"Morgen"

FitnessFirst, the UK gym chain, has expanded into Germany. I don’t know when this happened because, like so many things in Berlin, it wasn’t here the last time I was. Suddenly, they are, like Starbucks outlets before them, everywhere.

The nearest location is three minutes walk from my apartment in the Schoenhauser Allee Arcaden, one of many cookie-cutter neighbourhood shopping centres in East Berlin that were built in the naughties yet appear to have been based on communist blueprints drafted in the late 1970s or early 1980s. It is much closer in appearance and content to an updated Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre than to the modern architectural sprawl of, say, Westfield in London.

Perched upon the crows-nest level of the way-too-beige Allee Arcaden is a FitnessFirst. It is roughly the same size, on average, as its London counterparts with two big differences: it’s full of Germans, and it’s remarkably mildew-free. In fact, it is spotlessly clean with not a hint of the cow-herding, get ‘em in, get ‘em out complacent neglect apparent in nearly all of the ‘economy class’ London branches. (The so-called ‘Silver’ branches of London and their conspicuous celebration of British classism are nowhere to be found in Berlin. Ah, Socialism.)

But no matter where they are, gyms are still pretty much the same. Treadmills, elliptical trainers and stationary bicycles are lined up in invasion formation near the front, facing a wall full of flat-screen TVs broadcasting, in this case, completely unintelligible but recognisable content (Even reruns of ‘Die Nanny’ seem utterly foreign, and I wonder if Fran Drescher’s German voiceover manages to project the same annoying nasal honk and irritating laugh. But, alas, I can’t bring myself to tune in with the treadmill sliding away beneath my clumping gait. And who could stomach someone speaking German in Fran Drescher's voice first thing in the morning?). Free weights for the body builders are piled along a wall to one side, and the rest of the gym is taken up by redundant weight machines, mirrors and so on.

People huff, puff, sweat, turn bright pink, squirt water from plastic bottles into their mouths. Hunky staff (even some of the women fall into this category) man the desk, greet members, scan their membership cards and make and sell smoothies. Trainers roam the floor looking for business or urge middle-aged men to push through one more rep. Were it not for the German signage, a standard workout with throbbing iPod in ears would lead one to conclude they were in any gym, anywhere.

There is, however, one especially striking difference.

My first morning at the FitnessFirst, I handed my card to the smiling lump of muscle behind the counter, earbuds blasting my morning head-clearing music, and smiled and nodded towards him as the scanned card landed back in my hand. I rounded the front desk and headed for the locker room with as much determination as I can muster at 7:10am on a Wednesday.

At my leisure, I chose a locker (the gym is remarkably sparsely attended in the mornings, which is why I get up at stupid o’clock to go there), turned off my music, wound the earphone cable around my iPhone, tucked it into the locker and began changing into gym kit. Just then, I detected with the corner of my eye a small man of roughly 50 years approaching. He chose a locker in the row opposite mine, so about two metres away, opened the door, turned his head toward me and spoke the word ‘Morgen.’

I can only blame a decade in ‘everyone to their privacy bubble!’ London for the feeling of astonishment that washed through me. In the London Underground, for example, where strangers are routinely packed so closely together that I can tell those who floss their teeth regularly from those who do not just by smell, a random person can sit on your lap or come very near to making a form of violent, inadvertent love to you and still not acknowledge your presence, either verbally or with body language.

For fun, walk down a pavement in London sometime and play a little game I like to call ‘Count the Corneas.’ I have managed to walk a kilometre or more in London and pass dozens of my fellow pedestrians without detecting so much as an eyelash. We not only do not look at one another, let alone nod a greeting to one another, let alone, dear God in heaven, speak to one another – we regard each other with an indifference that, frankly, leaves the heart a little heavier with each passing stranger. In London, we generally treat each other not with distain so much as egregious social neglect.

Take a ride in the regional trains or the U-bahn or street trams of Berlin, and the world is a very different place. Rarely do school children and adolescents behave in a way that frightens the elderly (and, frankly, me). Never will another passenger so much as nudge you and not say ‘Entschuldigung.’ Nowhere is there shyness about glancing at another person’s face, should that be what you feel like doing. And, oh the humanity, you may even hear short bursts of conversation between people who, seconds before, had never met each other.

After I lifted my bottom jaw off my gym socks, and the dizzying cultural shit storm that so often blows me down in distinctly foreign situations abated somewhat, I managed to open my mouth and say ‘Morgen’ back to the man. I say, ‘managed to say,’ but what really happened was much more cruel than that: instead of an intelligible German word, all I managed to do was issue a croak that sounded more like the first words of the day spoken by a heavy smoker with a throat full of whiskey.

What was so cruel about this was the sudden realisation that this really was the first time I had spoken that day, which made me feel just a bit isolated and alone in the world - but has since taught me that, before entering the FitnessFirst locker room, it is a very good idea for those who live alone to clear the throat, for they may be required, in a very gentle and obviously human way, to come back into the community. And I love it very, very much.