home away
July 6th, 2007
A week is too little time in Berlin, You’d need a year, at least. We only got started… Now I am in throws of travel sickness (=homesick in reverse), there is always that when you come back.
Berlin is a giant. Travel twenty minutes with U-bahn and there is another main street, another Mitte, more beautiful old houses, vast parks… Too big to explore by foot, the city feels unmanageable. (And why would you need to manage a city?). You are just a grain of sand. That is freeing, and scary.
Our Berlin was:
The Jewish Museum, that comes in definite first. Daft Punk at Velodrom, one of the best gigs of my life. The U-bahn in general. Friedrichshain nightlife. A quiet Sunday night dinner in a restaurant where they played music from Amelie. Lots of good wine. Hellen van Meene at c/o Berlin. The whole Prenzlauer Berg. The stylish berliners in their black/gray attire… and so much more.
It’s a cliche but travel is a bit like meditation. A stuck in a motion kind of thing. You impatiently start to wait to get home, to do things, life, differently. To drink more espresso, to make more likeminded friends, to stay up all night talking, to make art… to hang onto yourself in every little way.
Even though I know the language, I didn’t get that ‘at home’ feeling in Berlin. I have no idea why I have that in Holland. And why Finland is a constant low level depression for me, however immature thing that is to say. All this I thought about a lot while away.
Scared and inspired, that’s what I feel like these days. It’s not a bad thing.
P.S. Most of the pics up now.
And oh! We seek to be pale, while we could glow.