The Flâneur in Kreuzberg

Places: Berlin, Hamburg
Guide: Rebecca Shapey

I. On Traveling Places

Hamburg ranges from an hour and a half to two hours away by fast train. Early on Friday morning, bright and chilly, our group sauntered into Ostbahnhof Berlin. With my croissant and Red Bull in hand, I boarded the train. Five of us curled up in a small private compartment on the train. By nine o’ clock, the sun was rising over bright green fields filled with thousands of cow families sleeping and chewing tranquilly, undisturbed by the trains rolling by.
I leaned as far against the window as my seat would allow. We passed through quaint gingerbread-house villages, and then suddenly more cows and meadows appeared. It would be miles before we hit another town. I suddenly wished that our train ride would be hours long – five hours maybe, six, seven, until the sun set, just so that I could see the rush of the German countryside fly past the window of my clean, roomy train compartment.

II. On The Exotic

My corner of Berlin, the southeast-central neighborhood, is Kreuzberg. Simply put, it is not a beautiful neighborhood. The architecture is uniformly, well, “Eastern European”. Apartments are of a general 1970’s stark aesthetic, little more than glorified slabs of concrete with chunks of primary-colored rectangular balconies set into the sides of buildings. And Yet, walking out of my apartment on Adalbertstrasse, I still have to urge to grin wildly and hold my arms out and proclaim, “I’m in Berlin!”. A quality newness and unfamiliarity excites the craving for “the exotic”.
As Botton suggests, it is the slight differences that signify a new, “exotic” destination (seeing the letter ß, pronounced as “ss”, is the most obvious). The buildings of Kreuzberg have little inherent charm, but as street signs, the drink markets, the Turkish food stands and the graffiti unfurl, stark block after block, I begin to grow into Kreuzberg.

The tram; Apartment complex in Kreuzberg
Being in transit thrills me down to the core. Traveling settles me and puts me at ease. On trains, airplanes, boats, buses, I am giddy with excitement – and the instability makes me calm. I have always felt as though the busier and less predicable my life is, the happier I am. It gives me purpose to know that I have activities to tend to. When I throw myself into a new country, onto a train whose signs and announcements I cannot understand, I’m overjoyed with stimulation. As I sit down on the rickety bench outside of the drink market and open my beer and watch artists in dreadlocks and Turkish families bike past, I am content.