Songbirds seem to be the recurring theme of the past days: It’s 5:30 am on the fourth day of what must be a historic heat wave in Spring and I just woke up from the incredible clarity of the their chirping outside of my window. The sun is already out, it is both quiet and really loud at the same time and though I have to work later today, I can’t seem to go back to sleep. What better time to reach for the computer and upload some photos?

It seems incredible that less than a month ago, we were facing snow and unreal conditions, while these days can be spent by the river in Dresden, overlooking the river – which is precisely what I did for the two days I was there to visit Anika. It always strikes me as stunning how much everyone misses the sun after a long winter and how spending your days in the summer heat can feel surreal to no end – time went by in an orange blur of heat and endless, spoiling sunsets. When biking home yesterday night, I tried remembering all that had happened over the weekend and easily managed to fill the 20 minute bike ride just by inventorying the components of what had been a successful few days: Arriving to the most beautiful scenery of late night Dresden on Friday, experiencing warm wind in the alleys of that city and emptying a bottle of wine by the river, exploring an abandoned factory with Melissa (the rather surprising visitor) before living the high life on the rooftops and feeling like the 1% and coming home to an ice-cold pitcher of my newest love, Mugicha.

Melissa happens to work for Soundcloud now, and speaking with her, I finally understood what that site is all about: a much looser definition of sounds than I ever thought. It actually fits really well with what I have been trying to do on Things that happened to me for years – capture moments and ideas – so consider this an experiment.

Along the river

Im Hecht

Schöneberg

It’s lonely at the top

Kreuzberg sunset

We found a factory

Melissa

More, as always, on flickr.

Berlin turns out to be strangely deserted during the holidays – normally, I wouldn’t know, as I tend to follow the flock and leave the capital – this time, however, I decided to stay and could have taken endless amounts of photos of the empty streets, public places devoid of any people and carless intersections. As if to limit spite me, the weather promptly turned awful, prompting Mareike to exclaim how nice it was that I had stayed in town over Christmas. It was only after the snow had settled that time seemed to speed up: Visitors from various sides of the globe arrived, the fog lifted and much was accomplished: Lapland odysseys, bridges at 5 am, abandoned airfields and coffee in all forms, Colombian bus signage and analogue photography, stroopwafels and stolen toilet paper, lulo and Wiederaufbauprogramm 1961. The list could go on forever.

His name was Dmitri and he returns rental cars to different cities for a living. “Mostly vans, but I get the occasional spors car.” When he explained the task, it quickly became obvious that this was a truly horrible job, something he was quick to admit himself: He gets up at 6 in the morning, drives several cars across the republic and returns home late at night, usually even on weekends. In Dresden, he had a train to catch in order to get home, so we sped along the dark, empty highway.

Back in Berlin, we had briefly given a colleague of his a ride: An older, white-haired man from Khazakstan, who idly sat in the chair next to me, occasionally throwing in some Russian sentence in a raspy voice. Dimitri, who was from Eastern Russia, was narrating a story about crossing Siberia in a Lada as I let my eyes wander and noticed the faded prison tattoos on his colleague’s hands. When we dropped him off to get another rental car, I learned that he had been a bus driver all of his life. According to Dmitri, the man simply could not stop driving: “It’s in his blood”, my driver remarked before casually adding “ever since his wife has had a stroke, he supports her with this job.”

Just last week The Guardian lamented the lack of a British equivalent of This American Life, the public radio show featuring extraordinary stories about ordinary people in the US. The idea is simple enough: Using the radio, one can gain insight into the lives of people we would never otherwise meet.
As Dmitri droned on about Russia, I realized how taking shared rides was strangely appealing in a very similar way: They offer a glimpse into the odd cosmos of other peoples’ lives, however briefly. When on the road, one does not normally wonder about all that goes on in the long line cars passing us – yet I have the feeling that I’ll keep thinking about this old Khazak bus driver, returning German rental cars to support his ailing wife in Leipzig.