Discover It Slowly
The safety demonstration on the TUI Fly flight was a minor masterpiece of minimum effort—the attendant running through it with the energy of someone three days without sleep who had specifically requested not to be here. The PA was mostly static. The captain welcomed us aboard the flight to Tegel… Berlin,
as if he’d needed a moment to remember what city Tegel was actually in. The guy two rows back kept quietly photographing the cockpit whenever he thought no one was watching, which made me anxious in a way I couldn’t fully justify. And just as I’d settled into the comfortable belief that I was probably the most interesting person in economy, a man in full military-goth regalia materialized from somewhere near the back and took his seat. Fine. Assumption withdrawn.
Stolen by Dashboard Confessional on the headphones as we lifted off. That particular song for that particular departure.
A web design studio in Berlin—one of the serious ones—had reached out after I’d put some feelers out, and they wanted to meet in person. So I came. Berlin is enormous, which I knew in theory but not yet in practice. A foreign tourist, notably compact, sent me confidently in the wrong direction when I asked about the nearest U-Bahn station, which either means he was winding me up or I have an unerring instinct for getting lost in large cities. Probably both. I arrived at the studio in Chausseestraße—then being called Germany’s Silicon Valley, a claim I found plausible that morning and have since watched age accordingly—substantially later and sweatier than intended.
The studio itself was a converted factory in a courtyard: open floor plan, exposed metal staircases, everyone on Macs, natural light through tall windows, people talking to each other as if they genuinely wanted to. I had the complete Lisa Simpson-first-arriving-at-university experience—that specific feeling of recognizing the place you want to be before you’ve had time to rationalize it. The interview went well, I think. I’d know more by the end of the following week.
I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering east Berlin. Alexanderplatz, remnants of the Wall, Checkpoint Charlie. The Brandenburg Gate defeated me entirely—several locals offered directions that added up to nothing, and I gave up somewhere between I think it’s west
and maybe north of the park.
I could always tell which half of the city I was in by the pedestrian traffic lights, which have different figures in east and west: a detail I find disproportionately charming every time.
The food situation in Berlin is its own phenomenon. Entire streets dedicated to a single cuisine—one block entirely kebab shops, the next entirely Thai, then you turn a corner and you’re somewhere that feels like a different city in a different decade. I was thirsty and slightly lost somewhere in this arrangement, recalculating my position and running low on supplies.
The newspaper subscription I did not intend to acquire happened at Alexanderplatz. A girl named Franzi with a sunburned décolleté and a voice like a Berlin taxi dispatcher was selling BZ trial subscriptions with cheerful aggression, and I said yes before I’d finished processing the question. I cancelled it by email the following morning. Sorry, Franzi. Genuinely. Good luck with the talking-to-strangers career.
My iPod gave up somewhere near the departure gate on the way home. The return crew were visibly in better spirits than the morning shift—the new flight attendant especially, and the captain, who made jokes over the PA in German and English and set the plane down with a bump that got a laugh from the whole cabin. Good for them.
Berlin is enormous and I tried to see too much of it in one afternoon, which is the classic mistake and entirely my own fault. The city doesn’t reveal itself to a single visit. You have to go back, take it slowly, let it open at its own pace. Maybe soon.