Blue supermoon setting
All posts by Helle Møller
Oh, what a Beautiful Morning ….
07.30 on a Saturday morning. Settling in to spend a QUIET weekend AT HOME, in and out of the balcony, pure bliss, no need to go out in order to escape the ear-splitting noise from the neighbours from hell.
When suddenly: Same-old-same-old. Just half an hour later than during the week. Like from drilling into a rock or a wall or something, I can’t actually see it but other neighbours can and are trying to ask them how long this will last. Which they are of course ignoring. Their arrogance never stops reaching new heights.
I feel like crying.
It is a good thing guns are not readily available in this country. If I had access to one right now, there would be dead people.
Cresco Capital Group @CrescoRealEstate
Course on diptychs etc continued
Multiple-panel panoramics – my take – more or less successfully.
Alt-Lübars and Köppschensee 9 August
Back in 2016, and as far as I remember also most of 2017, when I had just moved to Berlin, I used to go out to visit other places because I wanted to go THERE. How I long for those days when I was able to choose to stay at home and just BE, and chill, and use my balcony.
The need to get out of the house every weekday for so many years is really starting to catch up with me, and I am so tired. Now I often struggle to think of places to go because I need to get away from HERE and the neighbours from hell (the one with the ridiculous name of “Victoria zu Berlin”).
I doubt those good old days will come back. I am quite sure they will keep thinking of ways to make life miserable for the entire area, especially every summer.
Anyway, though I knew it would start to rain sooner or later, I ventured out to spend a little bit of time around Alt-Lübars, specifically an extremely peaceful placed by Köppschensee.
Bonus tip: There is no sign of any cafés in Alt-Lübars, and decent coffee is even hard to come by in the vicinity of S-Bahn station Waidmanshof, but now there is a new, modern café – “Ma Maison” just around the corner from the last bus stop before the stop at the station, when you come from Alt-Lübars on bus 222. A nice selection of fresh food and drink, but uncomfortable seating and ear-splittingly loud music. Nowadays you can’t have everything.
Photos to come.
Here we go again …
If I want to enjoy my balcony on weekdays, it has to be before 06.30 – that is the time they start shouting and laughing (standing and sitting right next to each other – are they deaf since they need to be so loud)?
Seven AM sharp – engines on and running and more noise, this morning giant cobble-stones being shifted from one pile to another. I have asked the neighbours from hell several times whether I and my neighbours will have at least ONE week this year where we can stay at home, with balcony doors open, and not have to leave our homes evey day to escape the noise. One week on my balcony, in my own home, for the first time since 2017? I am so tired and feel I am losing my mind. But they don’t even read their e-mails, let alone reply to them.
I am seriously thinking of cancelling the bridge evening at my place tonight. I have had a form of sciatica for months which my orthopedist says is most likely caused by stress, and am taking stronger and stronger painkillers which do not really take the pain away but cause severe brainfog (finally starting physiotherapy later this month). Somebody suggested another four weeks of “Reha”, but I really need to be in my own home, and also, much as I enjoyed my four weeks in Sankt-Peder Ording in November/December 2022, the food was not healthy (despite being a clinic specialising in post-cancer-recovery, and I am told that was one of the better places in that regard.
I JUST NEED TO BE ABLE TO SPEND TIME IN AND OUT OF MY BALCONY, CHILLING, AND GOING OUT TO PLACES BECAUSE I WANT TO AND NOT IN ORDER TO GET AWAY FROM HERE.
Only in Berlin …
does it take a spring and a summer, and by the looks of it also an autumn, and so much noise, to landscape such a small piece of land: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3k7t5ApDEQ.
Of course there would be no fun in preparing the tiles BEFORE transporting them here, because then you would miss a golden opportunity to continue, in year eight, to make life a living hell for a large area around you, and rendering our balconies unusable for at least as long, and that would be no fun, would it?
Next photography course assignment: the theme is “Mystery”
IN PROGRESS
Day in, day out, week in, week out, year in, year out
This week, they are cutting tiles to make sure nothing green can grow and provide shade there. I guess trees and bushes are too environment-friendly and healthy for the air and the soil and for people’s mental health. A tiled wasteland is much better, and more importantly, it makes an earsplitting noise to construct it. Why am I not surprised? Cresco Capital Group Cresco Real Estate
It reminds me of the relatively recently landscaped space in front of Kulturforum – barely a tree in sight, and crossing it feels like being in hell during summer. How is that sort of thing even allowed nowadays? What planet have people just dropped down from?
Lies, lies, lies
Best advice to people who have just moved to Berlin? Trust nobody. Or at least keep your bullshit detector on high alert. Lying is a favourite Berlin sport.
What is it about Berlin that people here lie, more or less blatantly, more often than they tell the truth, and that lying is apparently considered completely acceptable?
I started to notice that the minute I moved here, and it is only getting worse. People in all walks of life, for whatever purpose or reason. From Hausverwaltung (in one instance that nearly landed me in real trouble) to Cresco Real Estate who when starting their what would turn out to be a typical Berlin infinity project next door promised me my balcony would not be affected, to an HNO doctor I consulted recently (who tried to perpetuate a minor issue rather than solve it immediately), to so-called friends (even those you thought were different). And many other examples in between which I have chosed to forget so as not to clog up my already limited brain space.
The problem is, that when you start to not find any reason to believe anything anybody says, you end up not wanting to communicate with anybody about anything, because – why bother? – once you know a person has lied about one thing, you know they have most likely been lying about more things, or even everything, especially in emails and on social media.
I am assuming that most people who grew up somewhere else were raised to know that lying is never an option, and therefore it is probably one of the reasons why so many people say Berlin is a hard city to live in.
Strudelmedialive course on diptychs, triptrychs and multiples – and a really bad Volkshochschule course
Friday: In the hunt for motives for the assignment for the next class I went to the Tegeler Hafenfest.
Although that sort of thing is not really my scene, I enjoyed the afternoon, and since the atmosphere as well as the weather, and being right next to the large lake, were so nice, I would have liked to stay longer.
Instead, I wasted the loveliest evening so far this year stuck indoors in the first part of what I thought was a street photography course (silly me to think that just because those two words – “street photography” are in the course title ………. pfff) but turned out to be three hours and 15 minutes of theory for complete beginners. There are Youtube tutorials that convey that information in a more professional manner and in shorter time. I should have known. When it comes to photography course, VHS excels in that kind of thing. I am starting to realise that the only photography teacher really worth looking for in their catalogue is Johannes Rigal.
The upside is that I feel I have been gifted a lot of free time the next three days since the field trips to “exceptional places and their people, beside the typical touristic sites”, as it says in the description, we were informed this evening are RAW Gelände and Park am Gleisdreieck (!!!). Give. Me. A. Break.
Back to the photos of the day. I would not be me if I did not take any opportunity for some “nature” photographs while in the area (when I say “nature” I mean the manmade canal around the corner from Tegel Hafen. The Grebe couple is still nesting, but a new feature were four dead fish floating on the surface, one in the canal and three in the lake close to the shore. What is that about?
Triptych 1:
Triptych 2: Berlin’s love affair with those idiotic balloons which invariably end up in a treetop or a waterway and never really go away:
And a final triptych from this day:
Saturday: Tierpark (Europe’s largest landscape zoo and my favourite zoo ever). Took quite a lot of photos, but none that I can use for the course:
And then, a triptych after all, with the help of an ICM photo from the archive:
Sunday: Still doing miserably as far as the course is concerned. Went on an early morning walk (to beat the 32C forecast for later) to Landwehrkanal and Urbanhafen. Did take some photos, however, none that I can use for the course.
There is a relatively busy (at least during the week) intersection in Kreuzberg, adjacent to Landwehrkanal, where what I think used to be a boring, anti-environment, manicured lawn, for the last five or so years, has been left pretty much to its own, and nature’s, devices (manicured lawns are the opposite of nature) and now looks like this:
Other photos taken on the walk:
