Studies in hunger : Berlin

I felt smaller in Berlin than I ever had before: the Northern Germans are, by and large, a big-boned people, the shanks of their legs are particularly impressive. My language teacher had taken to calling me 'Fee-ona', from the German word for fairy, or sprite; I couldn't reach any of the pots in my billeted kitchen. And I was nervous that evening, as I always am at train stations, faced with the mechanised movement of so many people, so many ways to get swept up and out and along. The station was crawling with football fans headed to a screening of a match somewhere near the Brandenburg Gate and I knew, as it were, that the German trains would run on time.