I got here last night and it took forever! and this is only going to western europe.....I can t begin to imagine the middle east or southeast asia. I get very restless on long flights or bus rides. plus, my right ear became clogged up on the plane from zurich to berlin. i started to get kind of scared that it would become damaged and was glad the plane landed when it did.
anyway, i m in berlin now, where ive been before but it s like i was never here. it s strange how a place sinks in deeper the more you re there....and everything here is very different and this is only berlin.....i keep telling myself that. what will i encounter in cairo? well, for one thing, at least it will be warm there. i arrived at tegel airport yesterday afternoon but for me that was the equivalent of 7 in the morning. i was really dizzy and tired from the long flight and disoriented, but the guy i was supposed to stay with was not home so i had to find something to do between 2 and 6:30 pm, so i spent a lot of time at tegel airport, and desperately needed a shower. i found a shower at the airport and finally managed with my rudimentary german to get a shower from the bathroom attendant (you have to pay for it, it s about 3 euros).
the very small amount of time in switzerland i was there.....it was far more beautiful from what i even remembered last. even the airport is gorgeous, too bad it s very hard to live there and extremely hard to get citizenship. there are mountains and farms everywhere and there is no ugly construction or housing projects which you do see on the way from the airport to the cities in europe. it s an amazing place and not too cold.
i mean berlin is great but i am not a cold weather person (i grew up in chicago and michigan with their extreme, bitter cold winters) and it really doesn't get warm here. however, that doesn't mean I'm not enjoying berlin, but i might as well be on another planet. everything is different from the keyboards on the computer to the toilets and even when you run hot water a machine goes off.....this guy has a brick oven in the living room and his apartment is large and comfortable and in a gorgeous fairly old building that didn't get destroyed. thing about berlin is......it's kind of hard to look around and see all these new buildings which frankly aren't attractive, cause you realize why they're here.....the Marshall plan the so called benevolent thing.....but the natural beauty of the city is gone. however there are parts of the city that remained intact like where i am......and it s very much like what I saw in movies or read in books. the buildings are brownstones and fairly big and have huge entranceways and windows, and all of them have terraces I think they're called.
But last night before I met my companion, I was walking alone, after no sleep, in the cold and in this town that is not familiar to me. There were some skeezy men on the corners and I didn't even know if I was safe and oh.....I ws thinking, I'm here for twelve days and already I'm homesick. I miss my cats, my friends, I miss having my own place and my own toilet and my own computer I miss Garrett and I was cold, so I admire these people on bootsnall who seem to just go from place to place anywhere on earth and it doesn't seem to phase them. Those people who say, I'm never coming back.....that could be me, but I want to act and always figured I would have to stay in the US. And I'm really not a negative person.....but you realize you don't know what you have til you don't have it anymore. I am now missing 60 US dollars.....could be worse, could be $600, but it is annoying. But I realize what I had in the US like bodegas on every corner where I can get coffee at 2AM, my gym, 24 hour subways, and the familiarity. I mean, I was so fed up with the US when I left and thinking, with W in office and us workers getting fucked even though we work hard and everything being in favor of rich people, even on the democratic side, I thought I have to get out of here. But once I was gone I realized what I had left behind.....still I'm glad I'm here. I'll definitely be the richer for it......corny but true.