My things

 

Two months in Berlin, and I am still learning how this city works. Some discoveries are about places, some are about people, and others are about the ordinary systems that you very quickly start depending upon when you live somewhere rather than simply visit it. One of those systems is the Berlin U-Bahn. I had used it before, of course, but I was still getting accustomed to travelling through Berlin this way, understanding the lines, recognising station names and gradually developing a mental map of how different parts of the city connect. This morning I took a few photographs along the way. Looking at them afterwards, I realised that they recorded something else as well: how different the reality of Berlin's underground railway was from the image I had somehow created in my mind before moving here. It was not the nightmare I had imagined. Just walk into the station One of the first things that struck me about Berlin's u...

By the middle of July 2019, I had been living in Berlin for only about two months. I was still very much in that stage of discovering the city: looking at ordinary things because they were not yet ordinary to me, noticing behaviours that long-term Berliners probably walked past without giving them a second thought, and gradually trying to understand what exactly constituted the Berlin lifestyle . Then I saw this. On top of a street sign, somebody had carefully assembled what appeared to be a small collection of wine and sparkling-wine corks. They were not simply rubbish thrown there. At least some of them seemed to have been deliberately positioned, balanced and accumulated, creating a tiny and completely unofficial installation above the heads of everybody walking underneath. Naturally, I took a photograph. It was one of those small scenes that required no explanation and yet somehow seemed perfectly at home in Berlin. Who put them there? I ha...

I had just returned to Berlin from a trip to Moldova, and this time I had brought something back with me that I was beginning to appreciate more and more: a bottle of Moldovan wine. By then I had already tried quite a few wines during my visits to Moldova, and one thing had started to surprise me. There were some very good wines there — genuinely enjoyable wines with character — yet back in Berlin I was finding it remarkably difficult to find Moldovan wine at all. That seemed strange. Berlin is hardly a city with a shortage of international food and drink. You can find products from almost everywhere. Yet Moldova, a country with such a strong wine culture, seemed almost invisible on the shelves I was seeing. So this bottle travelled home with me. Three grapes in one rather unusual bottle The wine was from Castel Mimi , and the label immediately attracted my attention. It was a red blend of Pinot Noir, Saperavi and Rară Neagră . Pinot Noir needs little in...