Heine in Paris

"If anyone asks how I am tell him 'like a fish in water,' or rather, tell people that when one fish in the sea asks another how he is, he receives the reply: 'I am like Heine in Paris.'" -Heinrich Heine, 1832. Now replace "Heine" and "Paris" with "Axe" and "Berlin."

Here are some early observations, before I forget:

I'm moving into a flat in the most popular neighborhood (Neukölln) in the most popular city in the most popular country for refugees (ditto with hipsters). Booking an appointment to register with city officials was difficult since 550 people are officially moving in every day, plus a new app is booking and selling the other spots. The subway is full of people getting out with suitcases and bags, and I have no idea where they're going. As was the case with my last flat, my new flat's guest room may be busy---I'm hosting a Croatian friend for a week, and hopefully also a friend of an acquaintance (Estonian of course) who fell in love with this city, and like me, is trying to find a way to stay. I don't think I'll host any Couchsurfers for a while, if at all, unless my flatmate is also into that, although I really enjoyed doing so in Tartu.

As for me, everything came together very well, very quickly. All that's left now is to find a job that will grant me a residence permit (and thus get me past the last few obstacles, like insurance and banking). I've always heard that Berlin is a paradoxically hard place to be an artist. There are so many other artists, exhibitions, galleries, and parties that it's hard to get any word done! And now I know how that feels---there's so much in every direction! Hopefully the weather will get bad soon.

I went to Rigaerstrasse to get a haircut, and walked around for a while afterwards. It's on the edge of an area that got pretty clobbered by gentrification, but has some anarchist squats remaining, covered in defiant anti-fascist/gentrification/police messages and colorful paint, like their cousins on the other side of the city center. One even had shoes, shopping carts, and other random objects hanging from its walls. Naturally, the street's church had been converted into a free "Museum of Youthful Resisters."

I adore this city's political bent---Neukölln has representatives from the Green and Pirate parties, in part because it's nice to see people more to the left of me, so that I don't feel too extreme. It's still entertaining to see protesters blame the fighting in Ukraine on NATO and a bloodthirsty US, and even some people who stand in front of the Reichstag daily and ask for Putin to become president of Germany---clearly, the only way to wipe out fascism in Germany once and for all is to empower a strong leader who is above the law!

The flat I am currently in belongs to a Slovak I studied with during my first time in Germany, an undergraduate semester in Erfurt, in the exact center of Germany. She graciously offered to let me move into the flat even though we haven't met in five years, and the flat is truly beautiful---I feel like an immature slob after years of dorm rooms by comparison. It's in a section of the Lichtenberg (Light Mountain) district that, 25 years after Die Wende, is like what the DDR aspired to---young families, a few minutes from buses, trams, and a subway station, a school named after Orwell, and art depicting animals since East Berlin's zoo is just two blocks over. And yet every time I go biking (and I'm trying to only use the bike, like in Finland), I seem to take a different, and more circuitous route every time. I've been navigating by intuition, bus station maps, and through memorizing directions from Google Maps, and while it's a great exercise in problem-solving, I hope I manage to find and memorize a direct route before Thursday's date, or the next thunderstorm!

I got a decent bike for a decent price, and christened it Karjala/Karelia die Dritte. Hopefully it'll have a stronger constitution than my last bike, Karjala Kaks/White Thunder. I'm paranoid about having it stolen, but I bought a (hopefully) decent, and quite heavy, lock to go with it. After exploring an abandoned water park with an Estonian the other day, we found that someone had tried to snap her bike's lock, but merely scratched some paint, while my bike was untouched, so if locking a bike is like running from a bear, then hopefully my lock will be stronger, and my feet faster, than those of the person next to me! Berlin's public transport is the best I've ever seen, and I feel like a boss zipping across the city 24/7, but it's not cheap, and unless I get a job that pays for it, I'm going to try urban biking, even if I secretly fear that my chances of dying young spike whenever I head into the city center.

Hopefully I'll get around to that cheap travel guide I've been meaning to write for weeks, especially since I think I've finally caught up on sleep.