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Happy monthly anniversary. We have gotten through the gauntlet of the the holidays and now we go through the the dark of winter in Berlin, a special gray kind of darkness that is still haunted from its days east of the Wall. At least things are getting stable with work and we are finding the city less alien. Especially with us finding our way around the city. It is becoming our home.

 282

Happy monthly anniversary, my dear. We are approaching the end of the year having survived an international move, a new role, and adjusted to life in a massive city again. Better food and strangely cheaper groceries. Harder to find an apartment. A greater hustle after being locked down in Copenhagen awaiting our visas. But we are here now, about to celebrate Christmas with a surprise last-minute visit from my folks. We won't be alone for the holidays. We will have some kind of normal Christmas again, and now without having to endure a flight across an ocean. We will be in our home.

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Winter as come and we are making our Berlin home as cozy as possible. It's the darkness of Copenhagen all over again, but with more life and culture. Definitely better food and a better office. 

The worst of it is, we will again be away from family for the holidays and our family is smaller due to the loss of Seamus, poor sweet bear. It'll just be us and Liam in a quiet Berlin apartment. I think this time it's worse...we couldn't go to America for the holidays and see our families because of COVID. Now, it's just visa timing. One was an act of god. This is a bureaucratic hurdle. Man made, something you feel like you can control, and when you can't it's your fault.

So, again, a small Thanksgiving and then moving on to Christmas, with gifts ordered and delivered remotely, thousands of miles away and with the best intentions. 

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Happy monthly anniversary, my love. It is another month in Berlin, and we are finding the ground beneath our feet. We are cutting through the bureaucratic obstacles, building our residency, getting the odds and ends to make our place at home. We are finding our restaurants, our grocery stores, our patterns, our rituals to make this city of millions feel like its ours. We are settling in, thinking of this place as our home, yet mourning the notion that we will not be able to go to America for the holidays...again. It hurts a little more since this time it's due to some thing so mundane as a paperwork and not as harrowing as a dangerous virus. 

This is our home for now. The strange and the ordinary. But sometimes, more than Copenhagen and Amsterdam, I feel the distance.

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Nine days since we arrived in Berlin. It's like we always lived here. At least now the government recognizes that we're here. One more step, but it opens up two more thanks to the German bureaucracy. 

But we are here and we are safe, in our new apartment that looks out over the Berlin Wall, that old relic of our childhoods that we've seen on television be chiseled apart in 1989. Now the city is a mishmash of cultures and memories, the immigrants and the old world clashing in graffiti, monuments, Doner stands, elegant trams gliding along the street, and a dozen accents and languages flowing in the Mitte district at the center of the city. 

We are here, new immigrants in a rental van from Copenhagen. We are veterans in the EU move now, almost three years on the continent. Three years ago we were tearing down our American lives to come here, not sure how things would go. We have made it, despite the turbulence of bad bosses and pandemics. 

And I love you. Thank you for coming with me. Happy monthly anniversary.