Strange Coincidence

Yesterday, I spent the day with a friend, who moved to Neukölln neighbourhood of Berlin since I last visited her. The sun was shinning and so we went out for a walk for an hour or two: through the park areas, along the river Spreee, around a squatter’s community: weaving in and out of the various sub-areas within this district.

Neukölln doesn’t have a good reputation, but my friend feels very much at home and the apartment block she lives in houses a diverse number of friendly families. And most importantly, there are a lot of children around. My friend used to live in east East Berlin and she said there are only elderly or childless people residing there now. The east school system was/is suffering greatly, and so anyone who could afford to move west did.

I took a streetcar into the center of the city this morning. The outsides of most of the subway and streetcars are covered with graffiti and the windows are also just an opaqued scratched meshes. You can imagine my surprise when I looked across from where I was sitting and saw my name scratched on the one windows. What a strange coincidence. A graffiti greeting from this astonishing cosmopolitan.