Simple Joys in Berlin

Sundays in Berlin always feel a bit gloomy, like the whole city is on a come-down from the weekend. The shadow of late-nights and loud music is felt by closed stores, quiet streets, and also me. Today especially, as a cloudy morning gave way to an afternoon rainstorm, a certain heaviness followed me around. 

So, for this post, I’m invoking a practice my friend Hannah told me about called ‘simple joys’. It’s really easy because all it takes is your own awareness and a place to write. Maybe it’s self-explanatory but basically you just write down a list of sometimes mundane, sometimes significant things you notice. I love doing this for two reasons: one because it makes me more attuned to joyful things happening around me, like I’m collecting joyful experiences to record later, and also because the process of writing all the things down and compiling them makes me joyful again. 

All of this is a longwinded way of saying this isn’t going to be a regular blog post, rather it’s my list of simple joys that happened to me this weekend. 

• As I was walking to meet my friend at the Kino, a little girl with curly blonde hair shouted “Hallo!” at me from her balcony and waved as I looked up and walked by.
• I saw a really cute dog with stubby legs and a furry white coat. He had little brown spots on the fur on his head and black spots on his back. Dogs in Berlin rarely stray from their owner’s lead, so I was surprised and joyful AF when this little guy came over and sniffed my feet.
• A woman I saw on the street knitting a cap while walking briskly.
• My friend Madina debuted her beautiful curly hair! Normally she straightens it but we were all spellbound when she came to the bar with fun, bouncy curls.
• After getting ice cream in Neukölln, my friends and I looked around for a place to sit and enjoy, and a mother sitting outside directed us to Körnerpark–a sprawling park and flower garden on the grounds of an abandoned castle.
• Abandoned boats came up three times this weekend which my friends and I laughed a lot about: 
  • The first was at Holzmarkt 25, where we sat in an abandoned boat as we drank beers and played cards.
  • The second was also at Holzmarkt 25, only it was evoked through the imagery of Patti Smith’s new book Bread of Angels that my friend Emma was reading aloud to me. She described how her husband Fred Sonic Smith tried to buy this little yellow boat with a gold sail she saw and fell in love with, but someone else had already purchased it. This boat became a frequent reference in Smith’s poetry and songwriting.
  • The third was at Sisyphos–an outdoor nightclub that felt like an amusement park in the place where the Seven Dwarfs lived. Randomly, there was an abandoned boat people were sitting in. 
• I went to my friend’s friend’s gallery opening where we saw this beautifully tragic black swan made out of what we think were old socks.
• The thrift store chain, Humana, that I go to basically every single day had a sale where everything was 2 euros and my friends and I all got some really cute stuff. We got really yummy Syrian food after.

That’s all!