Hi there,
My name is Thomas, I was born in Berlin on Saint Nicholas’ Day in 1981. I loved my hometown that much, that I left it in 1989 to grow up in an area near the north sea. Ok while I really left Berlin back then, it had other reasons of course 😉
I came back to Berlin in 1998. Needles to say that the town had changed a lot. Of course I had been in Berlin many times between 1989 and 1998 to visit my parents in my holidays, but its still not the same to visit a place for a few weeks a year or really live there.
If someone asked me 10 or 15 years ago if I was happy to be back in Berlin again, I probably would have denied it. While part of the reason might have been the circumstances under that I came back, I had a lot of personal problems back then…, Berlin was just so different compared to the town I came from. I grew up in a town with ~2600 people, while of course I didn’t know everyone, it was almost as if I did. Being back in Berlin again was the absolute opposite, a town where you don’t even know all of your closest neighbors. Today I see the things a little different. I had 17 years to get to know my hometown better again, to learn to like it again. Of course one important thing that changed my mind was the fact that by coming back to Berlin, I got the chance to get to know my mother a little better and spend 13 years with the woman who gave me away when I was 8 years old, cause she was overchallenged growing up a child that was as difficult as me before she passed away in 2011 at the age of 60 due to cancer. I can’t say that the time since I came back had always been easy and I did regret to come back many times in the past, but looking back, I wouldn’t want it any other way…
Wait… a post about Berlin, and yet I haven’t said that much about the town itself? It isn’t really that easy to say something about a town, that many people already know (better than me), to say something you haven’t heard or read about it.
Me and my parents lived in Reinickendorf. Its a district in the north of Berlin, we have a lot of wood and water here, yet it doesn’t take much time to get to the center of Berlin. Reinickendorf is named by Reinicke, the fable name for the fox, and there are indeed a lot of foxes living here. I saw a lot of them, walking in the streets at night. I even saw one near the hospital, the day my mother passed away. Sadly I never managed to take a photo. Guess they are too shy, whenever I tried to take a picture, they ran away the moment I was ready to make the shot 😀
I still have some memories of the time before 1989, the times when the berlin wall still separated the town in east and west. My grandma, the mother of my father lived in west berlin too, but in order to get there I had to use a subway line that crossed partly the territory of the DDR. It was pretty scary to pass all those ghost stations, together with all those weird noises a subway train can make while driving on really old tracks, it was a poor nightmare for the little child I was. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_station#Ghost_stations_in_Berlin ) When I use the same line, the U8 today, all those stations, like Alexanderplatz look so small, much smaller than I got them in my memory… might be because of the low light they had back then and the slow speed the subwaytrains passed them with or just cause as a child everything seems to be bigger.
Anyway, that’s enough boring stuff for now. I got some random pictures, and I didn’t really know how I could use them as part of that post, I’ll add them anyway. These pictures I tool mostly in the area around the new central station, for no particular reason. I started to go to that place when my mother got really sick in 2010/2011. I wanted to be alone for a while and get my head empty. I had smartphone with a rather decent camera, so I took some pictures. I did so in 2011, 2012 and 2013 although I just found pictures from 2012 / 2013 for now.
