Definitely maybe

Berlin, now that's a city that needs some psychoanalysis. I have preached my obsession with the city for a few months now. But why?

At an economist's class dinner late June, people never stopped asking what my post-graduation plans were. I suddenly heard myself telling one person I was moving to Berlin or Barcelona. Then another, and some morer. One friendly classmate enquired whether these were job options I was talking about? Nope. These were cities I was considering.

Berlin, or Barcelona. Moving there anytime soon now. Definitely maybe. It's an option, for sure.

Summing up my knowledge of the city:

• various people told me positive things, altough I don't remember who they were and what they said exactly. Something about the party scene.
  
• I imagine artists and vagabonds painting their guerilla art on city walls, sitting around in smoky cafés discussion the state of the world. I imagine their mood as a combination of the dandyism associated with Oscar Wilde and the student activism of our parent's days. (The student activism I waited for these five years. I figure it won't come to me without some effort.)
  
• my father once told me a story about checkpoint Charlie and the situation in the city before the wall had fallen
• foreign airplanes supplied west Berlin with food for months in an intergalactic power struggle between the Sparta and Athens of those long ago times
  
• lastly, the obvious, - President Kennedy said Ich bin ein Berliner
  

I have talked about travelling around the other half of Europe for forever and now I seem to have nominated Berlin as the place to be in Europe right now. In ten years, Prague. In twenty, Bukarest. In twenty-five, Chisinau.