Landscapes/
Cityscapes

The Mall: International Comfort Zone
by Benajmin Tischer

Parangtritis—A Beach Not Too Far
by Barrie Lie-Birchall

A Glimpse of Hell
by Calum Harvie

Nantucket: Nice Pants and an Attitude to Match
by James Lairdo

Hotel Palacete de Cázulas—A Mansion of Memories
by John Towler

Shanghai Surprise
by Catherine Skrzypinski

Old Orchard Beach
by Marie Logan

Playa Del Carmen, Mayan Riviera
Riu Playacar Resort
by Daphne Wilson

Family Fun in the Forest
by Rosalie Robison

Falling For Charleston
by Sandy Summers

Digging Through Mexico City's Museums
by Robert Craig

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Landscapes/Cityscapes

july 2002

The Mall: International Comfort Zone
by Benjamin Tischer

When thinking of living abroad, few consider the shopping mall. It's the antithesis of all that's exotic about expat living. After all, there is nothing quaint about J.C. Penney, nothing historically significant about a food court's cuisine.

Yet in Germany, I live next to a mall, part of the booming post-Wall economics within East Berlin. It has three floors of shops, complete with discount and gourmet grocery stores, an H&M, a store that sells only socks, a full fitness center, and a post office, among others.

It's amazing in that it's simultaneously familiar and foreign, like some Auntie Mame character you've known all your life who still remains strange and full of mystery. Even though this mall is more subdued than Mame, the metaphor still holds. I visit there at least once every day.

As a teenager in Kansas City, I socialized extensively in malls, casually perusing parachute pants at Oak Tree, searching the discount bin at Camelot Records for the rare Stranglers or Ministry LP. Hours were spent hanging out eating fried potato skins and crab rangoon. It all sounds disgusting, I know. In America, I occasionally felt guilt over this misspent youth. But now, I find myself obsessed with its Teutonic twin. Everyone goes there, no matter what walk of life; it's full of gothrockers, ravers and old men drinking beer at 9 a.m. at the bar conveniently located in the throughway outside the grocery store. There are middle-aged hausfraus laden with fresh sausages and baguettes, posing on the escalator next to leather clad bad boys chatting on their cell phones.

In East Berlin these places are all new, epically huge, and unapologetically rectangular in shape, commerce centers built on the deathbeds of communism (though radical chic is alive, well and for sale; tank tops bearing "Viva Revoluc’on" and Che's Leftist mug can be found everywhere). Schönhauser Allee Arkaden, my mall, whose name translates to "Pretty House Alley Mall," is small in comparison. It contains no department stores, which are somehow deemed un-European, but it still provides a wealth of consumerist territory to explore. Plus, they aspire to all the diversions of a "real" American shopping center -- real America to most Europeans being New York. One only needs to look at the names of the stores (New Yorker, Chelsea, American Classics) and the various "I (heart) NY" and American flag paraphernalia (this season found in a multitude of tight glittery tops) to see that it is our capitalist charms they hope to mimic. In a time when Americans abroad are reassessing our roles as citizens, these simple symbols provide a cheap yet strangely affirming comfort.

Even though the mall is deeply indebted to our way of shopping, there are still many secrets to find, depraved luxuries never before seen by my New World eyes. Household goods come in an amazing spread of pastel tones that ooze with sophisticated Euro-styling. An entire row is dedicated to handheld milkshake mixers. There are gourmet butchers that offer sandwich meat shaped like the heads of teddy bears in varied shades of pink flesh. The sock store offers footwear embroidered with names like Udo, Adolf and Helmut. More than one store offers a crystal Pierrot, which can only be popular to elderly mime lovers and me. The European sensibility of sex is present as well. In the candy store, next to the Pokemon cards and marzipan pigs, are shelves filled with chocolate sexual parts. Nothing is hidden.

Sometimes I imagine myself an explorer on my daily trips, the mall serving as my urban wilderness -- the clothes, like leaves, changing with the seasons. The mall authorities do their best to encourage my voyeurism, forever molting the appearance of the thoroughfare. In my short time as a regular, its halls have been filled with Nascar racers, rabbit montages and children's talent shows. Last week, asparagus punctuated every ten feet, huge piles of soil with white vegetable tips protruded from their loamy depths, traditionally garbed mannequins with vegetable-laden baskets hung on their inorganic arms. This week white pedestals make up the center hall grid, each pedestal displaying a miniature Modernist chair design. The mall workers' ambition sometimes overextends their execution. Last Spring an enormous bounty of daffodils and tulips were planted in the vitrines lining the halls. By the time the flowers were planted in the far end of the arkaden, the first foliage was already wilting beneath the artificial lights.

Despite all attempts, this mall never quite fills the roll of town square, which it has so recently replaced. Unlike its American counterpart, no one hangs out at my mall. There are no movie theatres and few teens; still it provides a more telling picture of the modern Berliner than any of their museums. I have yet to run into the loiterer or tourist there, and I am able to write off my daily spending as guilt-free anthropological research.

The best part of this place, however, is that it allows me to pretend to be German, to fit in, through small everyday exchanges, consumerism as a means of integration. Like a millionaire buying himself political asylum, I purchase in order to belong, albeit my loaves of bread and H&M underwear seem small in comparison, but the point is it works. At the mall everyone assumes I'm a native. No one asks me my feelings on the war or what I think of George Bush. It is a small solace, but I am grateful nonetheless.