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On my bike ride back to our Airbnb from viewing an apartment this morning, I stopped by a cool coffee shop called Bonanza Coffee. The space is really beautiful and the old brick building clearly used to be something else before it became a hip, third-wave coffee roaster. But some other, cooler blog can probably tell you all about the cool building and the cool coffee. I wanted to tell you about something else. I wanted to let you know that after reading about a certain phenomenon for sometime, I have finally seen it with my own eyes: a sleeping child left outside a cafe in the pram.
Here, ladies and gentlemen, parents may leave their sleeping children outside. Outside what, you ask? Well, outside anywhere that makes sense. Outside the house? Yes! Outside the restaurant? Sure! Outside the really cool third-wave coffee shop? Totally! All within reason, of course. These people are not leaving their helpless children exposed in the snow, at the curb on a busy street, or outside a bar late on a Saturday night. Mom was within earshot enjoying coffee with a friend inside and this kiddo was super bundled up, snug as a bug in a rug, and asleep...outside. This is not something that we allow or tolerate at all in the US. Remember when that Swedish lady in Massachusetts went to jail for doing that? Or when that Danish lady did it in NYC? Sorry ladies, the US is huge and full of monsters so we aren't cool with you leaving your kids about all willy nilly, ok? In the US, we have not adopted this practice and there's a million reasons for that— and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that kidnapping and pedophilia are pretty great reasons— but it feels really refreshing to see that under the right circumstances, this totally rational idea I've read about being common in the Scandinavian countries also has a place in Berlin. And should you be in the market for a small, sleeping child, you now know where to look, but you didn't hear it from me.