So I have moved to Berlin. This came as something of a surprise to me as I had always thought of myself as a life-long Londoner. But for a variety of reasons this is no longer the case, and I’ve jumped on the Berlin bandwagon even though it’s way too late for any of the city’s residual coolness to rub off on me, not to mention the financial apocalypse of the pound versus the euro (WHY oh WHY didn’t I put my savings in Albanian Lekë?) and the fact that being a London refugee in the city of beautiful losers is now more of a Berlin cliché than eating curry wurst and having an ambiguous relationship with humour. 

But it’s certainly not been dull for a moment and I am learning things about Germany, German and the Germans all the time. Most notably that an A-grade GCSE taken in 1993 does not translate to much in 2009. I am one of those dreadful people who comes here without speaking the language, and as a veteran annoying linguist it’s truly miserable for me. Despite my best attempts at somnabulist learning techniques, reading my German primer in the shower and listening to German radio all day, I’m still barely beyond the wie komme ich am besten zum Bahnhof stage. I begin an intensive grammar course at the Volkshochschule next week, and I’m rather nervous (and not just because five hours of German grammar three days a week starting at 8.45am isn’t particularly accommodating of my busy drinking and sleeping schedule). 

But I’d be lying if I said one thing above all else hadn’t struck me about life in the German capital. No, not the dreadful weather (Berlin surely must rank as the only city in Europe with a less agreeable climate than London), nor the so-relaxed-i’m-actually-in-a-coma approach to life of Berliners (which I love of course, however frustrating that makes trying to find a flat to move into in the next two weeks). No. It’s actually the dog shit. How is it that I came to Berlin several times before I moved here without noticing the the city’s streets are plastered with canine excrement? I mean, what is wrong with these people? I thought the Germans liked cleaning up mess? Forget Paris - which looks like a monument to Teutonic cleanliness by comparison - the amount of turd-skipping necessitated by a wander from my house in Mitte to the  U-Bahn at Rosenthaler Platz is frankly like nothing I’ve ever seen outside the third world. I guess it’s just a lesson that few cultures actually live up to their stereotypes quite as much as we’d like, although the huge pile of notarised documents, registration forms and other bureaucratic wonders I’ve accumulated in just three weeks here may yet beg to differ.