Berliner

I am drinking Dunkin Donuts coffee at Alexanderplatz in Berlin. It tastes like a little piece of New England and I am in love with this city. After stops in Belgium and Amsterdam, I´m loving being in a place I´ve never visited before. I don´t speak the language, hardly know how to take the U and S Bahns, or even the difference between them, and we´ve been getting lost constantly. This place is beautiful-- old & new buildings, the glass-domed Reichstag, sites where construction is going on and will be for a long time, it seems, modern buildings, a huge TV tower, open spaces, wide roads, people who seem warm and open and friendly without any of the pretensions of Paris. Berlin wears its scars well, without covering them. If you had its history, you would have a lot of scars too. The Holocaust memorial, over 1000 slabs of concrete on an open square, took up most of our day. The memorial is beautiful and simple and disorienting to walk through. The information center is intense. I was completely overwhelmed and drawn in by the information at hand. Mostly I just found myself wondering why it took until 1945 for the allies to intervene. We found the double line of cobblestones that marks where the Berlin wall used to be. There are so many markers of the atrocities this city has experienced. But this place feels so in the present too, not clinging to some mythical past, but acknowledging its history and living in a place in between acknowledgment and recovery. We´re staying in Mitte, the trendy part of Berlin, where people sit in coffee shops and are so cool-looking without the jeans-boots-black uniform of Paris. I don´t know what I love so much about Berlin, but maybe after so many years of chaos and violence--or maybe because this place is just different--people here don´t seem as willing to waste their time being shallow or pretentious as they are in Paris. And everything is in flux, reminding me that the other side of uncertainty is always possibility.

Ich bin ein Berliner. I don´t even know what that means, but it´s the only German I know. I feel like I´m cheating on Paris a litte, but I also am happy to have discovered a new city I already love this much.