Two Things Unrelated except that They're Vaguely about Cultural Identity

I recently hung out with a lovely cohort of fellow Berlin transplants, all young women, all native English speakers, but having followed varied trajectories before landing here - one from Ohio but via many years in California, one English but raised in France, one part British/part French Canadian and raised in both those places.

As such collections of people sometimes will, we got to talking about things like where we feel at home and whether we think we'll stay here long term and how our own native language has morphed slightly through living abroad - for the Americans, for example, it becomes more "international," which means flavored by British phrasings that are often more readily understood in other parts of the world. And for the British, apparently, it means growing confusion about whether something is wrong, or just spelled American style.

Then the British/Canadian turned to me and said, You know, you're the person here who feels the most automatically familiar to me, because Upstate New York and Montreal are the most similar, they're the same region. Fascinating - even though she's kind of more British (you hear it in her accent, at least) and her Canadian culture is the French one, not English-speaking, still geography exerts that strong a pull on us, that just being from the same part of the world can provide us with an immediate sense of familiarity, certain things that don't require any explanation. (We'd also been talking about - are you sensing a theme here? - fall on the east coast of North America and how far, far superior it is to fall here in northern/central Europe.)

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And unrelatedly, except perhaps for being tied together by the tenuous thread of being somehow "about culture":

English students of mine, a middle-aged German couple, recently spent a week in Istanbul and came back gushing, as I knew they would, about the warmth and beauty of that city. (Cue nostalgic bout of gazing into the distance and thinking about Istanbul...)

Coming back to Berlin after that was something of a shock, the husband of the couple told me. All those long faces on the city trains in the mornings!

I have to admit, when I think about those sides of Berlin - how cold and unfriendly public life here often is, how strangers brush past each other at best, or even actively treat one another as obstacles to get past as quickly as possible - I have to hurry to find some aspect of Berlin to think about that do I like, because otherwise it spirals into, "Wait a minute, why would anyone in their right mind ever want to live here?"