Everything Sounds Better on the Ku’damm

Berlin summers are unreliable in a way that starts to feel personal after a while. You plan something around the heat and the city turns grey and damp. You dress for grey and it becomes oppressively humid for three days straight. There’s no winning.

One afternoon last summer a group of us ended up in Charlottenburg—west Berlin, the old money end, all that prewar architecture and high-end retail the east side pretends not to care about. We’d been put on a bus with drinks and little snacks and sent cruising down the Kurfürstendamm with music loud enough to make passing tourists visibly confused about what was happening. Absolutely ridiculous. But riding a bus down one of the great avenues of a major European city with a drink in hand and something good blasting out into the afternoon is hard to argue against, regardless of how you got there.

The part of summer that’s actually salvageable is always the part with music in it. I keep relearning that.