Two bright spots in my existence lately are, firstly, no norovirus infection for me, which meant that I could attend my final exam, on the history of Romance languages, which I passed with a little over 70%. Secondly, the end of the university semester.
On Saturday, I went to an intense weekend workshop for developing black-and-white films and making prints. It was a snowy day and the workshop took place at a picturesque pre-war square, which was convenient as I only had colour films along and had to buy and shoot a new roll with the hybrid digital-analogue camera that my mother bought for me when I graduated high school. (I used the camera regularly when I was a toddling undergraduate at the University of British Columbia, taking shots of the old and new buildings and sunsets etc. on campus. But since then I have felt too broke to be able to regularly afford to buy film and pay for it to be developed.)
Today I was planning to travel to a steelmaking town on the outskirts of Berlin to report on the possible effects of the steel and aluminum tariffs that might be impending in April, and the aftereffects of the last round of tariffs over 4 years ago. It's a town where, last autumn, it was also announced that a transportation manufacturer would close up shop. But now it's looking likelier I'll do it later this week.
First of all I needed to finish writing an essay for my Spanish & Portuguese literature class, so making progress on that took up some time this morning. Secondly, I wanted to photograph the makeshift memorial of candles, photographs and flowers on Unter den Linden in honour of Alexei Navalny, 1 year and 1 day after his death. Thirdly, since economics have never been my strong point, I'm feeling a considerable impostor syndrome about the ambitious steel works reporting plan.
In the end, at least I did make progress on the essay and take photos at the makeshift memorial.
On the way, I passed by the Berlinale film festival hub at Potsdamer Platz, and heard the delighted screams of fans at the red carpet during the premiere of Vivian Qu's film Girls on Wire. When the celebrities had passed along the carpet, the fans scuttled in groups as fast as their feet could carry them to the security tent. Presumably they still needed to show their tickets and enter the film screening itself.
Today's red carpet event, although I didn't follow it in detail, felt pleasantly wholesome. I'm still a diehard red carpet event skeptic, because seeing one in person (from a distance) in 2023 disenchanted me and I've never seen the need to revise that opinion since.
That said, later I felt gloomy and foreboding while treading across the snowy expanse in front of the Reichstag parliament building. It's not even so much the forthcoming federal elections and the impending rule of the CDU party. It's rather that after 4 years of glorious freedom during the last Trump administration from being too affected by his particular brand of mayhem, it feels like the grubby mitts of his regime, and possibly of Russia's 'democratic' leadership, are also being laid on Germany and Canada.
After J.D. Vance's speech to the Munich Security Conference last week (apparently the absence of white supremacist thought at the prow of European public discourse is a sign of the European Union's lack of freedom) and the American/Russian/Saudi den of dictators deciding Ukraine's future, it's not just European heads of government who are croaking of impending doom.
I hoped as I walked that I will still be able to tread across the lawn of a free parliament in a free Germany in two years' time. (I also hoped that I wouldn't fall and break my face on the ice; the area around the Brandenburg Gate, Tiergarten Park, and Reichstag is often embarrassingly bad for tourists to maneuver. In this case, the worst case scenario is that they are never able to travel anywhere again because they've slipped on the vast rinks of compacted snow and ice, cracked their skull and died.)
Less doomily, it was quite satisfying to walk past the US embassy with a Canada t-shirt underneath my coat, and to waltz into the Ibero-American Institute on the way home to familiarize myself with the maligned culture and history of Latin and South America.
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