Buying Umbrellas in Berlin
Not your typical travelogue.
At the Christmas market outside of the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, a light drizzle became a deluge. Without umbrellas, the cold rain quickly soaked through our coats. I used the last three percent of my iPhone’s battery to order an Uber ride and my phone died seconds before our driver pulled up.
Back at our Airbnb, we draped our coats over the radiators and looked at the forecast: we could expect rain every day of our trip. We needed better gear. While our clothes dried, I searched online for a place to buy a regenschirm. I found a place roughly 15 minutes away which meant we’d be able to make it there and back in time for our 7:30 dinner reservation. So, with our still-damp-but-not-sopping coats on, we headed to Berlin’s shopping district to buy umbrellas.
For my mom and I, the past two Christmases were bleak. During Christmas of 2020, my father was in the hospital due to lymphoma and because of Covid protocols, we weren’t allowed to visit him. He died a few months later in March 2021. Last year, my mom and I had our usual Christmas morning at home and visited my grandmother at her assisted living facility in the afternoon. She was 99 years old and we all knew it would be her last Christmas; she died this year, on Easter Sunday.
After all that, my mom and I said, “Fuck it. Let’s spend Christmas in Germany.” We planned a whirlwind tour of the country and aimed to visit as many Christmas markets as we could. A friend of my mom’s warned us that, weather-wise, December wasn’t the best time to visit Germany. He said it was cold and rainy; November would be a better time to go. “Cold and rainy” didn’t sound so bad. We’re Minnesotans, after all, and anything is better than subzero temperatures. Besides, we’d already booked the whole trip.
Maybe we were a little naive.
On the way to the upscale-looking department store that I’d found online, we came across a TJ Maxx and decided to shop there instead. We found some cheap umbrellas and, really, I should’ve known what would happen because I’ve had many umbrellas just like it and I knew how easily their ribs go out of joint. But for the moment it seemed like I had what I needed to keep me dry.
We went to our dinner reservation where we tried spätburgrunder — Germany’s pinot noir — and I had fried pike perch while Mom went for the roasted duck. In German restaurants, they leave you alone and don’t rush you to pay, which meant we had a chance to unwind. The next day, we took a train to Hamburg.
In the planning stage of our trip, I said Hamburg was a must. I’ve been a Beatles fan since the age of 11, and I knew that the band’s residencies in Hamburg were pivotal to their success, and if I was going to go to Germany, I just had to see those places.
From Berlin, Hamburg was a short train ride away. On the train, we sat in a “family zone,” and it felt like a massive faux pas, as everyone sitting in the adjacent “family zones” were parents with small children. I kept waiting for some train porter to demand that we move, but it never happened. The German countryside was green and bucolic as our ICE train sped through it, but some of the fields appeared to be flooded from excessive rain.
It was cold and rainy when we arrived in Hamburg, with a brutal wind that sliced through all my layers. I wished I’d brought my warmer coat and grumbled that maybe we had come to Germany at a bad time. But when we got to the Christmas market, I noticed that the locals didn’t seem to mind the rain too much. Twinkle lights winked from the green boughs that lined the roofs of the stalls and a giant tree made of lights shimmered in the wind. The rain may have chased us out of the market at Charlottenburg, but this time, we wouldn’t let it beat us.
Vendors at the market sold everything from wooden Christmas decorations to knitwear. At one stall, a glistening ham with carmelized, crackled skin rotated slowly on a rotisserie. We ordered two rye rolls stuffed with hot ham and sauerkraut. After walking around in the rain, those sandwiches hit the spot perfectly.
I remembered a comment I had seen on a Reddit thread about the Burning Man festival that said something like, “I often spend much of that week wondering why I keep going back because most of the time it sucks, but then something transcendent happens, and I remember why I make the trip.”
For me, that ham sandwich was transcendent. Before you say, “But Burning Man is all about art -- how can you compare that to a ham sandwich?” let me tell you, there were centuries of art and tradition on that rotisserie. I’ll be thinking of it for the rest of my life.
The next day, I thought we were getting a break from the rain. The forecast just called for a little wind. I thought we’d be able to take a little walk to a bakery for breakfast and then maybe visit the water.
No such luck. The wind from the North Sea bullied us with a blast of sleet and ripped my umbrella inside out repeatedly until parts of the canopy hung down like limp lettuce. I tried later to fix it but the cheap metal ribs were completely broken. So, once again, I took out my phone and looked for a place to buy umbrellas. I found a place called Schirm & Co. that sells only umbrellas and set off on my own.
Schirm & Co. had umbrellas in every color, plus walking sticks and flat caps. When I walked in, a woman stood at a table, and it looked like she was repairing something. She said something to me that I couldn’t understand.
“Ich spreche nur ein bisschen Deutsch,” I told her. I think she said something like, “Then I can’t help you,” but with a friendly lilt in her voice.
I looked around and found something that looked tough enough to hold its own against the winds of Northern Germany. I brought it to the front of the store, where a man who was working there told me, in German, that the umbrella I had in my hand was very large and heavy, and suggested a different one.
I wanted to ask whether it was strong, but the only word I could manage was “Stark?”
At that moment, Marcel, the monkey on Friends, could have communicated better.
The man opened the umbrella up and I could see that it was made of higher-quality materials than that piece of junk from TJ Maxx.
“Das ist gut,” I said, feeling dumber every minute. The man said something about how the royal blue umbrella matched my coat and showed me the other colors that it came in. I wanted to say I liked the one that matched my coat but didn’t manage more than “I like…”. Moron, I thought, idiot. You should’ve studied more so you could converse like an adult!
I paid for my umbrella, and the man put a sticker on it with the day’s date. Even though I could barely speak more than a two-year-old, I did understand them when they told me that my new umbrella had a two-year guarantee. Even though I wished I’d learned more German, the effort I had made paid off.
They wished me a frohe Weihnachten and I went on my way. By then, the wind was starting to die down and the sun was breaking through the clouds. The water of Alster Lake looked cold but blue.
“Maybe that umbrella will be your insurance,” my mom said. In the end, she was right. The sun was shining by the time we got to the Reeperbahn and went on a self-guided tour of all of the Beatles’ old haunts.
That night, we took an overnight train to Stuttgart, where the air was warmer and drier. In Esslingen Am Neckar, where we spent Christmas Eve, the skies remained calm as the locals gathered in the morning to drink wine in the town square. And when we returned to Berlin a few days later, there was some light rain but nothing like the frigid downpour that had sent us scurrying for cover.
You may have seen a New Yorker article making the rounds in which a philosophy professor argues that travel is not an achievement. (If you haven’t read the article, I recommend
’s response to it in instead.) Well, maybe going to Germany wasn’t in and of itself an achievement, but damn it, acquiring my Magic Windfighter umbrella in that little shop in Hamburg was.Maybe the trip didn’t change who I am, but feeling like a monkey in that shop for a few minutes did remind me of what people go through when they’re new to the U.S. and learning English. It wouldn’t hurt if a few more people had that kind of experience.
Anyway, now that I’m home and finally have an umbrella that’s better than all the bargain-bin ones I’ve ever owned, I’m hoping it rains soon. It’s dry in Minnesota, after all.
As someone who decided to stay home this year for the holidays, I'm envious of your trip even if it was rainy and windswept. Also being from the Midwest (Indiana), I'd take the rain, wind, and transcendent ham sandwiches of Germany for a week over the grey skies we're experiencing right now and probably will for the next three months. I also am honored to be thought of and mentioned in this piece. Thank you and happy new year! :)