Painting and police

I’ve got a flash new camera and yesterday I wandered round Prenzlauerberg taking what look to be very good photos, far more thanks to the camera than my skills as a photographer. Anyway, it was a rare sunny and warm-ish day, after a mini-typhoon in the morning that scattered dead leaves everywhere (and a few old ladies). So Berlin was looking very fetching. Here’s a picture of Berlin in autumn, in Helmholzplatz late afternoon.

This weekend I plan on taking many more, depending on the weather.
I made a stop on the way at a café/art workshop place called sisters, where you choose some crockery and then paint it yourself, they bake it and you pick it up a few days later. It had been about 50 years since I sat down and painted, which is a shame because painting is so relaxing and fun. It didn’t even matter that my cup, which was supposed to show Berlin in all four seasons, ended up looking like some five-year-old on LSD had attacked it with painbrushes.
When we got home there was an incident outside where two men were fighting on the street. One looked really scruffy and was trying to get away and I think he might have stolen something. He was shouting something over and over, but it wasn’t German. Anyway, soon there was a crowd of people and someone called the police, who of course showed up (five of them) very efficiently and hurled the poor guy off to the station.
I dread the police here, partly because of their military-style uniform (although that’s changing, according to this article) and their generally brutish manner. There are many possible stories I could tell, but here’s just one: I was at the now-defunct Love Parade in Tiergarten in 2000, sitting in the summer sun and rolling something not totally legal (vagueness in case family reading), when I looked up to see 10 policemen striding in my direction, not looking at all happy. Mouth agape and heart hammering, all I could do was stare at them, but luckily they passed by and headed to the man at a stall behind me, who was probably selling balloons without a permit or something.
Today was my last day learning German at my languge school, because my level was the highest they teach. So the next few weeks I'll be at home studying for my exam...