I'm in Berlin for a few days, and while riding my foldable bike back to my hotel from a business meeting, I realized how many memories I now have here – even though I have never lived in Berlin.
I left the Heinrich Böll Foundation (the German Greens) building just across the street from Deutsches Theater, where I sang on stage at open mike night two years ago, and only a few streets down from where I was offered a job as editor of the German photovoltaics magazine in 2008; rode across Under den Linden, where I purchased a real East German copy of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto back in June 1989 (just a few months before the wall came down, but even then no one saw it coming); passed by Galarie Lafayette, where I went shopping with Nelson Mandela's daughter back in 2001, when I served as an interpreter for her on an official visit here; took a right before reaching Kottbusser Tor, close to where some of my in-laws live and two streets from a German journalist who did my first two magazines with me in 2006 and 2007 (the person who was the German exchange student at the University of Texas in 1990 brought us together) – and a few blocks from the bar where a jazz trio used to offer open mike once a week (but, alas, it is no more); and finally back to my hotel just down the street from Postdamer Platz, where I have sundry memories not worth listing in detail.
Next life, I'm moving to Berlin.
