First Post. Still Here.
Atelier ManganelI didn’t move to Berlin with a five-year plan. Or a plan at all, really. Just a suitcase, an overused notebook, and the vague hope that something would click if I kept walking long enough. I told people I came here for “something creative,” which is another way of saying “I have no idea, but I need the noise, the quiet, the contradiction.”
Berlin didn’t welcome me. It didn’t reject me either. It just looked me up and down, shrugged, and kept moving. That was my first lesson: this city doesn’t care why you’re here. It’s not going to give you a gold star for trying. But it will give you space—if you can handle it.
I Moved to Berlin Without a Plan. The City Didn’t Mind.
This blog isn’t about Berlin as some dreamy European haven. You already know that version—the one with soft-focus sunsets over Tempelhofer Feld, graffiti that reads like poetry, cafés where someone’s always writing their “debut novel.” Sure, that’s part of it. But so is the Altbau apartment with windows that don’t close all the way, the U-Bahn smell in summer, the neighbors who never say hello but always notice if your recycling is wrong.
I wanted a place to write about that Berlin. The one that doesn’t try to impress you. The one that’s beautiful in a way you don’t notice until months later, standing in line at the Späti, tired and slightly heartbroken, realizing you’ve started to feel at home.
There are good days. Days when the city feels like a secret that only you understand—a perfect track playing in your headphones, everyone walking at the right speed, and the graffiti on the bridge saying something that feels oddly personal. Then there are the weird nights. The ones that start with someone texting “let’s just get one drink” and end in a warehouse with no phone signal, wondering how you’re getting home and whether that was actually a toilet.
And then there’s the in-between. The slow Mondays. The mismatched socks. The quiet walks home from a job you’re not sure you like anymore. The moments that aren’t remarkable until they stack up into a life. That’s what I want to write about.
Because Berlin isn’t clean or easy or obvious. It’s moody and blunt and weirdly freeing. It leaves you alone until you’re ready to show up as whoever you really are—messy, unsure, stubborn, curious.
So that’s what this is. A place to put the fragments. A way to mark time in a city that doesn’t ask for explanations. If you live here, you’ll probably recognize some of it. If you’re just passing through, maybe it gives you something real.
Either way, thanks for reading. No plan, no map—just here. Let’s see where it goes.
