BERLIN

 “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” (Kierkegaard)

When I tumbled out of my overnight bus onto the hazy streets of Berlin it had been thirteen years since I’d set foot in that splendid city. I have grand memories of the month I spent there at the end of 1999, exploring, cocooning, falling deeply in love with the place and all its scars and possibilities. It was Berlin I thought of when I went to China for the first time and knew I wanted to spend my life trying to understand it.

While there were plenty of places I thought I might return to I didn’t feel a burning desire to tour the city. The main reason for the trip was to see Henrike, a friend I’ve known since high school and to meet the family she has built.

Henrike has held onto the English she acquired as an exchange student in Seattle almost 20 years ago but my German is in a sorry state, any and all space in my brain’s language center now dominated by 普通话. While I can comprehend a good bit my ability to communicate is limited to scattered nouns and a handful of poorly conjugated verbs. It was easiest to communicate with 19 month-old Paul, who speaks only baby (but tolerated me reading books to him in exaggeratedly guttural Deutsch) and had christened me “Gika” by day two. 

Henrike’s 9 year-old son David is learning English in school but preferred to correct my mangled German and drill me in proper pronunciation. For conversation more complex than where to find the gelato shop we turned to technology. After I picked him up from school one day he used google translate to ask me if he could use my computer to watch a Harry Potter movie online.

I joined the family in leisured, nutella-rich brunches, park strolls, and museum visits and had two afternoons to myself to wander Kreuzberg and Schöneberg while Henrike and her husband ran errands. I sat outside at cafes strategically built to catch the afternoon sun, bought tea, browsed bookstores, and covered as much territory by foot as I could. 

This really is what it says it is (click for bigger)

It was just enough to take me back a decade and some – not to get nostalgic over how things were but to reflect on how very different, thank god, things are.

And of course I reveled in all the German and all the Germanity, eating fancy yogurts

  marveling at a shop entirely devoted to mustard

and giggling over personhood-ascribing marketing messages in translation. 

 lit: “Here I am a person, here I shop”

It’s always a treat to travel when you have a home base that is really a home and I enjoyed getting to know Neukölln, a lefty neighborhood with a visibly activist population and beautiful art nouveau architectural details.

Just two and a half blocks south of Henrike’s home is Tempelhof airport, the historic site of the Berlin Airlift and now an enormous public park. You can bike or roller skate down the old runways, till a plot in the p-patch, or just take in the wide horizons and growing collection of public art.

The old terminal, formerly one of the twenty largest buildings on earth, now hosts a dance school, a mini golf course (!), and events of all sorts.

I did not take this picture.

Rents are quite a bit higher in Berlin than they were 13 years ago but the city remains a place of enormous creativity and considerable possibility. I can’t wait to go back.