Sweaters for Cats and Serendipitous Berlin Architecture
Added 2020-04-14 18:00:02 +0000 UTCFebruary 15, 2020
A Bar in Neukölln
Well, I made it: 1 month. There should be something with a candle on it, I feel.
WHEW! It has been a difficult week. I learned that (private) health care here is shockingly shit. Germany is definitely behind on mental health care.
Someone just asked in English for a beer then walked away, and the bartender looked as if they had just asked for “food” (they take beer very seriously here).
Starting over involves so many things. Good fucking golly. You should see my “to do” spreadsheet (yes, spreadsheet). Appalling. I work on seven or eight intractable things every day until I deem it enough for one brain and flee to a movie and my knitting. Except, several days ago, I finished the beret I was knitting, so today I tried to have a day off with nothing to knit and nothing to sew. So I came undone, rather. Now I have started to make a sweater for my ex-cat Sabine. What does that say—knowing me (and Sabine, who prefers to spend her time hunting rabbits in the thicket)—about my mental state?
She will wear it. That is Ken’s problem (the ex-human; they have been duly informed).
I’ve decided to try to stay here for at least a year. Where else would I be? If you visited, you’d understand.
Berlin is a capital city that has forgotten to be a Capital City. It has forgotten to Rush. If you stay in the right places, it eschews the 21st century altogether. Neukölln was only lightly bombed. It still bears the frescoes of the Weimar Era, between the Treaty of Versailles and 1929, when the Americans called in their loans and everything crashed, providing Hitler his perfect window.
What a remarkable moment to have been solvent.
Fondly,
Ernestine
