywhere along the lines of what they endured, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Yet, the crudeness of the opening statement does not begin to describe the loss of innocence of a child when exposed to such atrocious abuse and being made the object of abuse without any sense of humanity for the inordinate pleasure of the perpetrator.

We cope, either way

Though some of us who once were victims of abuse have found coping mechanisms to live somewhat well-adjusted lives, none of what happened then is without lasting consequence.

One such consequence for some of us was in getting this early practical and harrowing introduction to sex, we became like suckling toddlers who before being weaned had our diets changed from milk to meat. I covered that issue the blog below.

Blog - Thought Picnic: We Never Knew What a Healthy Sexual Relationship Was Because ...

Carrying on the theme from the introduction, one can in the colloquial say, these acts of child sexual abuse in ripping out the child out of the child fucks up their heads and fucks up their lives and that is the beginning of many other fuck ups that people may not understand.

The signs missed

A usually normal gregarious child that suddenly becomes withdrawn and introverted, performance at school going downhill, unexplained and out-of-character behaviour giving guardians concern, a tendency to unhealthy habits leading to inexplicable addictions – these are usually symptoms of something gone wrong and usually never properly understood without professional help.

Then you begin to wonder why certain children later in life do not measure up to all sorts of expectations of them. Enough mental anguish and energy is expended in attaining a sense of normalcy without being harangued by parent, relation, friend, acquaintance or anyone to fit to some model of responsibility and status.

No more abuse

Yet, many suffer all the more for trying to please from when they were under threat after abuse through to the present time. Not that we give much thought to being let down or finding no protection where ideally there should have been support, succour, comfort and protection, in most cases we harbour no grudges.

However, there comes a time that if the pushing and urging does not stop the ensuing torrent of bottled up emotion and hurt will sweep people completely out of the way like a flood with shock.

It behoves many that these stories be told at a convenient time and that what many may not understand about that others read to be habit and attitude might well be the ultimate act of self-preservation. We might be just a bit fucked-up, but we cope well, however, if you encroach too much on our space, do not be surprised when we firmly say, fuck-off!