Berlin, Germany, October 11th 2008. It’s difficult to describe how much I like this city, or precisely for what reasons.  Certainly some of it has just been good fortune; I’ve met wonderful people who have opened themselves to me and made me feel welcome with their friends, and I’ve had a great apartment on Max-Beer-Strasse in Mitte to use as a home base as I explore.  Tremendous gratitude to Piers Walter for being so kind as to allow me to stay here.

There’s an effortless cool here, a less frenetic and showy kind of cool than what I’ve grown used to (and used to ignoring) in New York.  Isn’t that what cool is?  Effortless.  Maybe it’s the fact that there’s less people here than what I’ve come to expect from a metropolis, though 3.4 million is nothing to scoff at.  Maybe it’s the low rents.  Maybe it’s the government funding for creative projects.  Maybe it’s Kreuzberg, or Mitte, or Friederichschain, or Prenzlauerberg.  Maybe it’s that people can earn a living here doing what they love.  Maybe it’s the fact that everyone bikes here, and the streets are wide and come complete with big ol’ bike lanes that often are right up on the sidewalks, and you don’t have to worry about being hit by some Juicy-wearing, SUV-driving bitch who thinks that the road belongs to her (almost happened to me in Brooklyn).

Whatever it is, you can feel it in the air.  You can hear it.  You can hear it in the way people talk to each other, in the sounds of the wind through the trees, and in the sounds of the passing trams, and in the sounds of the bike tires spinning.  It’s not a perfect place; I’m not sure there is such a thing.  But it’s pretty damn great.