Soap Bubbles and Tequila

I was cat-sitting last week for a friend who lives nearby; one night I left her apartment pretty late, went down to the street and saw... soap bubbles, drifting down in the light from a streetlamp. The kind kids blow from little plastic wands, except that they were coming down from the sky.

Everything else was dark and the bubbles were only visible in the cone of light below the street light, but I looked and looked and finally traced them to the most likely source, a person framed in an upstairs window, who waved merrily in my direction.

Then there was the weekend, where an acquaintance I actually hardly know insisted I come along to a Mexican restaurant that was celebrating its one year anniversary, and I met various other cool people I hadn't known before and the restaurant owner came around and poured everybody shots of tequila on the house.

Next day, a trek down to the Neukölln district of Berlin, where an American woman runs an unofficial, word-of-mouth-advertised restaurant (the "speakeasy restaurant," as some like to call it). Delicious food and this time also a children's movie about an old witch who discovers her new calling, brewing up magical pancakes that make people happy. ("The final solution to the unhappiness problem.") This was accompanied by real life blueberry pancakes.

I'm starting to like Berlin again. There were a few months there were I really, really didn't, though admittedly those reasons were more inside my own head than out in the world. But sometimes I really hate the gray, the anonymity, the long faces on the subway. The way people push past each other as if every other person in the entire city were simply an obstacle.

I wasn't made to be a big city person. But living in a city this quirky does help.