I am from here and I am the only one in my last four conversations
- Looking for
- somebody staying long enough that we get past the introductions
- Experience
- Fourteen years, three dynamics, two of them with people from elsewhere.
- Around
- Kreuzberg, Berlin
Four conversations this year, and I was the only person from this country in any of them. Two Americans, one Italian, one who had been here four months and was still working out the bins. I am not complaining, and I would say the pool being what it is has made this city considerably more interesting than the one I grew up in. It does produce a specific fatigue, though, which is that I keep starting at the beginning.
Forty seven, Kreuzberg, switch, fourteen years in.
The beginning takes a season. Explaining how things work here, translating what people mean, discovering that a word I used has landed differently. It is enjoyable the first three times. By the fourth you begin to want somebody who already knows.
So this post is aimed at whoever has been here a while, from anywhere, and is past the beginning.
What I want is an arrangement in either direction with real structure, a fixed evening, obligations in between. Not looking to be anybody's guide to this city. Not looking for somebody in their first year. And not looking to conduct the whole thing at the level of a language I am translating in my head, which after a day at work I cannot do.