In a city where so little of daily life feels specifically German, the supermarket is always there to remind you that you’re foreign. Walk into a typical Berlin supermarket and you will first notice that it is small by American standards, the aisles about two shopping carts wide. With space so limited, you may be surprised that your neighborhood grocery store finds room to carry things like chocolate fountains, ladies’ bathrobes, and decorative garden baubles. Approach the supermarket with a shopping list and you will learn how it makes room for the chocolate fountains: by not carrying spinach. Or chickpeas. Or avocados or couscous or chicken breasts or black beans or risotto rice or any number of other things you used to think of as kitchen staples and now learn to view as exotic items sold only in specialty shops.

Cycling or walking through Berlin, one sees startlingly few billboards. One of the city’s charms is the absence of the consumerism-as-barrage that marks cities like New York. On a good day, the supermarket seems to be part of the same pleasing austerity. Nobody really needs the number of products an American supermarket holds, after all, and isn’t a relief not to have to make the number of minute consumer choices the American supermarket demands? (White or orange cheddar? Block, pre-sliced or pre-shredded? Full-fat or reduced-fat? Berlin supermarkets will not waste your time with any questions beyond: Is there cheddar at all?) But on a bad day, when the Kaiser’s in your East Berlin neighborhood doesn’t have any salt, you grumble that these people might as well just go back to communism already, cause they’re really bad at capitalism. A supermarket that doesn’t even have salt! you marvel to yourself on the walk home, your anger dissipating into wonder.

A heavy-set Mediterranean man with salt-and-pepper gray hair taped me on the shoulder and began asking questions about the Anmeldungs form. In broken German with a mottled accent he began pointing at the different portions of my form and mumbling his questions is a low voice:
“and this section, I am not moving with my wife, we’re separated, what do I have to do?”
“Ah, I really don’t know…”
“And here- I just put my new address here?”
“Yes,” When I had helped as much as I could, after glancing at my paper enough times he asked:
“You’re from California?”
“Uh, yes, I was born there.”
“Ohh.- What kind of man are you???!!! You left paradise to come here?!?”
“Well, it’s no ‘paradise’, people have the same problems there that they do here.” “Hmpf.— Really??? Hmm.”
His eyebrows bobbing and bowing as he processes this information.
“Ok, thank you very much.”
He returned to his seat and tells his friend
“This man is from Santa Frandisco in California and he came here, HERE – can you believe that?!?”

Sitting downstairs in the food court of the 205 cantonment consumerplex in Friedrichstraße – I only come here because I don’t know where else to go – between bites of the lunch and the reading of the Tome I’m startled out of my book-induced reverie by a curious sound. “And is it not a fine day today!” A man of decent vintage and wider girth has sat down but two tables away, replete with designer mutt and cut-off Jamaica t-shirt on account of said good weather (the t-shirt that is, not the dog). Taking off his matching baseball cap the aforementioned proceeds to parley at some volume with his imaginary dining partner who, given the choice, would doubtless also have opted for the fish platter combo – which will presently be eaten with some great gusto you bet! Overly fond of the rhetorical gambit, said salt-and-pepper baldy warms to his theme, upping the decibels accordingly. “Glorious!” he declaims to no one in particular. “Capital weather!” he roars, all the while surveying the room in the vain hope that a hapless tourist, passing suit or even errant Tourette’s sufferer will be spontaneously moved to confabulate on the merits of the really rather fabulous weather. Happily, no one’s playing. “Fish!” he shouts, warming to his theme and getting slowly but surely to the matter at hand. The dog lolls listlessly between his glistening-with-sweat legs, no stranger to its owner’s motoric outbursts. Licking his lips in greasy anticipation of his fishy treat, our hero’s eyes fix upon two teenage girls sitting at an adjacent table. “Lovely weather girls!” he bellows; his intended victims’ stoic refusal to play the attention-seeking fool’s game a tribute to studied teenage ambivalence and a preternatural ability to render pensionable lotharios in ill-fitting denim shorts invisible. A kitchen hand collects some plates.

Paul Beatty is the author of three novels: White Boy Shuffle, Tuff, and the recently published Slumberland, which takes place in Berlin. He is also the editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor.

Photo courtesy of Dan in Antarctica