Oh KaDeWe!

The Kaufhaus Des Westens earns its place in the Top 25 Things To Do in my guidebook. Bigger than Harrods, and on a Saturday afternoon, nearly as stressful, it was created to demonstrate the wonders of the Western World to the ‘one fizzy-drink, and you’ll like it’ East Germans down the road. And as we know, there’s no better way to demonstrate your freedom than by buying.

Known to locals as the KaDeWe, it has acres of perfumes, chocolates, bags and jewellery as well as all the fashion brands that make me want to scream, ‘it doesn’t even LOOK nice!’ Perhaps one of the best reasons to visit though, are not the products on display, but the staff who work there.

Looking like various breeds of preened poodles, with a strict hierarchy kept in order by the fragrant, older coiffured clothes-horses on the shop floor, they stare down consumers with a sense of down-the-nose superiority I thought was confined to Bond Street and most of the Parisian 7th arrondissement. The idea of paying for my purchase of a proper umbrella and some beautiful gloves with a debit card seemed to threaten the very core of their existence. I had to walk through half the store to find a till with a pin machine, which for a tourist destination as this is, is nothing if not surprising.

But the true stars of the employee showcase here were the presents, angels, and Christmas trees walking around on stilts. Oh, yes. With costumes ranging from the grotesque to the utterly vulgar – these hired actors and part-time clowns blocked entire ails, feigning total delight at the sight of a child, only to then to mistakenly kick the power-puff t-shirted 5-year old in the face as they moved on to the luggage section. Not to mention the half-hearted attempt at a jazz singer crooning, ‘oh happy day, oh happy day, oh KaDeWe’. (So clever...It rhymes!) She would sometimes stop mid-sentence to try and understand what her irate boss two floors below was trying to signal to her.

Don’t get me wrong, though, I loved it!

Thankfully, my Sunday was of a slower pace, visiting the various segments of the remaining wall left in the city (one part of which I’ve been cycling past for the last two months with no idea it was the largest open-air museum in the world, let alone the Berlin Wall). Topped with ‘Le Nozze di Figaro’, five rows from the front for seven quid – can’t complain really.