bringing it to berlin

map of potsdam / cake at KaDeWe / former kitchen of king fredrick the great (seriously)

san souci palace / salmon delegates brot /  the great dom

 my new hat (fits over my hair and everything) 

photographed with a fujifilm x30

I spent the last week in Berlin, and in order to properly write about it, I'm going to pull out a style I haven't used since my seventh grade creative writing class.

Riding backwards on a high speed train into Berlin was a very literal experience - you feel as though you are riding backwards in time, to a city whose tumultuous history lies only twenty five years under the surface. Everything had prepared me for a city like Portland, or San Francisco - a place that wore it's weirdness as a badge of honor. What I found was a city more like New York - a business city, a place building its future not next to its past, but on top of it. Everywhere we went, there was construction. Things were being paved, and put up, and pulled down, and covered over. Buildings that had sat quietly crumbling in the stand-still that was time on the east side of The Wall were being dragged into the 21st century, and and stones that fell along the way were cleared for the tourists. The tourists that took photos with fake soldiers at Checkpoint Charlie, and bought pieces of "the Berlin Wall" in the gift shops littering the streets. Indeed, the whole city has a strain of commercialism one expects in the most finely tuned of amusement parks, with every exit just on the far end of a gift shop. 


The weirdness is still there -in the graffiti that mysteriously appears over the fresh paint, in the couple in bondage leather carrying out groceries, in the young people with a pack of pugs outside Schloss Charlottenburg. It just doesn't feel like the kind of weirdness that can win over the tide of mainstream coming to clean it up. Then, there is the past. The past stands in the many palaces of Potsdam, where King Fredrick the Great and his relations built playground after playground, to escape the stress of a changing world. The most famous of these is named "Sans Souci" - "Without Worries" in French. The past lies in the one stretch of road no one will pave over, where the Berlin Wall separated so much more than just a city. It settles into the very corners, waiting not to sneak up on you, but to be found by those who are looking past their guidebooks, beyond what they expected to see. 


*drops the mic*

x J