KASTAZWA_:
sur/la/route: Berlin_now

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.

berlin_2

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.

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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