On an Excursion with Colleagues

It was raining and thundering today as T. and I began cycling to Friedrichshain for our company's latest team event. We were split into teams of five, and sent off into the neighbourhood to walk around and take photos of ourselves, and photos of buildings that we were asked to guess based on hints.

I was put in a group with members of the team that handles the cooperation with our clients and of the Front End team, a new colleague from the Back End team, and the leader of the team that gathers statistics to report to our clients; and I think our rapport was relaxed and happy.

We saw the Stasi Museum where the East German secret police used to keep their archives, and it was eerie, quiet and empty. We visited the teeming centre of Frankfurter Tor with its two towers designed in the late 1950s in imitation of the domes at Gendarmenmarkt and its tram lines and its heavy traffic streaming from the city centre and Alexanderplatz. And in between we passed the printmaker and florist and local fashion designer shops, Spätis, cafés, and cobble streets, homemade cloth banners that had graffitied slogans against 'Nazis' and a 'fascist USA' in the leftist zone around Rigaer Straße, posters that railed against rent raises and the high cost of living, a Dalmatian dog and maybe a dachshund? and other dogs, two white and blue police vans, the pockmarked brick façade of a 19th-century? street church, and the hollyhocks and other flowers of high summer.

After the other teams won the competition, we met colleagues in front of a Späti or went home. T. and I cycled home together. On the way to the office, T. and I had seen a protest march crossing the bridge at Warschauer Straße with a police escort, declaring events planning(?) as an essential service that should be protected financially despite social distancing measures. The way back was not as eventful, but it was nice to talk with each other.

When my team travelled by train from Samariterstraße to the station near the Stasi Museum, it was the first time I had taken the U-Bahn since the middle of March. I think that some people are militating against the mask policy or are forgetful. The Berlin transportation authority is running an automated loudspeaker message that persons caught without a mask must pay a 50 Euro fine, as per the anti-coronavirus policy. Anyway, the trains weren't too full. It didn't feel too strange to take it again, either.

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But in general, I feel like the Lady of Shalott. While I was working in the office between June 2016 and March 2020, I metaphorically went for a nice walk around the neighbourhood, spoke with the townspeople, felt perfectly normal (although a little quirky as always), and was no longer the Lady of Shalott. But now — not knowing how or when it happened — I am in the tower room again, seeing the world merely through a mirror. And it is not entirely nice, although in having my mother and brothers around, there is still a lot of entertaining and comforting interaction. But today was a break in the enclosed life.