Berlin

Friday morning, a TUI flight to Tegel. The flight attendant is cute in that budget-airline way—yellow uniform, perfect hair—but you can tell she absolutely doesn’t want to be miming the safety demonstration. The captain comes on cheerful in German and English, saying something about the weather. The attendant’s speech turns into white noise: pfffft… pfffft… The guy next to me keeps sneaking photos into the cockpit when he thinks no one’s looking, which is weird enough to actually make me nervous. I’ve got Dashboard Confessional in my ears. Stolen. Good start.

I’m in Berlin because some big German web design studio wants to talk to me. I got lost immediately—I’m terrible with cities. The bus drivers are grumpy, the streets go on forever, and everyone’s either designing something, sipping coffee, or carrying a newspaper like they’re about to read the serious parts. Some tiny guy gave me directions to the U-Bahn and sent me completely the wrong way. Or maybe I just can’t navigate. Berlin is huge. Impossibly huge.

The studio is in a courtyard on Chausseestraße, which everyone calls Germany’s Silicon Valley. Open warehouse space, high ceilings, people on Macs, moving around on exposed metal stairs, talking casually. Sun pouring in. I loved it immediately—this is what Lisa Simpson must have felt arriving at college for the first time. The interview went fine, I think. I’ll know more next week.

I walked through East Berlin the rest of the day. Alexanderplatz, the Wall, Checkpoint Charlie. I never found the Brandenburg Gate. The directions I got from locals were useless. But I started to notice the colored traffic light men at the intersections—they mark the old border between East and West—and once I saw that, I could actually tell where I was. Berlin has these distinct neighborhoods. One street is all döner kebab, the next is pure Thai food, then you turn a corner into someplace residential you didn’t expect. Got thirsty at Alexanderplatz, ran out of cash, and some blonde girl in a BZ newspaper outfit—sunburned décolletage, real Berlin attitude—got me to sign up for a subscription. I canceled it by email the next morning. Coward move, but I did it.

My iPod died right before the flight home. The new flight attendant was in a great mood—kept grinning at the captain, even during the safety demonstration. The captain was joking in German and English, and he landed the plane so hard I think he was still thinking about her. The passengers thought it was funny.

Berlin vibrates. It’s electric. But you can’t do it justice in one day. The city needs to be discovered piece by piece. Maybe soon, Berlin. Maybe soon.