Bicultural Urbanite Luke
You Can Take the Boy Out of the Climate…
![Me doing my best impression of someone who enjoys Berlin winters. Me doing my best impression of someone who enjoys Berlin winters.](/resources/files/jpg655/teaser_me-doing-my-best-impression-of-someone-who-enjoys-berlin-winters-formatkey-jpg-w491.jpg)
Being an Australian living in Germany who doesn’t really identify with anything quintessentially Aussie can lead to some rather trying conversations with strangers. No, I don’t surf. And no, I don’t have a lengthy mane of dirty-blond hair (very astutely observed, though). No, sorry, I don’t play cricket or footy. And nope, I don’t wear flip-flops (has humanity ever committed a more heinous crime against aesthetics?). And frankly, no, I personally don’t think it’s all that crazy that I’m not really into drinking beer—at least no less shocking than the fact I never rode kangaroos to school in modern metropolitan Melbourne (facepalm).
To be fair, it must be a disenchanting experience for the unsuspecting local or tourist in a Berlin bar to stumble upon me—a pathetic excuse for an Aussie—being so obstinately un-Australian.
My street in Prenzlauer Berg.
| © Luke Troynar
On some nights, I suddenly find myself briefly hamming up a twangy, indecipherable Australian accent to squawk out some ridiculous colloquialisms (“No bloody worries cobber digger, hooroo and shout out to the missus matey!”). This rarely fails to extract a contended German grin of boozy vindication. On other occasions, if I happen to have plied myself with enough long drinks and find myself feeling particularly charitable, I may just go out of my way to assuage the disillusionment more substantially by playing my Aussie expat ace: a confession of my very Australian dread of Berlin winters.
The cold is not my friend
And it’s true. The cold is definitely not my friend. Truth be known, I can’t stand it. And my yearly bills of excess heating costs are painful evidence of the fact. Granted, a couple of months of brisk temperatures at the tail end of autumn and through winter’s inauguration can be endearing—especially if the weather man serves up a white Christmas with all that majestic phosphoresce shimmering around. There is a particular kind of crisp, fresh December day in Berlin, where the cobalt blue skies and delicate snowflakes circling gently overhead can make even the frostiest of grinches coo with glee.![Christmas ambiance in Prenzlauer Berg. Christmas ambiance in Prenzlauer Berg.](/resources/files/jpg656/christmas-ambiance-in-prenzlauer-berg_klein-formatkey-jpg-default.jpg)
I would love to tell you this dark cloud of a Berlin winter portrait finishes with a happy silver lining, but in reality it usually ends with me cancelling plans to stay inside and hug heaters—working diligently on that next utilities bill and planning a balmy holiday escape. So there you have it: despite having a Polish-born mother, a Russian/Ukrainian-born father, plus that perverse unconscious drive to be everything your homeland is not that is exclusive to the expat psyche, it turns out I’m a little bit Aussie after all. Apparently you can take the boy out of the climate, but you can’t take the climate out of the boy.