Hot chocolate, new bears and in-bus pensioner fights...or, How to not spend money in KaDeWe

October 2016 in "the most exciting city on the planet": grey, cold, damp and miserable. Sometimes, just to mix things up a little, Berlin has added in fog or relentless rain. It's true there has been the odd beautiful sunny day, and the autumn colours have been spectacular, when you can see them, but mainly, the world has been "fridge crossed with swimming pool" as Bridget Jones so excellently describes it in her Diary. And like Bridget, we've been reluctant to go out into any of it. Mel even went so far, in desperation, as to catch a cold, which served as an excellent excuse for spending all day on the warm sofa interspersed with naps in bed.

However, even a cosy sofa can become tedious after a while, and although we're willing to be boring, being bored is not the same thing at all. We consider our options. Exhibitions? No, too full of wet people in steaming anoraks, trying to do culture while getting annoyed with each other. Cinema? Maybe, but we can't do that every day, too expensive! Visiting friends? It's a weekday, and our friends, unlike us, are all doing necessary and important things, like going to work, or picking up their children, or looking after their own incipient colds. Anyway, we need to go out.

Pondering our choices, knowing we have to be careful with our cash, Mel hesitantly suggests, "Why don't we go to KaDeWe? I've never been there!"

"You've never been there???"

KaDeWe, the Kaufhaus Des Westens (Department Store of the West), the Harrods of Berlin, and an institution. Like Harrods, it is expensive, but unlike Harrods, people who live in the city and aren't Saudi millionaires actually shop here. Comfortably-off people, of course. But if feeling poor, cold and miserable...why not pretend to be rich in the warmth and bright lights of a department store?

"That's an amazing idea," I say."We don't have to, you know, actually buy anything."

"Absolutely not," says Mel firmly.

So we wrap ourselves up ("But not too many layers, it'll be hot in there!") and embark on our rainy journey. The bus that goes from outside our house also goes nearly all the way into town, so we grab places on it. But not by the door of course. We wouldn't dare. You have to be very careful on this bus; every day, between around 8 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon, it is the scene of a fierce and - I was going to say silent, but it's actually quite noisy - struggle between feisty Berlin "Senioren", who crowd on to the bus with a calculating, competitive light in their eyes, mobility aids at the ready, to fight their way towards "The Seat By the Door". In their modish berets, snappy wool coats, careful make-up and occasional wigs, the elderly ladies of Zehlendorf instantly assess their chance and go for it...and if they can't get the Seat by the Door, then they will force their way through to an aisle seat, where they can take up their position for the remainder of the journey, their territory over two whole seats assured; try to get them to move over if you dare!

I speculate that this is the result of a particular kind of anxiety, which becomes more and more vocal as a stop approaches - or rather, as soon as the bus departs from one stop, however far it still is to the next one. "Are you getting off here?" they will ask aggressively, should you by any unlikely chance be the one on the aisle. On one particularly memorable occasion, one tiny, wrinkled woman wearing bright pink actually got up from her own seat and sat down on another, younger woman's lap in order to achieve a few inches' improved access to the door. The younger woman was either too polite or too amazed to say anything; but I know who this woman is now, and I stay well away.

Mel has another theory, which she explains to me as we travel along. "They've been through everything, these ladies...war, the Russians, the Cold War, the Wall coming down, reunification, David Hasselhoff...and now they've got their pensioners' passes and their seat on the bus, they're damn well not going to let any young whippersnappers take it away!"

Today, however, a revolution has occurred and the seat by the door is occupied by a podgy, disgruntled looking boy of about thirteen or so. He furtively sweeps the bus with a glance, trying to figure out if anyone is going to dislodge him, but he is so heavily and determinedly sat in this seat that not even the elderly ladies ask him to move.  Perhaps because he looks foreign. But there are whispers all down the bus...until he gets off at the S-Bahn station. Maybe he couldn't take the pressure after all. Anyway, these ladies are, really, the target audience for KaDeWe, as we are most definitely not. "They can be our role models!" Mel whispers and she's not wrong; I have always wanted to be an old lady in Berlin, as unlike English old ladies, they are not often held back by undue politeness or consideration for others. Maybe their often radical politics, underneath that conservative veneer, have something to do with it.


As we get to Wittenbergplatz, the U-Bahn station for KaDeWe, we are almost swept away in the crowd of people making their way up to the shops. But as we exit the station, we stop. A huge, black cloud of smoke is coming from the roof of the Europa Centre, the enormous, and enormously tacky shopping and business centre built in 1965 to prove West Berlin's economic and ideological superiority. We may not have the TV Tower...but hey, look what we've got instead! seems to have been the motto. What we have instead,at least now, seems to be an Irish Pub in the basement and endless shops selling mass-produced teddy bears in Berlin hoodies. Nonetheless, I realise, I would be distressed if it burnt down, for no other reason than nostalgia; it was the first place I found on my very first, too-bright morning in Berlin that was actually open and where I could buy a cup of coffee, go up in the lift and look out, through my hung-over eyes, over the whole of the shiny, glittering city, away out into the place where the buildings blurred into clouds at the distant horizon. And I still love Wittenbergplatz, the most elegant of all the U-Bahn stations.


With that sense of underlying unease that any unexplained event requiring the emergency services now awakens in many Americans and Europeans, we, like everyone else, stand around taking photographs and wondering if a bomb has gone off.  "Nah," decides Mel. "It's just a fire. Who would bomb the Europa Centre?" Sad, but true. So we make our way to KaDeWe, hurrying through the perfumed, golden, mirrored make-up and Chanel handbag section where the crowds are at their height. "Lifts! We have to go up in the lifts!" Lifts in department stores are always cool. Mel wants to see the "whole floor where they just sell shoes." This turns out to be not entirely true, but the shoes they do sell are exciting enough: Jimmy Choos, Manolo Blahniks, DMs and a whole array of designers I have never heard of.  But excitement, like being boring, is relative; a desperate sales girl stands, face carefully blank, surrounded by about fifty boxes and single shoes littering the rug where her customer is demanding to try on yet another pair. In other, quieter sub-departments, the wares glitter on the racks while the shop assistants, with no customers, stand and talk.  I realise I am already feeling slightly sick. "Let's go up and do the food," I urge. Food is always good.

We wander around the floor; no aisles here, but mini-sections for bread, oil, whisky, wine, meat, vegetables, tea and coffee, chocolate, patisserie..Serrano hams hang from strings with huge bowls of olives beneath them. The entire whisky resources of Scotland appear to have made their way here. There is a whole bar that just sells Veuve Clicquot, my favourite champagne (well, the only one I really know, as we kept getting given it at our wedding). The oyster bar is just across the way. We keep moving; no oysters and champagne for us, not today anyway! But here, unlike in Harrods, the food hall is full of Berliners. Berliners having business meetings (female lawyers in shiny heels with sharp haircuts and bright white shirts, eating sausages and potato salad; cautious, grey-looking men with lined faces, comb-overs, briefcases and suits that seem to be drifting apart on waves of alcohol, who may have been coming here since before the Europa Centre was even built); middle-aged couples, he in a rock-star T-shirt, jeans and leather jacket, she with blonde highlights, trouser-suit and more foundation than the Rockefellers; but also young Berliners out for a treat, young Turkish couples, young white couples, Indian families, middle-aged respectable Zehlendorfer couples with hand-knitted jumpers and ecologically sound leather shoes, buying rolls and cakes for the weekend. Somehow, I feel at home.

Moving on from the long lines of porcelain jars that contain any type of tea you could possibly want, I see, around the corner, a giant chocolate bear and a marzipan Brandenburger Tor.  Social observation be blowed. It's time for our treat. "But can we afford a treat?" we wonder. We move cautiously around the patisserie and coffee bars, but they are packed. "There's a space at the hot chocolate bar!" Mel has spotted it, and we are in there. The other guests smile and move over, offering us space to hang our coats. They don't look too intimidating: a couple from out of town with a small boy, a middle-aged lady, probably from our bus. I am right. It is not intimidating. Hot chocolate is only 3 euros a cup and coffee is less. And when it arrives, it is the best hot chocolate we have ever drunk. We all sit in a line, the family, the lady, us, all thrilled to be sitting in KaDeWe, in the middle of Berlin, drinking hot chocolate while outside winter is on its way.

On the way out we check out the prices of a few things, but we really don't need to pay 700 euros for a blanket. We do, however, end up spending something...I buy Mel a bear to help her over the first difficult times of winter in Berlin, and her sadness at a family bereavement, and to celebrate the fact that we are here. KaDeWe is all part of the circus. And now, so are we.