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| Fig. 1: A cat demonstrating the exact position in which I slept on my first night back in Berlin. |
Well, where do I begin, really. It’s been a long time without the internet, and as with every typical millisecond of my existence, practically every day has thrown up something eminently blog-about-able which has unfortunately had long enough to stew in the limbo of non-anecdotehood that it is now unlikely ever to be told. Schade, as the Deutsche would say.
Suffice it to say, these last few weeks have indeed been memorable and intense and have felt simultaneously brief and endless. They can be divided into two distinct parts:
The build-up to Christmas
Essential characteristics and events:
The alien white cold dreck on the ground persisted in rudely staying there despite people’s best efforts to generate enough heat to melt it purely by the friction generated by their lips flapping in constant complain. Therefore, of course, no aeroplanes in the entire world were able to fly and in response to this crisis Lufthansa chose a charming new track for their hold music (I believe it was called ‘Tai Chi in Peru’) and apparently outsourced all their phone calls to one woman living in the Guatemalan outback. I was at one point booked into three separate flights, two on purpose and one thanks to an admin error, and after spending my day weeping onto my phone’s touchscreen eventually braved the journey to Tegel airport only to be faced with…utter, utter serenity, peace and goodwill. It was so calm and placid that the security check men chatted with me and offered me a delicious-looking sandwich. There were only thirty of us on the entire AirBus flight, so we each reclined in our separate rows and clicked our fingers for the fourth Virgin Mary of the flight. Returning ‘home’ (i.e. the new house my family are renting, having fled out of my childhood home like olde-timey miners out of a collapsing Texan gold mine) I saw the members of my family in various stages of illness, subsisted for a good few days on gravy alone and mainly watched DVDs accompanied by cats and sleeping parents. Bliss.
The time after Christmas and New Year’s
Essential characteristics and events:
I finally threw a birthday party for myself on New Year’s eve and it was really rather good, to be perfectly frank. Then came the ride back to Berlin. The flight went smoothly and I arrived in Berlin in the late evening, rolled into the flat, opened my bedroom door to find…my roommate sleeping in my bed, having moved into my room. She drowsily murbled that I could sleep on the sofa in the dining room for the night and so there I slept, before plunging back into teaching the next day with all the enthusiasm and energy of someone being made to eat toothbrush bristles. The next day I moved out. That sounds like a brilliant dramatic coup-style denoument, but it had actually been planned for ages and I am now in my fifth accommodation of the Year Abroad. My new place is in Friedrichshain, the best of all the districts, and I love it here and the room is wonderful and has already been extra-furnished with a wooden trunk someone left by the stairs for anyone desperate enough to take furniture off the street but too shy to actually take it directly off of the actual street.
It’s a very self-involved post this, I realise, but we have a lot to catch up on, you and I. Tomorrow we start afresh and I will be able to tell you more about this lunatic city and the loons within it – now that you know the pu-to-date basics about the biggest loon of them all.
