Today I carried my baggage from one part of Berlin to another.  For once I was less focused on secretly filming the moods and behaviours of others – I had too many bags for such nonsense – so I was just a normal or perhaps extra-normal passenger.  I was relieved to arrive at the platform for the metro, the heels of my shoes are paper thin from months of travel across all sorts of pavements (and they weren’t in great shape to begin with).  I dug through my sea of bags to find a ticket to validate.  This validation process involves putting the correct end of a ticket into a little yellow box and waiting for a shuddering thump of the stamp of the time, date and place.  From this point you have two hours to use the ‘system’ to get where you need to go – I hope it won’t take that long.  I’m carrying my handbag, a camera bag, a shopping bag, a green bag filled with juggling stuff, chargers and books, and floating amongst the bags is a jumper and a tripod.  So I’m kind of keen to find a seat on the metro that should be arriving in one minute.  I wonder what the pecking order should be – how old does someone have to look for a girl with four bags to give up her seat.  In Germany not many people seem to be giving up their seats for others anyway.

As everyone piles onto the carriage, I slowly manage to get on.  I spy a seat but it is further up the carriage and as I head towards it, I am hit by the acceleration of the train pulling me back like I’m swimming upstream.  I smile as I enjoy the struggle against this force and how it jolts my body around.  I get to the seat and try to swing my bags around so my girth isn’t impacting on the people to the sides of me.  I don’t quite pull it off and I get a little sneer from the lady to my right.  I will avoid eye contact with her for the rest of the trip.  So we, the passengers, are lined up on each of the walls of the carriage, facing each other.  It feels like these carriages are designed for people watching, but we all manage to avoid looking at any particular person long enough to make any real eye contact.  It’s an art form.  You watch the people who are watching someone or something else, preferable far enough away from you so your gaze escapes their peripheral vision.  In front of me I have a bunch of youngsters/youths/kids/I don’t know what to call them without sounding patronising or like they are up to no good.  Anyway, they have been shopping (or maybe shop lifting and then my use of youths sounds appropriate) and have loaded bags.  There are also two very plain women who keep on looking at the same things, but I don’t think they know each other – they are having a synchronised people watching session.

For one of the first times in Berlin, I manage to get off the metro at the right stop.  I feel proud, but also embarrassed at my previous failed attempts – I impulsively have been getting off the metro when I hear a station that sounds like the one I’m meant to get off, only to find that it was only the first and last letter that was the same.  I follow the crowd, including a few rough looking dogs on leashes, around to the S-bahn.  As I juggle my bags in a much more awkward way than I originally carried them, I hope that the walk is short.  It is. As much as I love the stairs normally, or taking the speedy side (the left in Germany) to walk up the escalator, I relax into my little slot on the slower right side of the escalator and let it do its thing.

I have perfect timing (or the trains come all the time) as the train arrived seconds after I arrived on the platform.  I only had time to have a little look around and spot my imaginary transit romance for this trip.  I instinctively get into the same carriage as him (or maybe he got into the same carriage as me) and I find a seat next to the window.  This time we have a different seating arrangement – four seat booth style – so there are really only two people you look directly at.  So maybe I should explain this imaginary transit romance – sometimes subconsciously I start to imagine little romances with random guys I see on public transport, I know they will never eventuate but that makes them more fun.  I just pretend we are two connected souls that are trying to work out how to show our love for each other on a crowded old metro carriage.  But then we get off at different stops and the romance ends there.  Anyway, halfway through the journey, a man sits down beside me.  I attempt to cram my bags closer to my body to give him more space, but he says something polite in German, so I let it be and he smiles – some Germans can be kind on the metro – das ist gut.  Knowing I have a bit of time on the S7 I have somehow managed, using a very tricky yoga pose (I do believe there should be yoga classes which specialise in awkward transport manoeuvres), to pull out a book and now I am reading.  To make my romance more interesting, another young guy glances down at me, the girl who is surrounded by bags, tripods and absorbed in a book – at that moment I glance up at him cutely but then turn back to the book – he must think I’m one of those disorganised, arty, interesting, intellectual and inte-other stuff too.  How easily fooled one can be on the train.   He sits next to me when the polite man gets off.  This is when I get absorbed in my book and don’t dare glance sideways – whatever happens with my transit romances, the worst thing would be real contact with one of the characters that let my imagination stray.

I should point out at this point, I have decided I’m going to write about this trip.  Perhaps it’s the neurotic parole in the novel I’m reading, or just getting a chance to glance out the window and remember how beautiful things are.  Whatever it is, I’ve started narrating the trip in my head (it was all in the present tense then but now it’s a mix of past, present and maybe even future).  It is the time of sunset and most of the sky is filled with subtle colours, and the light on the buildings is soft and makes everything seem less intimidating – even spectacular monuments.  I am enjoying the colours of the apartment blocks.  Perhaps one day I would like to live in a pink building with white window sills.  From time to time I catch a glimpse of my reflection and the reflection of other people in the train.  I like this mainly because it randomly appear and it is unclear – just when we pass a dark patch in our surroundings I see fragments of reflection.  I like how I get to see people from all different angles and I get to look at them without looking in their direction.

Amongst all this romance and looking around I am still trying to read my book, but Berlin is genuinely intriguing, as is the self-obsessed narrator in the book I’m reading.  I find myself not having enough time on the train to do everything I want as I read and look around.  I’m new to this city and I guess one can get bored of beauty, so maybe the book would eventually win if I lived here.  My stop comes and I get off without excess anticipation.  I leave my window seat and my imaginary transit romances.  I had felt quite at home for a little while there, but I make sure I have all my bags that were surrounding me, and head for the exit.

Berlin – I was told I would fall in love with you, but it’s very hard to fall in love when it has been predicted for you.  So I am still working out what my relationship is with this city that is a mixture of history, beauty and a somewhat laid back approach to life.  It just doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously.

My first impressions of Berlin were from the spacious interior of the express bus from Tegel airport.  I first spotted people riding bikes not too far into my journey, they were so casual and calm it looked like they were floating along – especially when you can only see their top half from the bus window.  Apart from the bicycle lanes the streets looked very hostile for cycling – big roads with no shelter – highways and bi-ways style.  However, as the journey went on, I started to see more ornate buildings, narrower streets and trees filled with beautiful green leaves.  It suddenly felt like a village – a very big villages with lots of incredible buildings.   Apart from my chance to look around, the bus trip also allowed me to discover the no-nonsense, almost stoic nature of the female bus driver.  At one point the bus turned into a road which had roadworks and a truck was parked facing the wrong way on our side of the road so we couldn’t pass.  The bus driver turned off the bus and went to talk to the truck driver to hurry him along.  I guess she wasn’t happy with the idea of her bus being late – Germany has a reputation to keep – so the truck moved out of her way bloody fast.  Although everyone warns me that Berlin is one of the most relaxed cities when it comes to schedules, compared to Malawi, I’d say everything runs like clockwork here.

Now that I have been here for a week, I can safely say I have lost all sense of direction.  I’m not sure if it’s the city, or the fact that I’ve been sleepy for the last week, but on a number of occasions I’ve found myself going in the opposite direction to the way I thought.  I usually pride myself on my navigational skills, but here I am turning maps around (or turning my head around when the map is fixed to a bus shelter) in disbelief while trying to make sense of the streets around me.  Thankfully most bus shelters have maps inside them so I can recheck where I am again and again.  I blame my disorientation on three things – streets that are not quite straight but appear pretty straight to me, metros that take you underground and twist you all around the place before you reappear in what seems like another world, and thirdly long german names for streets and metro stops – with some that start and end the same but have different gobbledygook in the middle.  This disorientation makes me feel a little bit frustrated from time to time (because I cannot go anywhere with efficiency or with any certainty), but more than anything I feel a lack of autonomy.

I am hoping that once I start riding a bicycle this will improve both my sleepiness and my sense of direction, otherwise I’m going to be riding around in circles with my eyes shut.  I feel like Berlin is almost safe enough to do, but don’t worry mum, I won’t try this just yet.

So, my approach to ankara involved a few days in istanbul and a couple on the aegean coast and everyone I met kept warning me about how boring Ankara was.  ‘It’s just a capital city with lots of public servants, it’s a planned city with no history’.  I kept thinking about canberra.  But worse than canberra they said no one rides bicycles in Ankara.  I was starting to feel a little reluctant to get the overnight bus to a place which had ‘car’ in it’s name.  But boring cities can still have interesting transport, and everything is relative – a city in turkey with no history still has castles and turkish baths and museums.

I have now spent a few days in Ankara – it’s the first city of my project with a metro system, but sadly it seems to be lacking a bicycle presence.  It’s a lively city with lots of pedestrians.  There are overhead pedestrian walkways to cross roads, wide footpaths and some pedestrian malls in the centre of the city that are teaming with people.  Having said this, locals complain that not all the pedestrian infrastructure has been well allocated.  I don’t know about this, but I know the council of Ankara likes spending money on things like colourful fluorescent lights in trees and benches in the median strip of a highway (which can come in handy when you have been standing and waiting for a gap in the traffic I guess but not really where I’d want to spend my Sundays).  But however they are catered for, the pedestrians are definitely a force in Ankara.  They have a way of crossing the road which surpasses all others I have seen.  They just go for it, whether the there is a green man (oh, they have awesome animated green men here) or red man, if there is enough of them, they just take on the cars and cause traffic to back up for miles as they refuse the cars entry to the intersection.

The pedestrians and public transport (buses and dolmuses – the turkish equivalent of a matatu) interact freely, with people getting on and off dolmuses (and sometimes buses) anywhere along the road.  The dolmuses will beep at pedestrians to see if they want a ride and they will jump around the lanes to get to a potential customer.  While the traffic isn’t as chaotic as India, the lane structure can certainly be interesting at times, and dolmuses have a way of weaving their rather large derrieres through all sorts of gaps.  Buses can be quite full at times but I have been luck enough to catch the less crowded buses of the ramadan holiday time.  Now traffic is back in full swing I will have to try and my luck on some more crowded transport.

However, I have just made my most significant purchase in a long time and I want to make the most of it.  I bought a brand new bicycle.  The reasons are as follows:

• I want to have good control to face the traffic of Ankara
• I have only seen one other girl riding a bicycle in Ankara so it’s important to show that cycling can be fun and slightly stylish
• Most bicycles sold are children’s bikes or mountain bikes and we have to start getting the bike shops interested in marketing to commuting cyclists.
• I want to have fun and feel good on my bicycle even when facing the hills of Ankara (which I didn’t find too many of today but the locals keep telling me it’s a hilly city)
• It’s my birthday on Thursday and there is a group ride and I want it to be fun

Ok, so I have a bicycle and I’ve attacked the traffic.  No one on the road is expecting you, so being careful of car doors and swerving vehicles is key for survival.  On my ride I couldn’t help but want to give this city some cycling infrastructure or at least a map to help people get through this town.  There are wide footpaths in some areas which could be converted to shared paths, there are spare bits of road in other areas that is currently doing nothing (except when a dolmus tries to squeeze through), there are lots of areas without parked cars, where a bicycle lane could fit.  I also don’t think the hills are that bad, the weather seems nice enough and I’ve seen much worse traffic in my time.  I feel like Ankara is crying out for someone to start a cycling revolution here.  It’s filled with university students and public servants – the same kind of people that are riding everyday in Canberra.  So the plan is to try and plant some seeds in people’s head by getting out and riding this city with a smile for a week.  I might even try and make my own map of different routes as I get better at knowing where I’m going and knowing the quieter ways to go.

So I’ve briefly mentioned matatus throughout my discussions on nairobi, but they deserve more attention than that.  Matatus are such a part of the culture of nairobi and were part of the reason I became interested in the culture around urban transport all those many years ago.  Matatus have such a strong culture around them that it is one of the biggest barriers to introducing any other forms of public transport.  Some people are proud this culture, others less so, but everyone knows it’s there.

First of all, what is a matatu?  Some refer to all buses and vans used for public transport as matatus while others look at it more like goldilocks.  There are the big buses, which are too big to be called matatus and are hence called ‘buses’ (surprise surprise), there are minivans that are too small to be called matatus and are hence called ‘nissans’ (they are all secondhand or maybe thirdhand from japan) and then there are the colourful vehicles which are just the right size to be called matatus and they are hence called ‘matatus’.

Buses have set stops (or stages as they are called in Nairobi).  So you wait, get on, find a seat and then the conductor comes around to collect your money, give you a ticket, and turn the funny contraption that looks like it’s come from a world where bigger and heavier machines were the bomb.  The bus is filled with seats and the idea of standing is left to people hunching is minivans in rural areas.  In most of the buses I caught, the atmosphere was quiet, there was occasional music and there was even sometimes people getting on the bus to sell their wares.

On matatus and nissans the ambience can vary drastically.  There are those for business people that are quiet and serious.  Some people talk I guess, or look at their phones, maybe listen to their own music.  Then their are the matatus that are designed for particular audiences such as students.  Here, noise is essential – and if there is a beat with so much base you can’t feel the bumps in the road – you know it’s going to attract the customers.  People don’t just hop onto any matatu and the touts see that they make enough noise (they call it welcoming to whistle and yell at you) to ensure you choose the matatu they are touting for.  So a matatu stage becomes a bit of a stage as the touts perform their acts of persuasion.  Once you have clambered in, you might be waiting for the tout to fill up the vehicle before you go or if you’re lucky it is almost full (full one meant there was no excess air in the matatu, but now it just means the seats are filled up).

When the music is loud, you cannot talk to anyone unless you shout and everyone just bobs up and down to the music – there are often cushioned roofs – I guess that’s for if your bobbing becomes extreme.  The decorations can mesmerise you for a while – with posters of rappers and general bling lining the walls of the matatus in all sorts of colours.  These decorations and music are more than a way to attract customers, they are an important form of expressions with nairobi, with every nairobi driver taking pride in their vehicle.

I guess at the end of the day, what is so interesting about matatus is what they represent to the people of the city.  Even when they are dangerous and loud, they still have a place in the hearts of the people of Nairobi.  They are seen as part of the fabric of the city.  I guess this is an important part of any transport system and something I’m searching for in cities around the world.