When people ask me if there’s any­thing I dis­like about Ber­lin, I can only come up with one straight answer: the cold. Win­ters here seem harsher than any­where else, and the con­trast to Ber­lin city life in the sum­mer is just too sharp for me to handle. If I could, I’d move away every winter to avoid freez­ing my ass off. Com­ing back from a trop­ical sum­mer of six months really didn’t make it any easier and spring is surely tak­ing its time.

That said: I’m finally back, and it’s grand as ever. Had I known, three years ago, what mov­ing to Ber­lin would make me do (and not do), man, I’d have not believed it. And while many things happened in the last months before my depar­ture, it finally feels like I’m open­ing a new chapter of liv­ing in this city. When I took a long walk the other day, I felt… well, not quite too com­fort­able as it was freez­ing, but I felt right at home. I might be home­less and some of my friends I still haven’t caught up with and I’m actu­ally unem­ployed wait­ing for the next semester to enroll in uni­ver­sity, but life is good. And that’s all that matters.