Back from Berlin

So you might notice that there’s no entry for January 1st. That’s because my entry for December 31st actually ends at 21h30 January 1st. I finally managed to do what I had never quite done during my summer here in Berlin: have a “night out” that was so long, there was no “day after” to write about.

So today was my day to head back to Paris. In retrospect, I should’ve bought my return ticket for tomorrow, so that I could’ve stayed longer at Berghain the night before and then spent all of today recovering. Nonetheless, New Year’s was a lot of fun.

So I got up, tidied up the apartment a bit, showered, changed, packed, did some more blog-writing, and then headed out at around noon to look for lunch. I found a Vietnamese place that made pretty decent Pho and springrolls just on the next major street, where I sat admiring the fish in their fish tank while warming myself over the soup.

I went back to the apartment, finished cleaning up, and fiddled around with an old installation of Ableton Live that I have, acquainting myself with it’s built-in sound-synthesis features. Around 14h00, I got a call from the apartment-owner, saying that she wouldn’t be able to meet me in time to pick up the keys, so I dropped the keys into her mailbox and headed off to find a taxi.

Lucklily, I was able to grab a taxi at Eisenacher Straße pretty easily. When I told him that I wanted to go to Tegel, he said something in rapid German about not taking the usual Autobahn route and construction. I guessed that he was asking me permission to take an alternate route, so I shrugged and said, “It’s all the same to me, I barely know Berlin.” That was perhaps a bit of a risk to take, since saying something like that to a taxi driver was like saying, “Please! Take me on the most circuitous and expensive path to my destination! I don’t know any better!” But I actually do know enough of Berlin’s geography to notice if he’s not going in the right direction, so I suppose I could’ve protested if I needed to. In the end, he was an honest man and took me directly to Tegel, although he took local streets rather than the highway. If I understood him properly, there was a bridge about halfway along the Autobahn route that was only half-constructed.

The arrival to the airport and the flight itself went pretty much as expected, although by pure coincidence I had the same person sitting beside me on this flight as I did on my flight to Berlin. We caught up and compared our New Year’s Eve activities, and then he napped his way through the flight while I tried, again, to make a dent in this Lévinas book that I am slugging through.

Arrival! I got into Paris, schlepped my way back to my place, ate a big meal of raw vegetables and foie gras (which are on opposite ends of the health-food spectrum, methinks), and eventually made my way to bed.