An American Among Strangers: And Now For Things Less Serious (Day 38)

Winter in Berlin:

Light

Streetlamp Tempelhof

Its almost gone now. Today it rained instead of snowed. The cold tried its best with waves of hail but its time is nearly up. The snow of Monday barely stuck and the mercury read more than 1, sometimes ever more than three. Those who pass by in the street (Flaneurs as they call them in other lands) have dropped layers of artificial skins, and spring, we can safely say, despite the stubborn efforts of several soon to come cold snaps, is on its way.

Holocaust Memorial in the Snow / South of Unter Den Linden

I found children throwing snowballs in the middle of it when I got there. I found this uplifting.

Whats written at the top of one of the monuments

Much of this feeling comes from the sudden appearance of the light once more. You adjust to life here when it gets black at all of a few minutes after 4:00 (16:00) in the afternoon and you forget that its really making you unhappy. Then when all of a sudden it is 4:45 and you can still see three feet in front of your face, the whole world seems to come alive. And unlike finicky things like the temperature, the advance of the light is ever steady in its advance. I walk to the train now, bathed not in the early dawn, but in the full light of morning. Someday soon it may even be light when I wake up. This gives the coming of Spring a certain inevitability allowing for rationalizations like, "Yeah it may be minus 5 today with heavy winds, but I could see out the windows of the Sudkreuz S-bahn station for the first time in the month that I've been here." And because the winter is darker here and the summer lighter, the shift between the two is much more noticeable. You can feel the difference between a few days whereas in the east (which strangely is west of me) one can only look up every once and a while and notice that "oh yeah, it is getting a little lighter isn't it?"

So I thought I'd leave some parting immages of the Winter:

The Gerndarmenmarkt in Snow

Stadtmitte

No Swimmers

Unknown lake in the Grünewald [Green Forest]

Hope

Wall near Hackescher Markt

German phrase of the moment: "Die Blaue Stunde" lit. The Blue Hour or Twilight. Along with "Weiße Nacht" it is a poetic synonym for "die Dämmerung" which you may have heard of in the context of "Die Götterdämmerung" [lit. twilight of the Gods] of Wagnerian fame or from mythology where we normally call it Ragnarok.