I. My german love affair
Berlin is the place where I currently live and it has been like that for almost the last ten year. It's the city I have chosen for my european come back after one year between Australia and south east Asia. Why did I move to Berlin is one of the question I get asked the most and although I do not have a clear answer to it, I knew that once I moved here it would have been for a while.
The city is a place that makes you feel comfortable, the cost of living is pretty low compared to other european capitals and there is a plenty of interesting people with impressive life stories and different backgrounds everywhere. Berlin is a sort of love affair that can not turn into something more, at least for me. It's a "non-lieu" that grows like ivy, developing its own identity from the fact of not having a clear identity itself.
Culturally is absolutely wide and various. Every artistic movement can find its own dimension and no matter what people are into it is easy to find someone into the same things. The darkness that cover the city especially during the winter period and the lack of light makes Berlin a place where it is hard to adapt completely, where people pretty often feel lonely and have to find a way to deal with it.
Berlin definitely helped me to grow as a human. It gave me all the space I needed and it left me quiet, working on my main interests. It's the city where I found the highest number of inspiring life stories I came across so far and crazy nights out I ended up doing something completely unexpected from what I was doing only half an hour before.
Despite of its massive techno scene, If I have to think about my personal Berlin soundtrack I think a huge part of it would be related to ambient music. In particular I like to remember Kraftwerk Autobahn and the nice memories I had relocating from one flat to the next and having to drive up and down from Italy in order to bring up my staff. Bowie's trilogy ("Low", "Heroes" and "Lodgers") written between 1977 and 1979 also seems to transpire through the walls of the city, backtracking the movies of Wim Wenders, "Wings of Desire" in particular. Last but not least a movie about the music scene of the late '70 called "Berlin B-Movie" and looking back deeper a little bit in the past, the memories of the expat Christopher Isherwood in his "Goodbye to Berlin" that also inspired the eclectic musical "Cabaret", a great way to have a taste of how was life during the Weimar Republik, just before the awful nazis came to power.
II. Plattenbau stories
(chapter one)
I started to notice that the girl I put my eyes on had also a vague interest in me the day we both accidentally saw each other is Sarah's flat. Sarah at that time was subrenting a huge flat on two floors (must have been around 100m2 in total) in one of the former eastern neighbourhood of the capital of Germany. Nobody really had the certainty that the flat was located in the former east Berlin, since back in the years, the wall was running like a sort of a crazy snake and it was hard for the most to know exactly what belongs to what but that was the impression we all came up with. All in this case is a very generic term since during the time I was hanging out there, I met so many different people and now I really find hard to remember most of the names but apart from the locals, I remember lots of people who came from eastern countries, like former soviet countries, some latinos and a bunch of so called mediterranean people, which I don't know exactly what that means but this is how they were called. Sarah use to like to invite random people to her place and to give temporary accomodation to those who were struggling to find a place to stay. I remember in particular this guy called Damon, a writer from the south of England who was mostly living out of small casual jobs. He was a young man who recently decided to move to Berlin because he found something to do in a local radio station. Damon was one of the first people I have got to know there, except from Sarah of course. Sarah was 10 years younger than me and sometimes I have to say I was a bit overwhelmed from all her enthusiasm of being still somehow a teenager that got hit by a lucky strike during her first months in the city. To be honest I have never really found out how she found the flat but I guess it doesn't really matter. I think in order to live there, she had to do housekeeping, water the plants, take care of the mail and occasionally take out a dog named Sascha, that belonged to the relatives of the people that owned the flat. The name written on the bell said Schmidt and as far I knew, those people owned a countless number of flats in Berlin that they probably did not even care anymore and the only thing they wanted, it was to find some good and reliable person to keep the place open and alive. Sarah in fact was that kind of person but still too young, too fragile and too eager to discover pleasure and get lost in the night life of the capital for them to be entirely sure she could cause no damages.
(chapter two)
We first saw each other in a bar in Leipzig the day before. As always I was lost in my thoughts and while staring into blank space, I casually look towards this girl sitting alone in a table of 10 people at least. The table is full of jackets, scarfs and so on. She smiles me back politely and I feel terribly ashamed since these things keep happening at that point that I started to wonder if I am aware of whom I am looking to or if I am driven by a sort of automatic pilot during those moments. The radio is playing "Stolen Moments", I think it is Grant Green version but I am not entirely sure. I suddenly move my sight away without smiling back to her and start to look at the bartender to pretend I am acting at least a little bit more casual. Led by curiosity, after a few minutes I decide I want to give a look again, just to know exactly how she looks like. She is blonde, white-pale skin, green eyes and maybe from Leipzig too. She is probably having a night out with a group of friends although I can not understand why all her friends left her alone at the same time. She is wearing a pretty neutral black long sleeve tshirt and a pair of black paints. Not much to say also regarding make up, rings of any other sort piece of cloth, since she is not wearing anything particularly catchy, just a natural pure simple beauty (to be comtinued).