Warm Cheesecake at Three
Here I am, then. Tom Cruise is filming somewhere in the city center, small children outside are attempting to recreate the sound of a dying cat, and I’m sitting in my new life in Charlottenburg. When I unlocked the door to my mini apartment on Thursday morning, my first instinct was to turn around and go straight home. But with every hour that passes I’m more certain: Berlin is better than Buchloe. Better in most every way.
I live right in the middle of Charlottenburg—U-Bahn stop, pedestrian zone, cheap Greek place, all a few minutes on foot. My room in the student dorm is small, bordering on claustrophobic. The internet hovers around two bars. The DVB-T antenna doesn’t work and I don’t care what anyone says about it. I can hear every cough in the stairwell. But I like it here.
Last night I went out with Cedric and a very funny woman named Pia who showed me the city’s insides. I ended up in a club where Bushido—Germany’s biggest rapper, the kind of famous where half the country loves him and the other half hates him—was also present, then walked straight through a crowd of working girls on some side street in the small hours and couldn’t stop staring. My personal highlight was warm cheesecake with cream and strawberry syrup in a restaurant that looked untouched since 1963, at three in the morning. Cedric and Pia immediately diagnosed it as classic stoner food, then launched into a story involving biting literary circles and satanic cat sacrifices that I could not begin to verify. At half past four I was lurching through empty U-Bahn stations with the strangest characters coming at me from the other direction. I kept my iPod firmly in my pocket.
I feel genuinely at home here. Every corner has something going on, the subway is starting to make sense, and there are strange people everywhere. Tomorrow I’ll take it easy. Monday I need salt, pepper, and a decent poster. At some point I should probably register as an official Berlin resident. And if this DVB-T situation doesn’t resolve itself, I’m going to miss The O.C.—which is simply not acceptable.