Concerning Berlin
Berlin was calling. I had to go. Like the years before. When you’ve been to Berlin once before (and ain’t not sick of it already), you just have to return. Every summer this city calls me by a feeling or just by plain Austrian fatigue. Then I book a flight, make no plans and off I go.
This is a short photo-blog-post of my impressions.
Berlin needs to be experienced best through the microscope of everyday experiences. Berlin is detail, it is a patchwork of delicacies woven together by stretching alleys and slowly crumbling houses. Berlin is chipped-off paint on pre-war buildings, covered in stickers and iced with graffiti. They look all the same from afar but become more and more discrete the closer one looks.
But don’t get lost in the details. Enjoy the sun, enjoy the wind, enjoy the low prices and the smell of coal and smoke in the winter.
Berlin is flat. At least in Google Earth it is. Once you roam the sidewalks they are an uneven terrain for the unassuming traveler flipping the flops. Right now one of my feet rests on a loose cobblestone in a shabby little café. Every café is shabby and small but every single one is it in a different way and offers different specialties. And no table is stable enough to keep one’s drink from spilling.
The wall is long gone yet every day I wonder where it led through. The former east looks like the former west, the former west looks the same while pretending to look eastern.
Drug dealers do business in subway stations while young mothers talk to their kids in German and English about the colored tiles. A crazy man rambles drunkenly, a bottle slowly rolls towards the platform’s edge.
Spanish, English, French, Turkish and German are the stones in Berlin’s mosaic of impressions, shimmering like the tops of girls playing soccer in the Görli-Park, a rare event as I have been told.
Everybody smokes. Everybody coughs. Everybody walks their dog. Everybody has a gay friend. Everybody has a tourist friend. Everybody is polyamorous. Everybody meet anybody on the city trains. Nobody looks back.
Everybody speaks English.
Pedestrians are noticed only when they cross the streets in numbers, paying no attention to the color of the Ampelmann streetlights. Only sometimes women are gallantly allowed to pass in front of vehicles so their drivers can catch a good glimpse at the lady’s ass.
The subway stations smell like any subway stations and the night is as dark as the night is anywhere. Yet the train cars smell slightly different and the clouds move slightly faster.
Nobody looks at you when you look odd for everybody looks odd in their own way. Steady currents of people mingle in Kreuzberg an scatter in Mitte.
Meeting people is easy, getting to know people is incredibly hard.
I leave my mark.
I embrace Berlin.
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