Berlin Diaries - the rest of the story

Berlin was not all introspection and daily meditative art experiences. No, no, no. I was there at the invitation of Sonya, who is ten years younger than me and single (although quite attached) and Berlin is a party city. Indeed, I do not think I have inhaled so much secondhand smoke since my freshman year of college. I decided that cigarette smoke is my nostalgia smell for Berlin. India is a burning smell mingled with spices. Rome is a whiff of car exhaust. Newfoundland=woodstove. Berlin is definitely cigarettes.

As if to prove the difference between 32 and 42, I frequently bowed out of such opportunities as dancing until 7am, but I was invited (read: coerced) into going to a club where every third young woman had dreadlocks and the music was two young men with their backs to the audience using various electronic devices to some effect. Not a good effect, but it was an effect. And then me, with my increasingly white hair and cardigan sweater. Actually, part of the charm of the Berlin party scene is that you can have white hair and a cardigan because no one really cares. It was fun. We were there with a really lovely Danish artist,Ulla Hvejsal, and it was fun, for the moment, to let go of worrying about home and about making art and about trying to speak German and about planning, organizing, thinking, and just sit on the broken furniture and gossip and watch people and invent ideas for future projects with two other artists and drink slightly suspicious beverages and, just for a moment, be part of the scene.

And then there was souvenir yarn:


For fun.


For socks.


For my mom to make socks.


For more socks.


For Lucy, who has already started a scarf.