- Somewhere near the TV Tower in Berlin, but before I saw the tower and the old church and the Marx/Engels plaza, I was walking down a lane with shops on my right and elevated train tracks on my left. There was a restaurant and a Bioladen (grocery store selling natural and organic products) under the tracks. I was curious about both, but I was distracted quickly by the apparition of a nail salon. I took a look at the prices. I tried to remember the words for “fingernail” (Nagel) and “manicure” (Nagelpflege?). Didn’t know for sure, but I looked down at my hands and saw the days-old poor excuse for a full set, and I walked in. I was wearing the same sweatpants (athletic cut!) that.I had worn on my flight over to Berlin from Austin, TX. Lufthansa or United Airlines or both had lost my luggage back in Houston, so I didn’t have many items in general for the first 5 days of my journey. So I walked into the nail salon and said “manicure, bitte”, and the Vietnamese women skittered and talked quietly with themselves. “Hand Nagel,” I said. The lead for the team asked me if I wanted “Farbe” (color), I said yes, and she had me sit and wait. I was wearing black trainers with white socks; black joggers. The tone of the shop was light blue. There was a middle aged woman with short hair and a tattoo getting her nails done. We probably looked alike. There was an older blonde. A punchy and pranky German TV show was on the screen sitting high in the corner wall. One prank was about a city official in a public park gathering on a sunny afternoon. The officials gathered were raising a city flag to commemorate a new sculpture or some other art installation near the public way. The prank was that the politician would get the attention of someone walking by to come and “do the honors” of raising the flag. The unwitting passerby would be asked to raise the flag. In doing so, the flag-raising mechanism would trigger a pole to fall down quickly and hard onto the grass. But instead of grass, there was an onlooker’s little doggie – a Corgie – crushed by the “accidental” fall of the pole. The fake puppy was placed surreptitiously to replace a live puppy while the Prankee was distracted by his duties to raise the flag. The Prankee was led to believe that their support of raising the flag resulted in the death of a puppy. The sort of humor struck me as delightfully ancient – the old bait and switch, the old switcheroo. I was in the Switcheroo. I traded one city for the other, and there I was, getting a manicure by German speaking Vietnam natives, enjoying this Augenblick, because I knew that it would only be a few more days of a finite number of blinks before the city switch switched back.
The author
Ernest M. Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and sportsman.
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