An Excused Absence

I have had this reason for not putting up a post in the last few days: a friend of mine whom I haven't seen for, oh, about 23 years has been in town! And we've seen each other! And now it's been only a few hours since we've seen each other. It's quite miraculous, actually, and owes a lot to the wonders of the internet, which I choose to boil down to human tenacity and ingenuity. It was quite amazing and now she's gone and I have to say that I'm a little sad about it. But check out her photos - I've added a link to her Flickr page to the right-hand side of this page, so that everyone can enjoy her pictures and appreciate the fact that we are once again in touch. For anyone interested, here's what we looked like the last time we saw one another:

As you can see, things have changed quite a bit.
In other news, though, thanks to all who sent me good wishes regarding finding work - things went swimmingly and I find myself with three definite weekly engagements and more surely on the way! What luck! Or perhaps it was hard work, I don't know. What I do know is that it is very exciting that I feel that my life here in Berlin is becoming more established, that I'm actually a part of the city now and not just a visitor. In honor of that, I've finally followed through with my promise to show a little more of the sights one would see when just living in Berlin, rather than snapping sightseeing shots. Here's one now.

That one is Brad on a really big swing at Mauerpark, which is a park that still has part of the Berlin wall up. To the right is a large field and a very large flea market, which the following picture does only so much justice.

To the left is the standing part of the wall, which is being liberally painted on by quite a lot of people. The American perception of graffiti as a sign of a bad neighborhood doesn't really exist here. Here, it's still a viable form of expression. See?

But that's enough of that. That's really only one panoramic scene of one place in Berlin (in a district called Prenzlauer Berg). There is plenty of art to be seen all over the city, not just in this one place. However, I still haven't captured enough of that art to show a good cross-section of styles and forms. This one building caught my eye - wonder why?...

That building is found in our district, called Friedrichshain. There are so many more things I will show you...
I'm getting more settled here, partially due to finding various forms of work, and also because in the pursuit of these various jobs, I've really been all over the city, so I feel that I'm getting my bearings in a sort of accelerated way. There are days that I spend at least two hours on public transport, and that's a lower limit. It's giving me a chance to see the outskirts, the less urban parts of the city, the rich places, the poor places, the extremely quiet and residential places, and the clogged places. I've gone in plenty of bookstores, several clothing stores, a few museums and a few churches and synagogues in various levels of glory or disrepair. Things are coming along...