Day 87 – Part 1

A day in cultural, racial, social and lingual studies of an immigrant

Today I woke up at 9, even though it was a Sunday, although I do wake up around 9 every day anyway, when I don’t have to get up at 6:45, as I had booked a tour. A free walking tour of Berlin, which would later be revealed to be a tip-based one, to get to know this city that I’ve been living in for the past three months, better. Bear with me through the language, it gets easier.

So I got up, took a shower, had a turkey and cheese sandwich like the Germans do, with apple juice, and got out of the flat an hour before the tour started, in order to get there in time, like the Germans do. It was a glorious day. The sun was shining, there wasn’t much wind, and almost no clouds in sight. If only those small white fluffy thingies from trees weren’t all over the place and in my mouth…

I took a tram and then an U-Bahn. In the tram, there was a (trying to be socially correct here) mentally challenged young boy sitting with this older man of a different race -supposedly his father- and he was clapping and laughing abnormally. I tried to look at him as I would look at a (for the lack of a better word) normal person. And I secretly give myself credit for it as this is sometimes a challenge because, in contrast, you don’t see a lot of disabled people in Iran as they are somehow omitted from the society.

Then there were two Iranian women in the tube speaking Farsi. This is not unusual as I even hear kids playing and speaking Farsi outside my flat window. But still, I tried my best not to make eye contact and got out -I think- without them suspecting I was a fellow countryman. I got to Brandenburger Tor, 30 minutes earlier than needed. A young woman was waiting with her newborn in the stroller and as she took the baby up in her arms, the stroller turned over. I quickly helped her set it straight and she thanked me.

The tour guide was a middle-aged Israeli man named Nir who pronounced my last name Ghashti. If he didn’t tell us, I would’ve thought him to be French. I have to add that I shortened my awkwardly long, obviously Middle Eastern last name and only wrote the second part of it when registering for the tour. When we got to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, I ironically decided to skip strolling through the monument and have a word with Nir. This was actually because I had seen the memorial two times before.