The Internet Personified: Like Captain von Trapp

Adventures in meeting new people I

Aug 08, 2024

This might be a recurring (but not very often) series called “Things I Do To Try And Make New Friends In My Forties In A Brand New City.” Which is a little long but I could also go on, “Where I Have No Full Time Job And Therefore No Co-workers And My Grasp Of The First Language Spoken By Most Residents Is At A Six Year Old’s Level.”

Anyway, here I am, age 42, having moved to Berlin three years ago, which feels like a long enough time for one to make some friends and I have! I know a few people well enough to hang out one on one, but some of them are out of town and if I keep going back to the two people left they’ll probably get very tired of me. Besides, a person needs variety. Not best friend material, but at this point I’m not even looking for besties. I want casual friends, people who are delighted to see you (and vice versa), the friendship doesn’t wither away and die if you don’t meet for three or four months and who are also up for a quick drink and a catch up on say, a rainy Wednesday without you having to book them three months in advance (a very German problem.) I gaze at knots of friends moving through the city with envy, how did they get a gang? How can I get a gang? I just want to be part of a group text with a regular spot and have someone say, “I knew you were going to say that.” Maybe I just want to be inside of Friends, but those guys never had room for any new friends, so perhaps it’s for the best. Where would I fit in between Rachel and Monica and Phoebe?

I turn to the Meetup app more often than not. In Berlin, it’s possible to find something to do with strangers almost every single night of the week. Mostly it’s just drinking or chatting, but sometimes you hit gold. Like, for instance, one of my regular Meetups is a book club started by an American woman where we all read one book set in the city every month and then gather at the same cafe to discuss. I found my theatre language group on Meetup—that was a successful one because we’re still friends, most of us. K found a writing group. We both went to a movie night held at a second hand shop down the road. The model has changed a little because you now have to pay to start a group which puts off people who are just doing it for fun. But now that Meetup knows me a little bit, it sends recommendations to my inbox which I always click on.

One of these recommendations was a quiz walk. A quiz walk! So fun! You all gather in a previously agreed upon area and then you walk around the neighbourhood in groups of four and are given questions to answer the clues for which can be found on the buildings. The questions aren’t so much to do with the history of Berlin but, say, for instance, you see an ad for Jo Malone and you’re asked to identify a singer and a piece of music, you’d guess Post Malone, because the clue tells you what you’re looking for.

It was our first time so we were teamed up with two people who had done one of these events before. They weren’t there together, they were both single men—one in his twenties who was chatty and forthcoming and the other in his forties who was decidedly not. We were in Hackesche Höfe, which has many histories, first as a Jewish cemetery and half-undeveloped land, then built up by a Count von Hacke after whom it was renamed, then a predominately middle class Jewish neighbourhood, then ruined by the Nazis, and finally, during the GDR era, reoccupied, and a little later, the large vacant ballrooms and entertainment halls taken over by the Chameleon variety show (which still exists). Now? Hackesche Höfe is gentrified to fuck, full of tourists, beer gardens and steak houses under the arches beneath the S Bahn with designer shops and hardly anywhere to get a reasonably priced meal or drink. I don’t generally like going there because it seems so lifeless, so touristy, but it was designed originally, I mean way back in the day to be a mix of culture and housing which it still is, I guess.

The organiser already seemed tired as he rounded us up. K and I had stopped at a shop to pick up something to drink—quizzes are always associated with a nice chilled alcoholic beverage for me, perhaps because of the word “pub” often before them. I don’t drink beer, so my go-to in Berlin which is a great city to grab a beer and wander around the streets with it, is what the Germans called a wine schorle, probably better known as a wine spritzer—ie, wine mixed with soda. They sell it in bottles here, and as I get older, I find my capacity to drink has gone waaay down and often I’m even skipping the glorious floaty just before you’re drunk feeling and going straight to sleepy. (I found my first grey hair the other day too, so give me a cane and call me grandma, I guess.) There’s also rose cider which I will have in a pinch but my favourite on-the-road drink is a no name brand (they’re so hipster they have no branding) which just labels their drinks: wine schorle (white or pink) or beer. I usually get a rose, but this shop didn’t have any (tourists don’t drink wine schorles) so I found a small bottle of Lillet premixed with tonic. Which is this very sweet French aperitif and that mixed with the tonic made it so sweet that I had a raging headache before the walk even started. No matter. Quizzes bring out my competitive side which goes very against my usual live-and-let-live loosey-goosey attitude, no, I’m like a SHARK and it’s EVERY PERSON FOR THEMSELVES and if my team doesn’t have a winning attitude then I will WHIP THEM INTO SHAPE like Captain von Trapp.

Sound Of Music Captain GIF by The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization

An aside: many Germans have not ever watched The Sound of Music. They haven’t even heard of it. What a national tragedy.

The idea of the quiz walk is not to know all the answers (which would be spectacular for someone like me) but rather to gather them, like so many eggs in a basket from random passers-by. In this way, you meet new people and also talk to strangers, which is supposed to be good for your all-round development or something, I don’t know. My mum does this a lot—talks to strangers and so does K, more recently. I, a person with many interests and hobbies, I’d like to assure you, become completely struck dumb when faced with a new person I haven’t been introduced to with whom I have to do more than ask a question. But it’s not my fault! When I do manage to let the banter flow, people are more likely than not to be exceedingly—how do I put this nicely?—out of touch with the world. Uninformed. Like the young NRI man at this karaoke bar I was at, we were both in the smoking room and he said, “Where are you from?” and I said, “India” and he said, “Oh me too! Except, like New York. Amritsar, that’s where my family is from.” “Oh nice,” said I, I do like Amritsar, “Yeah, the Golden Temple? That’s the place.” And then, in a swift change of subject, “Are you Sikh or Hindu?” Hello, sir, are those my only two choices? Luckily my cigarette was over so I laughed a get-me-out-of-here laugh and said, “Neither, I’m an atheist” and he said, “Oh me too, but I still wear the kada” and I said, “Cool” one hand on the door handle and as I left I thought: a) huh and b) maybe young NRI gents are asking for little thumbnail lectures on India’s multicultural heritage and diversity but you know I have reached the point in my own NRI journey where I can no longer be bothered to give lectures so I just go, “Cool” and I leave. Can I be bothered to educate this person I think often and tediously and so I usually don’t, bored by my own self righteousness as well.

All this to say that the first or second question people ask me is generally, “Where are you from?” and then you wait for whatever will happen next.

I read this article in the Guardian the other day about rejection therapy. The article is quite literally titled, “An experiment in ritual humiliation” so you can see where this is going.

Pioneered by IT worker turned self-help guru Jason Comely, [rejection therapy] began as a card game challenging players to place themselves in the path of rejection (by, for example, inviting a stranger to a game of rock, paper, scissors or requesting a lower interest rate from a credit card provider) once a day for 30 days, thereby inoculating them against fear. Recently, its popularity has exploded on TikTok, where #rejectiontherapy has more than 98m tags, alongside videos of users asking strangers for hugs, dancing alone in the supermarket or releasing guttural screams in the gym

Anyway, the journalist Joe Stone does all sorts of things like asking someone if he can keep their lighter (yes he can), or asking another cyclist if they can swap bikes (an odd stare from the other biker before the light changes.) The thing is Joe Stone also seems, from the many photos of him in the piece, like a good looking well-dressed, well-spoken fellow. I’m not saying our motley crew was unattractive, but let’s just say we got waved away a lot by people who assumed we were begging. There I was in my nice new jumpsuit, make-up on, shiny eyed and there I was getting shooed off. It was vaguely insulting. Actually it was clearly insulting. Finally, after a few rounds of this, I decided to take a different approach. I stood there and waved my phone in people’s faces, sticking one hip out. “Do you know this person/song/place?” I’d ask, rolling my eyes at them like they were my fellow conspirators, “I’m on this quiz walk and so we have to find the answers.” You know, this approach worked one hundred times better than the previous one. People stopped, people laughed delightedly at the idea of a quiz walk, people engaged. It was weird, by adopting an I-don’t-care-if-you-don’t stance suddenly everyone really cared. Even if they didn’t know the answer, they wanted to chat and they wanted to help. It’s the naked neediness that chases people away, which is sad.

Twentysomething, let’s call him Jan, had kind eyes behind glasses and was very tall. His favourite Meetup, apart from this one, was something called eye contact meditation where you stare deeply into a partner’s eyes without talking. You can move around too, he said, and switch partners whenever you like. His method for victory was taking a photo of the question on my phone, and running off into the distance to ask people what they thought. Often he didn’t even stay to figure out the clue on the building. His favourite thing was just talking to people and having an excuse to do so. We’d see him walking towards us, and then quickly getting diverted by some people passing on the sidewalk. “Excuse me, can I ask you a question?” he’d start by saying, holding out his phone. Most folks were kind, which was nice, but no one really knew the answers. He wasn’t really matching the people to the questions, which is something I started doing, scanning the crowd like Joe Stone does, or like any serial killer really. Target acquired. Two women, likely on a date, but comfortable with each other so not a first date, sitting outside a wine bar. They seem smart, and they are, they answer two of our questions. A man walking by with his girlfriend, sort of stocky necked, in a tank top. Let’s ask him the question about the football player. A bunch of teen French girls pass us by and one does a little nod of recognition to the song I’m playing so immediately I stop them and ask if they know this song. “It is Post Malone?” they say in their French accents. Posteu Maloyn.

I ran out of steam though and I’m not saying it was Fortysomething’s fault but it wasn’t also not his fault. Fortysomething, let’s call him Paul, was grumpy from the beginning, arriving late, glancing at us and deciding we weren’t the best teammates he could have. You got the feeling that this whole thing for Paul was a huge disappointment, from us to the questions to the neighbourhood itself. Paul stalked along behind us, occasionally saying things like, “Are you all high?” because we were so delighted at finding the right answer or “This whole team definitely has some ADHD issues” because I didn’t read the question fully before entering my answer. I don’t know where Paul wanted to be, and I wished he’d go off and do the something better that he was obviously waiting for but he grimly kept up like an albatross. He didn’t want to talk to strangers and he didn’t know any answers. The one answer he volunteered obviously wasn’t right but he was so passionate about it and he hadn’t been this enthusiastic about anything so K and I exchanged glances and wrote it down anyway. (Jan meanwhile had run across the street to a busier crossing to find more people to ask his question to.) At the group dinner after, he ditched the three of us to take a seat opposite the organiser and spoke to him for the rest of the evening BUT he walked back to his bicycle with the three of us anyway when we went up to say goodbye. Paul. Such a mystery. His favourite Meetup was a regularly played board game event.

I think they were both lonely—Paul and Jan—but they weren’t my kind of lonely. They wouldn’t be your lighthearted friend who always brings the mood up when they’re around or your introverted quiet friend with a wicked sense of humour who you love taking to group outings because of all the observations they have afterwards. Too needy maybe, and maybe that scared me away.

A fun activity and one I’d do again but on a scale of one to ten potential besties, Quiz Walk only gets a two.

The Internet: Personified

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