a joke about 'spreewasser':
i am tired and sore after fourteen hours on a cramped bus crossing the continent (berlin-hannover-brussels-paris, with a short stop around midnight for coffee, cigarettes and bad spaghetti at a little canteen). i have clean clothes, my bag is thankfully infestation free, my room was clean and welcoming. i am still employed. i have no food thanks to my pre-departure purge but the monoprix is open until ten, and although i am cold my little heater promises to keep me warm (if i can stop being afraid of using it.) paris, for better or for worse, is exactly as i left it.
but berlin...
if i had my way i'd quit both jobs, transfer my savings, learn german and get myself a little coldwater flat in the east, with a cat and a gas stove and a window overlooking the aboveground u-bahn and give myself over to, as a friend of a friend so poignantly put it, 'thinking'...
"because that's all that the young people here are doing. you ask, what are you doing in berlin? and they'll say, oh, just thinking..."
but berlin...
if i had my way i'd quit both jobs, transfer my savings, learn german and get myself a little coldwater flat in the east, with a cat and a gas stove and a window overlooking the aboveground u-bahn and give myself over to, as a friend of a friend so poignantly put it, 'thinking'...
"because that's all that the young people here are doing. you ask, what are you doing in berlin? and they'll say, oh, just thinking..."