my 21st birthday: the BALTIC SEA, lasagna and Gluhwein

How is it that the most memorable moments happen when one is totally caught off guard? The best presents are the surprises, what one would never ask for but would love to have. Robert gave me the surprise of a lifetime as my 21st birthday present: a rented car and a getaway to the island of Usedom, on the Baltic Sea. 

Although I wasn’t expecting Robert until Thursday, he rung the doorbell at 7pm just as I was about to head to the grocery store. Is someone dropping off a package?- I didn’t recognize his voice and went downstairs expecting a DHL delivery man. Ah! A day early! I had expected to have a quiet weekend in Berlin, but he gradually gave me more and more information. I was to pack warm clothing, not worry about fitting everything into one bagpack since I could bring a suitcase, bring some good walking shoes, and go with him food shopping for milk, eggs, bottled water, necessities. I could pack some CD’s and movies, bring some books, and plan for about a 3-4 hour ride to wherever it was that we were going. We were going to meet “someone” at precisely noon right in the center of town the next day. I asked ten times whom it was that we were going to “meet”; he responded that he doesn’t know this person, and neither do I. Hmmm… what could he mean by that?

We were packed and ready to go, but we left our luggage in my apartment (fishy, I thought…how could we meet someone to take a trip with without having our luggage?). A half-hour later, we follow an address that Robert had written down to a car rental place. A car rental place?!? True, people we do not know and a good reason to pick up the luggage later! Luckily Robert had his driver’s license with him after all (sort of panic moment there…), and the company ran out of Peugeots (his preferred choice), so they had to give us a B-class Mercedes. With a good sound system, fabulous gas mileage, and lots of trunk space. We nicknamed it Dax, which means “badger”, since it sort of looked like one.

So Robert, Dax and I survived Berlin traffic and headed through the snow-covered fields of empty Brandenburg. An hour later we were in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (the northern province where Angela Merkel is from) and then we were greeted by a sign on the bridge, Wilkommen an der Insel Usedom.

We stayed in a little vacation house near the village of Korosow (not to be confused with Kosovo which I did many times). A short walk away in one direction was the Baltic sea, its calmer, land-sheltered side. A slightly longer walk away in the other direction was again the Baltic sea, but much stormier and with bigger waves. The beach itself reminded me a bit of cape-cod, except that on Usedom dense pine forests began right where the sand ended. Lots of shells, very few people, and general tranquility.

On Saturday we took a daytrip to Stralsund, an ocean town where Bush once stayed for a G8 summit (yes, apparently he goes to those). But more importantly, here is the home of two really important “Ocean-museums” – the Baltic Sea Museum and the “Oceaneum”, both complete with aquariums. The first museum is actually a remnant from DDR times, put together in the 70's I believe, and they left everything exactly as it was, meaning that it was a sort of museum of a museum. For instance, every animal species on display (many birds, some turtles, all things found in the Baltic) were labeled in German, Russian and Polish. Robert remembered going to this museum when he was little with his grandparents. 

Contrastingly, the Oceaneum was brand new, totally high-tech (heavily Greenpeace-influenced movies, cool maps), and had a huge darkly lit room with life-size models of a blue, orca, humpback, and sperm whale.

Germany’s very own Squid-and-the-Whale display! On the floor of this gigantic room they had lounge chairs set up so that you could just chill there listening to whale sounds and feel tiny in comparison to the massive mammals above.

Perhaps the last thing that one should do after visiting an aquarium is eating the pretty fish that one just saw swimming around. 

Well, that’s just what we did. We drove onto Ruegen, Germany’s largest island and a really popular tourist spot (particularly for east Germans back in the day since that was pretty much the only place they could go). We found our Lonely-planet-recommended restaurant in the tiny itsy bitsy town of Binz. We then went back to Usedom to pack up the car again and get ready to leave the next morning.

But finally, I turn twenty one! Six hours earlier than in Boston, too. We didn’t leave Usedom without a first birthday hoorah and a last walk on the beach. The weather had been foggy but peaceful the three days that we were there. But on Sunday December 7th, my birthday morning, we woke up early enough to catch the sunrise. We walked through some forest to a large cow pasture, and finally to the rougher side. We watched the waves for a while, totally overwhelmed at the beautiful scenery on and around the beach.

Back to Berlin, and considering there is no speed limit on German highways we made it to Kreuzberg an hour earlier than expected. When we came home my roommate and her parents, who were still visiting, showered me with birthday wishes. I found that my roommate had made a quark-cake for me in my absence and had bought the ricotta cheese we needed -which is awfully hard to find here- to start making lasagnas. The rest of the afternoon was spent chilling in the kitchen and making sauces to Eliza’s Motown mixes playing on my computer. We ended up with three big lasagnas, two meat and one veggie, a big tomato-mozzarella salad, garlic bread, and I believe no less than 8 bottles of Gluhwein (and of course some Amaretto to go with it).

Fifteen people came to my birthday dinner, including Nancy and her son Jan and my guest family. We drank all eight bottles throughout the night, ate all but ½ of the lasagnas, finished the salad, and devoured the cake. I was glad that no one minded sitting on the floor since we have relatively few chairs in our apartment. Everyone seemed to bring either wine or baked goods, even Kate brought me a Stollen, traditional German Christmas bread filled with sugar and nuts and raisons. My guest family gave me a much-awaited appliance for making Kaese-spaetzle, along with the recipe. Nancy shopped at her favorite store, the Oxfam bookstore in Kaiser-Wilhelm Platz, and gifted me an excitingly cheesy looking novel about the history of Poland, a dictionary to help me learn “Berlinerisch”, and a book of poems written by women in Berlin.

I hate to end this entry on a cheesy note, but I end most of my blogs with some sentimental “looking-to-the-future” sentence… so I’ll just say that I felt so incredibly proud and touched that the people that have made Berlin a home for me all came to help me celebrate the big 2-1. I know a more typical 21st involves a heavy amount of liquor and cheap beer, but I’m very content to save that for my first legal bar-crawl in Boston. Perhaps on New Years…?

Also, thank you so much, oh grand anonymous reader, for the nice Facebook messages and birthday emails. I’m hoping for yet another cake back in Boston, so that I can share it with my Mom, whose birthday was on the 6th. But then again, four-days straight of “birthday” is probably enough for one year.

(above: opening presents; below: quark-cake!)