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July 5, 2007

As my flight from Amsterdam to Berlin banked to make its final descent into the city a week ago, I turned away from my preoccupation with the eerily uniform communist-era buildings below me to listen to an announcement from the captain. “Berlin is looking quite nice today…it's cloudy, but there's no wind and the temperature is 12 degrees.” I had to take a second to convert from Celsius, but I knew right away that 12 degrees was really quite cold—particularly coming from the 95-degree Midwest —and I put my jacket on as soon as I got off the plane.

It's warmed up since then, but the weather was only the first difference between summer in the U.S. and the Berliner Sommer. The two school semesters here are winter and summer instead of fall and spring, so all the university and grade school students are still in class, meaning that summer doesn't have as much of a connotation of time off as it does in the U.S. Then again, Berlin is very relaxed, so no one really seems stressed or hurried either. Summer days here are also extremely long since, as one German told me, Berlin is on the same latitude as Labrador, Canada. So it doesn't get dark until around 11:00 at night and starts getting light again at 3:30 in the morning.

That's fortunate for me since Berlin is an extremely large city and there's a lot to explore. Each neighborhood has its own very distinct identity, enhanced by the fact that the city was only reunified 18 years ago. For my first few days here, I lived in a friend's apartment in Kreuzberg, which used to be right on the edge of West Berlin. Because the Wall was such a big presence there, it was mostly a poor and immigrant neighborhood, and the majority of the residents are still Turkish. But now that the Wall is down, it's very open and full of nice parks and some of the few 19th-century boulevards that survived the war. On Sunday, I moved to Prenzlauer Berg, in the eastern part of the city. It's very young and almost intimidating in its trendiness: sometimes I look around me and seriously question whether my skinny jeans are skinny enough or my dangly earrings dangly enough.

Then again, I have bigger problems fitting in than that. I speak English at work, since my boss is from a part-German part-American family, but I still have to speak German every day with my roommates and around the city, and I'm pretty sure I haven't been mistaken for a native. The crowning achievement of my trip so far has been my ability to understand a German pun in a subway ad. It wasn't even particularly funny, but I laughed for a while just because I was so proud of myself for getting it.

I've started my job with doing research for several documentary film projects. I can't say too much about where my work will go from here, since part of the point of the research is to help my boss figure out which projects she wants to work on this summer and which she'll leave for later. But I'll write again when I know more. For now, I'm off to live my life auf Deutsch—bis später!