Berlin reunion

After a year and a half, the three of us were once again in the same city. And we had very little time, yet we did manage to make the best of it.

Meeting the girls and hanging out with them made me reflect upon my shallowness, my happiness and my sometimes very unhealthy obsessions and fears. And while I’m perfectly ok with the first two and content with most of the choices I’ve made, I figured it would be in my best interest to stop obsessing and let go of my fears - in the end, it's been 10 years and it would have been even more unsettling if things hadn't changed at all. However, looking back at those 10 years, with their ups and downs, even though I did manage to come to terms with the fact that as we grow older, we have new priorities and outlooks upon life, I still think we're not old enough for such a conversation:

my high school crush was not a crush, it was a crash

mine is best to be avoided, even after all those years

mine is dead...

It so happened that Ceci was there reporting live from the film festival, so almost all our meeting points, day and night, were somewhere near the red carpet. So I discovered that proximity to glamour can make you feel glam, but also that you can't rely on your friends, especially when you ask them to shamelessly use & abuse their press pass. And so, because Ceci is very ethical and professional at very inappropriate times, she refused to set me up with Leonardo DiCaprio :(

Berlin was amazing and more than just a very good setting for our reunion. I'm officially in love. I don't want to move there, not planning to start over (yet) again, not at all ready for the whole packing-unpacking-life twisting scenario, but it could easily become a regular weekend destination. Coming from a city like Warsaw, which has its odd and melancholic charm, distant and not exactly open to multicultural experiences, Berlin is like a breath of fresh air. It's dynamic, light and positive, with a contagious energy. And I just love the fact that everybody smiles - it's not very common to see people smiling in the streets of Warsaw. Its magic is made up of all those apparently insignificant details: the Russian accordionist on the S-Bahn, the Iranian shop with all the conceivable and unconceivable spices in the world, next door to our hotel, the colorful Kreuzberg district with its extra sweet cakes, immigrants, radicals and the most amazing artichoke in the world, the Russian market with fresh fruit late at night and the Asian supermarket with everything and anything aloe, the industrial buildings and the art world they hide and of course the exciting nightlife. I may have found my favorite club in Berlin, although it's rather an assumption, not a certainty. SO36 was described in my guide as being home to any alternative lifestyle, from gay Turks and metal heads to punks and hardcore vegans. I wouldn't know, because unfortunately we didn't make it there - I blame it on that last round of shots, but another fairly reasonable explanation was that the last round of shots came after we had tested almost everything on the menu. But I think I found the perfect excuse for yet another perfect weekend in Berlin.