tree making out with building © Lilly Schwartz 2011

A couple of days ago a car was sounding its horn when I was driving by a church on my red bike. The reason was because I had my eyes on the building and not on the street and was starting to drift off the bike lane! Not paying attention to the traffic is not exactly the best idea in a city like Berlin. There are many taxi and bus drivers who just seem to hate people on bikes, so normally I’m really careful when I’m going on the street. Well, if a view makes me not pay attention in the middle of traffic, it’s probably worth photographing I thought and came back to the church yesterday.

What’s interesting is that I’ve only noticed the church then, although I had been going past it on the bike regularly. Probably the light was never good enough to let me notice all the intricate details. A great detail is the ivy that is growing on the building. It is thick like a regular tree and really adds to the atmosphere. I was trying to take a few pictures of the Ivy trunks on the side of the church facing Perleberger Straße but then had to realise that the trunks are too far down in comparison to the leaves and it would never make a good picture. However, red brick stone churches are worth photographing on its own and I got some great shots out of it. The church is on a street corner so I went around it to see the rest of the building and found the spot for yesterday’s picture: The kindergarten of the church.

I don’t remember much from my own time in kindergarten and I couldn’t remember details of the building if my life depended on it, but I remember that the playground had painted car or bus tyres half buried in the ground. I remember also that another kid. out of carelessness or malice, I don’t know, hit me in the head with a heavy metal door. And foremost I do remember the reason why I don’t eat beans today: My kindergarten teacher forced me to eat a whole plate of them, because “We eat what is on the table”. She came to regret it, because the beans made me sick. Ah, the joys of growing up in the German Democratic Republic, i.e. East Germany before the reunification. And beans do make me feel sick to this very day thanks to that lovely lady.