Berlin, Slowly

Berlin in the afternoon feels different than Berlin at night or in the morning. There’s this particular exhaustion to the daylight hours, a sense that the city has already shown you most of its hand and now you’re just picking through what’s left. We went to Dandy Diner first—vegan food that doesn’t feel like penance, which is harder to find than you’d think. Then Made in Berlin, a vintage shop that has the kind of inventory that comes from someone with actual vision instead of someone who just opened a store in a gentrified neighborhood.

By the time we got to Yoli Frozen Yogurt I was thinking about how cities like this work. They’re supposed to be overwhelming, this constant assault of choice and people and spectacle, but if you move through them slowly enough they become almost intimate. You notice the things that other people miss. The care someone took with a window display. The way a bartender knows how to talk to strangers. A frozen yogurt shop that just is what it is. These are the moments that stay with you, not the famous landmarks.