reflections of berlin

as my last post states - i was in berlin. i was there for a total of ten nights, eleven days. i stayed at a friend of a friend's house just round the corner from yorkstrasse station and saw many a sight and had many an experience. the only thing i was a little disappointed with, was having no internet for the time i was there. how could i keep up my facebook friendships? how could i communicate with those back home without wasting all my handy (mobile) credit? (which i did anyway!) and how could i remember everything to let you, dear reader, know just what went down? the last one had me a little worried. you see berlin had the tendency to make me drink. not get drunk on ye olde gluhwein like one painful evening in heidelberg, but let's just say the beer and wine and scotch were plentiful and flowing a little too easily.

but anyway, here i am back home in heidelberg and starting this blog writing business again. now my first thought was to just purge everything on here and let you guys sort out the mess, but then i thought that would be unfair and i might be asking too much from a casual reader, so i scrapped that idea. my second was to write eleven entries and have a day for each, but that would be doing an injustice to places that really need more than just a few lines hurriedly written in my failing english. (you see, even though i am still yet to learn german or spanish properly, the effect of talking to non-english speakers constantly is starting to take away from my rather pompous and educated english.) so i've decided to just write and see what i feel like writing about when the words start flowing. i doubt i'll talk about everything to do with berlin (i still haven't talked about my beloved schloss or france!), but at least you'll get a good idea of what i experienced and what i'm up to. so here goes...

berlin is an odd city. i went in expecting a massive sprawling city with skyscrapers and crazy big city things going on everywhere. berlin is not one of those cities. at first i was kinda disappointed by this. that's what i liked about frankfurt. it had skyscrapers and still retained some of it's altstadt charm. i spent the first few days thinking, 'where's the city? are we in the middle? what's going on here?' now berlin has roughly the same population as melbourne, so i expected something similar, not in appearance, mind you, but at least in size vertically. it wasn't til a couple of days later that i figured it out. berlin isn't about the city, it's about the vibe, the small places and what you can find hidden away. this became only to apparent when alexis and i went out for the day by ourselves, and after going through the abysmal new jewish synagogue (i don't recommend it unless you really want to go), we found a large courtyard full of trees and shops and cafes near oranienstrasse. it was beautiful to just stumble across this piece of tranquility amongst the urban sprawl that is the graffiti-soaked berlin main strasses. this seems to sum up berlin perfectly. it's an ugly bitch with nothing much on the outside but 'urban art' to interest you, but dig deeper and you'll find the city's real heart. and it has got heart, you just need to get past the gruff german exterior to find it. everything seems cold (literally and metaphysically, -6 degrees is a killer), but there really is a great liberal atmosphere that makes you think that you could do anything and no one would bat an eyelid or even care. i became very aware of this after spending new year's eve in berghain, but that's a story for another day.

by the end of my time in berlin i had grown to love it. i stopped wondering where the city was and starting taking it for what it was. however i still don't agree with berliners calling everything alternative underground. if your club has advertising everywhere on the streets and it's a very well known and sought after place to get into, it is not underground. that's called successful. at least where i come from it is. it's like calling revolver underground. it's not, it's just alternative. but when does alternative become the norm? is it when you get so popular you can turn people away for no reason at all? or there's an hour long wait in a que just get in? but that's beside the point and not really what i wanted to talk about here.

berlin is now one of my favourite cities, however i don't think i'd want to live there. it's way too depressing and cold, and just like that ugly bitch with a heart of gold, sure you want to be friends, but do you really want to see them everyday? nope, melbourne is still my one and only true love. that city has left a permanent mark in my heart and it wont go away by cheating on it with a euro substitute. however, if heidelberg was the size of melbourne i might be persuaded to take a german lover. just don't tell dear old melbs i said that.