What's a big deal in a small town is just another day in Berlin. Every possible combination of events has already happened. The good news is nobody cares, the bad news is nobody cares.

I look up and see someone watching the sunset off one of the balconies at Hotel Telegraphenamt. He‘s so absorbed by the view he doesn’t notice me. I try to enjoy his moment, but it‘s cold downstairs.

My friend jokingly told me recently that I have a resting sweet face. That's a great compliment, I still think about it sometimes.

Went to this restaurant that looks like we‘re about to make some clandestine backroom deal in a Tarantino movie. I can hear the song “Staying Alive” by Bee Gees. I kind of wanted to be in the shot, but I had no deal to make. Maybe next time.

One man deep in his cups advises the other: “Na ja, it’s not your wedding night, you’ll be fine!”. His Aperol Spritz clings on for its dear life while he gestures. The bartender keeps his eyes on the glass he's drying.

Spring is mostly just trees trying to be seductive. Imagine being so attractive once a year that other species come to smell and touch you. I‘m not a good pollinator but I enjoy it.

Confidence is such a mysterious quality because it doesn't always care about ability, social class or common sense. I admit sometimes I try to redistribute it a bit, but it's dangerous work.

A lot of things that photograph really well don’t look or feel good in reality. And vice versa. People obviously expect both, but it's actually twice the effort.

German women rarely wear any red I've noticed. I don't wear any either to avoid whatever they’re avoiding, but I've always wondered why. Too bold? After all these years I'm still not sure.

Every time I give a Berlin cashier exact change, they say „Perfekt!“. This is so rare to hear out here in any context. Now I always immediately produce the coins in the hopes of hearing my favourite word.

Went to this bar recently where the rules of engagement were quite clear. There’s a part of me that wants to rearrange them by importance, but I wouldn’t know where to put the forklift one.

This very non-Prussian palm house used to exist in Potsdam, saw a study of it at the Alte Nationalgalerie. Already burnt down in 1880, sadly. My favourite detail is the two fictional harem ladies lounging around. I‘m sure Carl Blechen thought they were cheesy, but when your boss is the king…

Sometimes when I feel sad I look at photos of fawns sleeping in the grass. It’s adorable, you should try it.

You may think that some women are vain, but if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t bother. They‘d save their pennies and buy themselves a pretzel.

As my mom likes to say: “Oh yeah? If you're so smart, how come you're not the prime minister?” I don't know mom, I don't know. Could ask you the same thing.

Summer in Tiergarten.

A tired ticket seller sternly warns me that I‘ll be locked in overnight if I don’t leave the botanical gardens on time in the evening. I can’t tell whether this is a threat or maybe an invitation. She then points towards the sign that says this as if it’s some kind of legal proof. I can now confirm that they turn off the lights inside the greenhouses fifteen minutes before closing time. I left on time.

My friend gets frustrated trying to explain pecans to me, she doesn't know what they’re called. „They’re like walnuts but more elegant!“. I admit I do like elegant walnuts in my breakfast.

Our neighbour’s five year old son ambushes me with questions while I‘m sitting on the bench in our courtyard. His parents are nowhere in sight, I wonder where he defected from. He gets straight to business: how come men wear belts and women don’t? I explain to him that women probably have wider hips so they don’t need them as much. He’s not satisfied with this answer and I can see more questions about women’s hips forming in his blue eyes. Let‘s go find your parents before we both get in trouble.

A young woman in Treptower Park is trying to convince her poodle to do a trick. She starts prancing like she’s in a Disney movie, hoping the dog will join her. The poodle looks up offended, wondering what kind of indignity is this.

The day after I was born my mom lent all her clothing to her hospital roommate for a couple of hours. She'd had an emergency birth, never got a chance to grab her things and needed to sort out some paperwork. Imagine having to ask a near stranger for a favor like that. I didn‘t press on how exactly this arrangement came about. She wore everything, down to the boots, coat and fur hat. I asked mom: So did it feel like you? Is it like looking at yourself? She said: „Not at all.“

She looks so peaceful and ethereal (La muse endormie). Brancusi made about two dozen different versions of this sculpture, but this one’s my favourite. The bronze gives it this sci-fi feel that I really like.

Almost every woman in Berlin parts her hair in the middle, it’s basically the law. I only became aware of this because people occasionally point out to me that I don’t. I can’t help but wonder who gets to decide these things.

My neighbour’s house gets graffitied semi-regularly, he immediately rushes to paint over it. Most times I don’t even get a chance to see the masterpiece, just a fresh coat of paint in the morning. Is it a strategy? Or maybe he just hates it that much? But today the graffiti’s just been sitting there for hours, it says: Marco Crew. He‘s probably not home or maybe they’ve finally broken his spirit. I‘d go downstairs to take a photo, but I‘m afraid he might think it was me all these years.

Whenever I get the flu I end up listening to this podcast about Napoleon and his battles to pass the time. It’s like a ritual. There’s 134 episodes, and it takes us 25 just to finally leave France and see some action. I’m sick and there’s nothing to do but listen, so every day we drag ourselves from camp to camp. Sometimes it’s quite suspenseful, sometimes it just lulls me to sleep. I must have slept through the battle of Arcole at least four different times. Once I start to recover I lose interest and desert his campaigns. I‘ve never made it to Egypt.

Later edit: I went to the Deutsches Historisches Museum to take a photo of the hat Napoleon left behind at the battle of Waterloo. The front desk guy solemnly told me that the exhibit’s closed until... 2031. That‘s a long time for me, but a short time for a hat.

I‘m at the Berlin Zoo when I get asked out of the blue by my friend if I can tell apart the male from the female hippo. They’re both lurking in the water and look nearly identical to my tired, non-caffeinated eyes. I stare at them for a while, and conclude that one of the hippos has longer, cuter eyelashes. They’re not exactly like Audrey Hepburn‘s, but you know, more noticeable. And I guessed right! Self-doubt kicks in later that maybe I just got lucky, so I spend the rest of the day studying everyone’s eyelashes. (Later edit: my friend said that she looked more delicate than him.)

I’m trying to log into my old Goodreads account, but it’s been over ten years since I last signed in and I don’t remember the password anymore. Spend days trying out different combinations, trying to reverse engineer what kind of wacky password my college self could have possibly come up with. I’m standing in line at the supermarket when it suddenly dawns on me what it could be. I only have a few items, so I throw them back into my cart and rush to try it before I forget. I hide out in the potato section to try my luck. „Your password is incorrect“. I go back to the now much longer line feeling foolish.

I’ve been curious to see Hotel Wilmina for years now, the premises used to be a women’s prison ward/ criminal court in the 1900s. I assumed they had taken all the prisonness out of it and only left a few historical details here and there. They actually left in quite a bit. The rooms feel like a german take on California Modern and there’s a fancy restaurant downstairs, but at the end of the day you still go back to your cell. I would describe it as a whimsical luxury prison. This is probably where they’d send you if you were a billionaire.

A hand politely jolts me awake, two flight attendants are hovering above me. Everyone’s gone, the lights are off. “Oh my gosh! We’re so sorry ma’am, my colleague forgot to check the cabin. She’s new. We didn’t realize you’re still here.” They kindly toss me out of the plane. Three minutes later I’m standing outside on the tarmac shivering, wondering how this is even possible? You can’t just forget people on planes. Next time I’m putting a tiny cat bell around my neck.

Proof of my return to Berlin, randomly took the shot on my way to a meetup. I like how the photo already looked like an old memory the second I took it.

Ever since I got allergies, winter is the best time of the year. Whenever I look out the window and it‘s -1C, I think to myself „Perfect! As God intended.“

A bunch of different parts of me are having a useless disagreement and I’m trying to break up the fight. Everyone back in your cages. I don’t care what you guys decide, I just need to get some sleep.

Sometimes the wisest version of me burns a bridge, and then the dumbest version of me keeps coming back to cry next to it. Or is it the other way around? Some days I can't tell.

I left my bag inside Denns (german Whole Foods) just as the store was about to close up. I’m standing outside their entrance in the freezing cold trying to grab some young employee’s attention. To my surprise, she doesn’t open the sliding doors and just does the universal body language for “I’m tired, what do you want?”. So now I’m playing charades with this stranger, trying to mime an imaginary backpack and desperately pointing towards their bathrooms. She immediately goes to the men’s bathroom. Now I’m offended. She eventually does find it and just drops it on the dirty floor and disappears. I look at it longingly though the glass door, just like the day we first met, hoping we get to go home already.

Henri-Edmond Cross would have probably liked Pinterest. His pink-purple-green color palette almost feels like digital art you’d just casually scroll past on your phone, but it was super unusual for 1896. Not even his friend Paul Signac ever made something that looks straight out of a video game landscape.

All his other paintings feel era appropriate and easy to date, but for some reason he broke the matrix with this one. Maybe we’re all accidentally ahead of our time once in our lives, but we’ll never know.

I can always tell when an investor is visiting our office not by their outfit or latest iPhone model, but by the way they sit on our office couch as if it’s their own living room. No 9 to 5, employed man is ever that relaxed at 1 PM in the afternoon.

The cost of anonymity is that it also strips away a lot of credibility. You realise how much your identity makes your life easier, it gives your words real weight. Without that your character gets examined with a flashlight. I can relate to how offensive that feels sometimes.

I recently read this article about shoemakers that make ballet shoes by hand for prima ballerinas. Most of the blue collar workers have never actually seen any ballet at all. Each ballerina has her shoemaker with his symbol (crown, butterfly) on the bottom of the shoe; she then later scrapes them off so that her competitors can’t see it. You have all these famous dancers who personally show up in limousines to collect their shoes and say thank you, yet in their public life the workers don't exist.

I’ve been looking for a new apartment recently and noticed how messy everyone’s nightstands are, like little art installations. I thought to myself: how can people live like this? Then I went home to check my own nightstand.

My friend asks: Why do you use a metal cup? Are you in prison? (Later edit: the best part of having a metal cup is that you sometimes forget you can’t put it in the microwave. Gift one to your enemies.)

A friend I occasionally meet told me unprovoked that her father is, verbatim, an asshole. And she's not the type to say such things, so it caught me off guard. It still haunts me weeks later, I mean, what a legacy to leave behind. My father is kind and calm and sweet, I tend to assume everyone else's is as well.

People tell me I look younger than I am. I do my best to take it as a compliment.

All of Jørgen Roed’s work has this slight quirkiness to it that I like. Those trees look a bit whimsical to me, like they’re from a children’s book. Maybe I can just borrow this from Kunsthalle and put it in my bedroom, they’d never think to look for it there. I‘d eventually give it back.

I'm on my way to work, red light is taking forever. There’s two groups of friends excited to finally see each other, they’re waiting on opposite sides of the crosswalk in Alexanderplatz. I get excited too and start smiling like a fool. Wish I could join them.

Bought a tiny little embroidered shooting star today, thought it looked so delicate and pretty. It’s actually a lot smaller than it looks in the photo. I’ll probably add it to my winter coat. I guess if you want to spot me in Berlin, look for the shooting star.

Berlin’s slowly emptying out for the holidays. Soon it will just be me and the foxes, running into each other at midnight.

It’s Saturday night. A group of drunk guys stumble out of a pub and try to accost me as I walk past. This is unusual even for Warschauer Straße. I‘m wearing a long Mackintosh coat if you’re wondering. I ignore their questions and give them a wide berth. They can barely stand, but they try to follow me down the street like hungry puppies. They probably won’t remember what they said in the morning, but I will.

I'm turning 31 in a few months and on some level I'm relieved that a younger, greener version of me is gone forever. Like some annoying but endearing friend who moved away. I find her old t-shirts, patiently mend bridges she burned, laugh at her old tweets. People who used to know her still contact me. I do miss her. Times like these I wish I could give her a call, see what bold advice she'd give me. She was braver than me, maybe she'd know what to do.

It's late and my local pharmacy is randomly playing a documentary about street monkeys in India in their window display instead of their usual ads. First I stand there watching just out of pure confusion (what am I looking at?), then I slowly start to like it. A homeless man eventually joins me and we watch together for a bit. I thought we were having a moment, but then he asks me for money. I give him some change and leave. Kind of wanted to keep watching, but now it's awkward. (Update: The monkeys are gone, back to regular ads. Maybe it was a Christmas special.)

I finally manage to sit down when I suddenly realize that the tram is taking me in the opposite direction, but I'm too exhausted to get off again. It's quiet and empty, close to the end of the line. I just let it take me in the wrong direction for a while. At least I know for a fact there's good sushi at the end of this line.

You can’t really understand who someone is without knowing the best and worst thing that ever happened to them. It’s not about trauma dumping or expecting sympathy, you just want others to understand where you’re coming from. Your whole world gets filtered through those events.

I don’t spend any time on Instagram. I have no idea what exactly happens there these days, I just get to see the final output. It gets harder and harder to find anything that somehow escaped the TikTok-Insta black hole. You try to fight it for as long as you can, but you always feel its pull everywhere you go. I noticed that even older men now start to subconsciously prefer the Instagram-like beauty ideal, even though they never directly spend any time on the app.

Whenever I’m having a disagreement with someone, there’s this funny AI song called “Wow, I didn't know that” that I like to play. Always makes me laugh and defuses the situation. It’s a satire on people that play dumb or act innocent when they get caught doing something wrong. We all know someone like that, this could be their national anthem. I just love the fake innocence the singer has when he “learns” he can’t drink and drive, commit insurance fraud, or show up late for work: https://www.udio.com/songs/jGjYfsRosZjYTkSBdFgEyF

Martin Luther ended up in an unfortunate spot in my photo gallery. Sorry buddy. Just saw his portrait at the Deutsche Historische Museum.

Also saw a pretty view of Altona from 1859. But the context of the painting in this exhibit was quite sad: multiple cholera outbreaks happened there around that time.

I think the hardest things to afford in life are dignity and integrity. That’s the real luxury, not having to ever compromise the two. Being able to say no.

My Christmas present: a Gustave Baumann calendar. Sells out every year because people collect them. The artist was German-American (born in Magdeburg, emigrated to the US when he was ten), maybe that’s why I have a soft spot for him. I feel like there’s some germanness in his prints, no?

I got talked into watching „One battle after another“ and I actually really liked it. Later I was talking about the movie with a friend and he asked if I‘d be willing to go on date with Leonardo DiCaprio. I said absolutely not, on account of his dating habits. We then had the most absurd debate about how most women would probably say yes. So I spent the rest of the week asking a bunch of women I know if they’d go on a date with him, just to prove a point. We got roommates, coworkers and moms involved. To my dismay, most women said yes. They just wanted the clout of having been on a date with DiCaprio.

You know that feeling when you’re hoping for good news, and you get one of those long, well-written, promising emails? It‘s crafted like this beautiful origami crane, and when you read it there‘s just a big fat no inside.

My mother was beautiful, I'm not even exaggerating. Our eyes look similar. I remember that even when I was too young to understand what beauty was, I could feel how the energy in a room changed when she walked in. She had to deal with a lot of unwanted attention; it was polite and subtle, but still palpable enough that I noticed it even as a kid. It's silly to say it, but when people praise my looks, I feel like they're just complimenting my mother. She was the star, I'm just a derpy copy of her. Even two generations from now, mom will still be collecting compliments.

If you want to find out who someone really is, watch their reaction as their ICE train leaves right in front of them. Such a mundane thing to happen, but it really tests your character.

Someone recently gave me one of the sweetest compliments and nastiest insults I’ve heard in a while, both in the same afternoon. It was so confusing, felt like a kiss and a slap. You’d think they’d cancel each other out, but not really. Guess which one I still think about.

I'm always flattered when Germans smile at me in public transport. I think „I camouflage well, they must think I'm one of their own.“ But by the time I finally learned how to look like a local in Berlin, I went to Munich. I‘m not fooling anyone here with my cargo pants.

Whoever took my umbrella from the coffee shop, I hope you drop your keys in the Biomüll dumpster.

I have a cold and no umbrella (see previous note) and I’m standing kind of dejected in front of a Rewe in Prenzlauer Berg. A well-dressed, tall guy is taking a long business call. Bad news judging by his body language. He towers over his three year old son, who looks up at him to understand what could possibly be more important than him. The little boy eventually loses his patience, grabs his dad’s coffee cup with both hands and takes a big gulp. I panic because I don’t really know how much coffee a toddler can have.

I know so many people who are two or three honest conversations away from being on great terms, but I know those conversations will never happen. They either lack courage or humility to some extent. I can’t blame them, there’s so many conversations I wish I could have.

I'm finally starting to master the art of exact change whenever I buy anything with cash. If there's some national competition for this in Germany, I'd be down to participate. If you want to be competitive, this is what you need:

Saw people queuing up in front of the new Uniqlo store in Munich like it’s some trendy Michelin star restaurant. Here’s my Uniqlo jammies, I got them „zu verschenken“ from my neighbours.

I think people sometimes confuse being trustworthy with being likeable. You can find a person charming and fun to be around, but not necessarily give them the keys to your apartment. You can dislike a coworker, but trust them to meet a deadline. I recently met someone new that I fully trusted AND liked within hours, which is rare. I don't quite understand why, but I'm very impressed. You usually end up with either one or the other.

Every day on the tram I see weary german dads with their tiny colourful daughters. They all look like they need a vacation. My dad had me in his 40s, I know that look.

Berliners have been really kind to me this month. I‘m grateful but a bit suspicious.

I patiently sit in line at Rewe with my vegan sushi, which I absolutely don’t need. The two guys in front of me are lugging 30 bottles of Peroni. The one in front of them is buying one single Monster drink. Suddenly I realise we’re all in the poor-life-decisions queue and I feel embarrassed.

Someone I recently met at an event showed me a tattoo they got when they were 16. Sixteen! My mom would have murdered me, I’d be grounded until I was 25.

Friend explains his new dish to me: „It’s like a burrito Jesus would make.“ I thought: I don’t think Jesus had miso paste.

It’s always easy to say to someone “you should have known better”. Some life lessons don’t stick until you’ve felt them on your own skin.

I wonder how people remember me. Do I live in their memories as a regret/ mistake or someone they’re happy they met. Maybe they don’t remember me at all.

Friend looks at this photo and says: “What’s with this photo, you look like you already died.”

I don’t know what it’s like to have a man’s libido, but I know what it’s like to sit in front of the candy bar section at the supermarket for 15 minutes, thinking “maybe I should just go home instead”. But I know that if I do, I’ll just be thinking about candy bars all night.

I managed to walk 26k steps in one single day this month. That’s almost 20km (12.4 miles). Was surprised how fine I felt the next day.

I bought my father a wool flat cap as a gift for his birthday from this store that sells only mens hats. It was a lot more awkward than I thought it was going to be, I felt so out of place in this super manly space. Now I know how men feel when they buy lingerie. You just want to get out of there as soon as possible.

I recently saw someone in Mitte wearing the same Patagonia fleece jacket as me and I got overly excited about it. I half considered showing him that we match, but then I thought “this is not the german way”.

There is this rock song me and my friends used to listen to when we were kids: Nickelback – Rockstar. Which was hilariously inappropriate for our age, but we had a lot of fun. We even had a whole dance routine and everything. I recently got back in touch with this childhood friend, and we reminisced about our “concerts” in my living room.

I got into this habit of just spontaneously trying out random restaurants or cafes that I’d usually never go to. I end up regretting it most of the time. Sometimes it’s quite bad and I just resign myself to the experience, sometimes it turns out to be surprisingly interesting or comfortable. It’s really worth it when I discover some place I‘d usually never go to.

You never realise how well a cashier does their job until they suddenly don’t. I had this supermarket cashier accidentally scan a pack of cigarettes and a block of cheese, then insist these were my items. No ma’am, they are not. What a random combo.

Whenever I go through the list in my mind of all the men that ever rejected me, I’m always grateful nobody else has it but me. You couldn’t water board that information out of me. I guess no matter who you are, there’s always someone out there that just doesn’t like you no matter how hard you try.

Two of my most favourite places in Berlin in winter are: the greenhouse at the botanical garden in Steglitz, and the Alte Nationalgalerie. One of the reasons is because they’re both spacious and quiet (warm too!), which is not always easy to find in a big city. Another is that they’re not commercial spaces, nobody’s trying to sell you anything. My friend warned me that I should never mention online where I like to go, in case I have a stalker. But I find the idea of someone waiting for me all winter next to the Pieter de Hooch painting quite funny.

And here’s Pieter de Hooch, retroactively added this photo after my last visit. I can’t believe this painting somehow survived all the wars that happened since the 1600s.

I saw someone in Berlin wearing no more and no less than a “Duck dynasty” cap. It was this pretty obscure and lowbrow US reality tv show that stopped airing 10 years ago. Imagine if you found someone casually wearing a “Dschungelcamp” t-shirt in Cincinnati, Ohio. You’d be compelled to ask them “Why do you own this?”.

I’m sometimes too honest for my own good. So now I always ask: how honest do you want me to be? 60%? 70%? That’s the recommended setting. Anything past that and we’re getting REALLY honest. (Later edit: I just remembered that this is actually a reference from Interstellar. Cooper had this robot called TARS that had a 90% honesty parameter.)

This is me.