Happy Birthday KaDeWe

I had today off because it was Wandertag (a day when all the classes take field trips together, not, as I initially thought, a day for hiking - wandern). I decided it would be a good day to hunt dictionaries (I'm looking for Turkish-English), and headed to Kudamm, where I was greeted by this scene: KaDeWe's 100th birthday party! KaDeWe stand for Kaufhaus des Westens (department store of the West). It was not originally intended to be a jab at the socialists in the East, but after the wall went up, it sort of became one. Think precursor to the actual thumbing-the-nose-at-the-socialists Potsdamer Platz shopping center. At any rate, to celebrate their centenial, KaDeWe pulled out all the stops, and it certainly brought in a crowd. There were roughly a gajillion people there. KaDeWe's own birthday present to Berlin was a genius new marketing strategy: free champagne. Lots of it. On the sidewalk outside the store, for shoppers, tourists, commuters switching buses, taxi drivers, drunks, and everyone else passing by. The combination of champagne and rain makes the inside of the store look very warm and inviting. So does the giant birthday cake:

Rumor has it that the cake used something like 1,200 eggs. Looked like there were that many people waiting in line to eat the cake too, so I decided to skip it. But that free champagne worked pretty nicely - once inside, I thought I might as well see what kind of sales they were having, if only to escape the crowd and dry off a bit. Champagne+sales=spontaneous purchase (trouble). But one glass of champagne wasn't enough to make me stop feeling like an imposter. I was happy and quite at home standing in the rain drinking champagne with a subway musician and a tiny old Pelzmanteldame, but with my ancient, muddy, falling apart sneakers, I was definitely out of place in the shoe department. Or anywhere else in KaDeWe, for that matter, except maybe the cake line, where it doesn't matter so much if your hair won't stay put, and you're dressed entirely in last season's sale items, and your creative energy obviously goes somewhere other than makeup, and you don't know what you want, because there's only one flavor of cake. The fact of the matter is that I'll probably never be polished or put-together enough (to say nothing of graceful) to be comfortable in those kinds of shiny, glass-and-mirrors, can-I-help-you-find-anything stores. To get out, I had to cut through the cosmetics department, where twenty polished, put-together women in heels and tailored suits reinforced my feeling of being a little ragged at the edges by chasing me with perfume bottles and makeup brushes and free-with-purchase offers. In the end, I didn't buy anything, but on my way out I did have one more glass of champagne, on the sidewalk, in the rain.