"Poor But Sexy"

“Poor but Sexy” is Berlin’s gay mayor’s unofficial slogan for the city. After last month’s visit to this progressive, kooky and gritty city, the slogan (on top of the existence of an openly gay mayor) seems appropriate. When I first visited Berlin in 2006, I somehow managed to completely miss seeing anything of note and didn’t actually enjoy myself at all. This time around, however, the interesting blend of East and West that we found resonated with me in a strangely stabilizing way. The few days we spent here helped me to close a little tighter the very palpable gap that seems to still exist between Eastern Europe (Latvia) and Western Europe (Denmark, Germany).

A few of Linda’s most notable experiences in Berlin:

• Getting intellectual with our hosts and their spunky, local friends

• Sampling plentiful and very affordable Sudanese/Vietnamese/Thai/Turkish/Lebanese/German/you-name-it food available at every corner

• Exploring the wealth of street art and creative architecture that cover the urban landscape

• East Side Gallery: Interestingly, the Berlin Wall, once a barrier representing segregation and control, now seems to serve as a cultural and temporal bridge. The parts of it that remain act simultaneously as monuments dedicated to remembering the unimaginable and as canvasses for artists, which are therapeutically swathed in the colors and shapes of humanity’s emotional gamut. Check out our pictures (below) to experience some of the art of the East Side Gallery.

• Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport: Expanded by the Nazis to become “the mother of all airports” and used throughout the Cold War by the US military presence, it has found a new life as a well loved and well used public park, community garden and open-air living room. Spending a sunny Sunday afternoon here, we were surrounded with people of all ages from countless different cultural backgrounds all barbequing, playing and relaxing next to one another. Unfortunately, we got “locked out” of our hosts' apartment and weren’t able to grab our camera before heading to Templehof, but here’s a pretty good picture from the web: http://mullenkerri.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/090510-tempelhof-park.jpg . Who knew airplane runways made such great rollerblade tracks?

• Getting “locked out”: Each new location we find a temporary home in there’s a new kitchen with its own arrangement, new toilets with buttons in different (sometimes unexpected) places, new showers with different methods for flood avoidance, washing machines in a new language, a new front door and lock with a unique set of special pushes, pulls and number of clicks. Let’s just say we were “locked out”.