How to spend a perfect day in Berlin

It all starts with sleeping late. I can not sleep longer then, say, 9ish or so. I used to be able to sleep until 1 in the afternoon, but that is ancient past and no need to shed a tear about it. Over! Basta! I fear I am entering the phase my grandmother used to call: "I am old, I don't need sleep anymore." And besides the reading glasses I need now that is the second real depressing thing about aging.

Well anyways, the perfect day in Berlin old or not is still like this: I wake up at 9ish, I go to the kitchen, I make myself a cup of strong coffee (nobody talks to me, thats mandatory, everything else is, well, less perfect, sorry husband, sorry kids) and a slice of bread with my selfmade strawberry jam or rhabarb jam or something like it and go back to bed. Because the perfect day for me always starts with breakfast in bed. I can stay there for hours and read and write in my journal, get lost in my very deep and profound thoughts and solve the one or other essential question, nobody else asks in this universe deprived of any sense. I read May Sartons Journal of a Solitude. Great btw! About truth, gardening, writing...she really shows herself and thats pretty much what I want from a good writer, from a good book. I am too old for pretentious stuff. Thats one of the good things about aging. With those reading glasses you see right away what is true and what is pretentious stuff!
I stayed in bed until 11 and then I looked for a nice summer outfit, because it was HOT HOT HOT last sunday and I went to the Nowkoelln Flowmarkt. I always find something good there: last sunday a skirt for 3€ in dark red with embroidered flowers on it. Its really elegant and yet Kreuzberg and yet me and yet...The Flowmarkt sometimes also happens in the Prinzessinnengärten, which was the case on sunday. Then its called Kreuzboerg not Nowkoelln. Just check them both out. I never went to any of them without spending just a little money and finding the one or the other wonderful treasurous thing. I mean I spent 7 Euros last sunday and got a skirt (as mentioned above), a beautiful shirt for my older daughter and a badger family for my younger daughter (to supplement the gorilla family, the fox family, the elephant family, the icebear family, the brown bear family - and yes, thanks for asking, she is the one loving all animals!). They also have great food and wonderful music.

Since the Nowkoelln Flowmarkt is close to Friedelstraße it was time for me to finally discover one of the best iceparlors in town, Fräulein Frost. I had read about it so numerous times, for example here (where btw I find the best ideas how to spend my money on great food around Berlin), that I felt like totally left out. I ate cherry joghurt, rhabarb and oreo cookies ice with whipped cream and it was fantastic and not too sweet and there were at least 23 other ice cream flavors I would have loved to taste but could not because I was soooo stuffed. I will be back. I swear. Friedelstraße 38 in Neukölln. It is super crowded there, lots of children, lots of parents. My cousin had their spaghetti ice with homemade strawberry sauce. She said she never had a better one, ever. And she is from the rhineland. You'd think she should have tasted good icecream in Cologne before with all their original italian iceparlors there, but she said: no, not that good!

I slowly went back into my neighborhood, back to bed to get over my full icecream stomach, too tired to read or have profound thoughts, I simply napped (an afternoon nap, undisturbed, is also mandatory for a perfect day).
But you  can not live on icecream alone (which is a shame), so as soon as my stomach felt emptier again I started cooking a delicious spring minestrone with my older daughter. While we were waiting for it to be ready I tried the Crow again, in the middle of our kitchen, and I am becoming better and I decided: yoga is not about getting my fingers to my toes but about the way it takes me to get there. As I said before: its all about that the impossible is possible.
The soup is with asparagus and peas and vegetable broth and brown rice in it. The recipe is from this book and somehow perfect in combination with the one or other yoga posture.
The weather was really good and the soup wasn't such a burden to my stomach and extremely yummy.
I had not been swimming all year long, which is unusual for me. We had years when I hit the first lake sometime in early April. The water would still be cold, but it would be good. This year somehow it didn't happen, the weather was like in Siberia and I am just not too fond about hitting a hole in the ice and swimming like some maniacs will do. But the ice has melted a little while ago, even here, even in my homeland of siberia, and it wasn't raining everyday, which was also quite nice. Sunday it was HOT HOT HOT but I did not feel like driving all the way to some lake. Instead I decided to go to the Prinzenbad. When I go there I always go at 5.30 and pay the so called late-swimmer-prize. Right now they close at 7 but beginning with june they will close at 8 so either way I get enough swimming and sun bathing and french fries in an almost empty pool. I love it when I come and most other people start to leave. Each time I am among the ten last people to leave and thats, when Prinzenbad is most beautiful and feels like a true vacation spa or something. The only shadow (shall I call it this?) was that the security people again did not want to serve cocktails to me and my cousin. That would have been the ultimate trip. I think I will make it my mission this summer to convince them to have a little bar up on the security glass tower, just for me and some of my special friends. Its a great outlook, from which they shout via megaphon to teenagers behaving badly in the water or on the slide "You with the black hair, yes YOU, stop trying to drown your little sister and get your ass over here")- french fries and sun downer in an empty Prinzenbad, served by security guards in white shorts. Perfect ending for a perfect day.

© Susanne Becker