Migrate, Adapt, Don't Die
Welcome to Berlin. I suppose I never mentioned on here that I was moving. Well, I am. I did. I'm living here for about four months while Dom takes advantage of an exchange program offered by her school. Except, she scheduled herself for class only two days a week, and I quit my job, so, for the most part, we're free to explore the city, the country, and the continent as we please.
Let's start with the city. How about the neighbourhood, actually. A couple of months ago we searched for an apartment through 9flats, a German service comparable to Airbnb, and got ourselves set up with a studio in Prenzlauer-Berg, a district just to the north east of the city centre. The Wikipedia article sums up my first impressions pretty well: picturesque, kid-friendly, hip, but historical. It's pretty gentrified, and populated with a fair amount of expats, by the looks of it. The transformation of the neighbourhood in the past couple of decades has earned it the clever label "Bionade-Biedermeier", a mash-up of a trendy, organic lemonade brand and an environment in early 19th century Central Europe in which the middle class grew and developed a certain set of comfortably vanilla artistic tastes and pursuits. A trendy, yuppie, New-Bourgeoisie vibe appears dominates. So, not a rough neighbourhood, parents at home will be relieved to know. We're probably overpaying relative to Berlin as a whole, but it's still cheaper than Toronto. Hey, that's exactly what Wikipedia said I would say!1
It must be human to try to map your past experience onto new ones, an efficient and effective way to make sense of uncharted territory. That would account for the rampant name appropriation throughout the New World. (Ontario even used to have its own Berlin, but they changed the name to Kitchener in 1916 for some reason.) So, walking around Prenzlauer Berg this morning, I tried to think of what I could compare it to in Toronto. Roncesvalles is close in terms of yuppiness. Leslieville has its fair share of babies being pushed around in strollers. The Junction is definitely trendy, but maybe too trendy.
Anyway, we're in the Old World now. There's nothing in Toronto to compare to the cobblestoned streets, the architecture, the cyclists not getting rammed off the road by enraged and reckless drivers. We'll get used to it eventually.
[1] "More recently, countless North American, British, Australian and Spanish citizens have moved into the borough attracted by the relatively cheap cost of accommodation and studio space compared to other cultural capitals like New York, London, and Paris."