Bear time: Knut, Knut, ALLES IST GUT!

Jump to Comments

Wow. Just wow. I’m writing this on the train, ensconced in a comfy corner seat on the miracle of ferrovial perfection that is ICE. My original plan was to go to the BordBistro and have a huge lunch but my fellow travellers were quicker off the mark and the Maitre D’ - or Speisewagenuberhauptkontrollman - told me to wait until Hannover. So in the meantime, you get my thoughts, hungry but happy, on the Bear, the Berlin, and the Beers. Knut, for those of you who’ve been living in a shack in the woods, is a wickle baby polar bear whose sad story can be read here. He is very much in demand and several times today it looked as if the cruel hand of fate would stop me meeting his fluffiness. Here is a near-realtime account of my ursine mission, or as I prefer to call it, DER KNUTQUEST.

08.30: Wake up. Realise that drinking champagne until the wee small hours and dancing to underground German electronica in the Ur-kitsch surroundings of Prenzlauer Berg’s finest nitespots was a manifestly foolish idea and may even impair my bear location skills! Crisis.

09.30: Check out of hotel and drink some miraculous German life-giving vitamin juice.

10.00: Get taxi to Hauptbahnhof and check in bags. Scan the day’s headlines for latest Knut-updates. Tell taxi driver I am seeing “Der Bar”. He nods sagely.

11.00: Ask for metro ticket to get to zoo and see the Knut. The Deutsche Bahn lady says how cute he is. Disappointingly they haven’t started making special Knut-passes to the zoo and I buy a normal Tageskarteregeltarif ticket for the Verkehrsunternehmen.

11.15: Get out at Tiergarten station, run downstairs, and into the street. Realise that although my special linguist powers tell me this means ‘animal garden’ it is the wrong station and I should have stayed on to ‘Zoologischer gartem’. Feel a bit stupid and get some lemon fanta.

11.18: Arrive at the zoo station. Ask a trendy Berlin scenester who is parking a bike where the zoo is. He points at the station. “Nein,” I say. “Ah, das Zoo, mit Knut und alle,” he says, the sun glinting off his aviator shades. “Ja,” I say, and follow his excellent directions, as the realisation slowly dawns on me, that no-one from the hippest Replay-clad club kid to the white-haired granny in front of me in the queue is immune to the cuteness of the Knut.

11.47: Buy zoo ticket

11.51: Scorn rhinos, ibexes and otters as I rush towards der fluffmeister’s enclosure.

12.03: Let out cry of “nOOOOoooooOOOOOOooooooOOOOO” which upsets even the hyenas as I learn that Knut is having a nap and not coming out til 2 o’clock! Disaster! Whilst the furry little fellow is being played Elvis songs by his keeper, my day is thrown into disarray. My train leaves at 14.51. Can I risk missing the day’s only connection to Brussels to see a small, fish-eating bruin?

12.04: Clearly I can. Picture the faces of my grandchildren, transfixed with joy as I tell them, misty-eyed, about how I saw Knut.

12.05: Look at the other polar bears. One of them must be Knut’s mother, her heart as cold as the arctic floes upon which she once resided. Give all bears a dirty look so she’s aware of my disdain.

12.06: Decide I have been unjust in my decision to snub the zoo’s other inhabitants. Go for a wonder and realise I haven’t been to a zoo for years. It’s fascinating! Nature is amazing. Consider evolution and the fascinating twists and turns it’s taken. Take ostriches. Birds’ main advantage and their evolutionary USP is that they can fly. They can escape predators, build nests in trees and do all sorts of great stuff.

So why, over the course of several millennia, did ostriches evolve so that instead of being able to fly like their relatives, they can run fast – not a good situation when all the things that want to eat you can also do this, often better – and look really, really stupid? Why have they survived? Why do they have such silly-shaped bodies? Why do their knees bend backwards? What’s going on?

12.50: Buy Knut poster, postcards, but not Steiff bear. That’s just silly.

13.04: Look at ring-tailed mongoose running round and round and round and round and round and round in its little jungle playground cage and think serious thoughts about human existence, or, as Hegel would have called it, a Mungomenschlichzusammenhangdenkbarhietmoment.

13.20: Feel a bit sorry for the big cats, they must be lonely and miss hunting stuff on the plains of Africa. It’s alright if you’re an otter and have a massive water park to play in but it doesn’t seem fair on the lions and leopards. Improve language skills by learning the German for ‘Don’t stand too near the cage or the lion might wee on you’. Heed warning.

13.30: Become aware that rest of zoo is getting emptier and emptier.

13.48: See massive, huge, first-day-of-the-sales size queue. The crocodile snakes round and I ape everyone’s bullish behaviour by leapfrogging several crabby people to get a bird’s eye view (do you see what I did there?).

13.55: Listen to speech about Knut, how he’s doing, what he’s been up to, get told not to scare him.

13.59: He’s coming

14.00: Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! He’s here!

14.01: Experience a sort of cuteness epiphany, a cuddliness transcendence. Nietzsche, I’m sure, would have named it a Niedlichheitursprungdaseinerlebniss – but let’s face it, if old Friedrich had seen anything as cute as Knut, he would have cheered up and become a sort of Teutonic Beatrix Potter.

14.02: Knut follows his keeper round on his hind legs. The keeper pulls his sleeves over his hands so he has big giant paws and they roll round on the ground play fighting. I hear the sound of several hundred people sighing simultaneously.

14.03: Knut, Knut, alles ist gut…

14.10: Realise I have to catch a train in 41 minutes, and that my baggage has to be picked up as well. Panic and get lost going out of zoo. As I leave, I realise the cuteness has affected me and I am dizzy and disoriented. My efforts to escape the zoo are continually thwarted as I find myself at the flamingos again and again and again… Hilfe!

14.20: Get taxi to Hauptbahnhof. My taxi driver, like every single one of his colleagues I encountered during my 4 days in Berlin, was polite, friendly, interesting and kind. Having reassured me that, of course, we would make my train, he pointed out all the embassies we were driving past and answered all my questions about German history.

14.40: Get baggage

14.51: Get train and enjoy seven hours of such pleasant travel, such delightful surroundings and such delicious food it’s a whole other blog entry… Bis bald!

5 Comments

Filed under blue peter, cool amazing, cute, europe, germany, knut, literature, trains, travel