back in the friedrichshain, you don't know how lucky you are babe..

De ja vu, while not German is a fairly good summary of what is going through my head right now. Five years ago I left Australia and went to Berlin to work out what I was going to do with my life after sitting down on my birthday and thinking about what I was doing. I was unhappy with what I'd been doing there and wanted a change. First stop was Berlin and crashing at my friends Benjamin Waters. Fast forward 5 years and here I am, once again at a cross road sitting here in friedrichshain thinking about what I'm going to do with my life couting down the days till my birthday. I wonder what the day will bring this time around, something as radicial as packing up my life and moving to the other side of the world I doubt, but then again, you just never know :)

While Berlin has a lot of issues, it still stands head and shoulders above pretty much every other place I've been in terms of just relaxing and doing nothing in good surroundings. For me what it means is that I'm getting a chance to catch up on sleep and for a change I'm actually reading again. I just picked up Camus's "The Happy Death", which is really starting to freak me out as so far the first few chapters mirror part of the decisions I'm going through right now, work for money or use the money I have to do what I want. In fact the precience of Camus continues to haunt me, in more then just this latest book I feel as though Camus has some kind of insight into my mind, each time I pick up one of his books I learn something about myself, or at least, see that I'm not the only person that thinks like this.

I was going to head off into Poland for a couple of days but the lack of net access at Ben's house put a cramp on my ability to find out the information I needed to plan the trip at short notice. Equally to blame though was the simple fact that I just didn't feel like it and so I'm just using my time to relax and think as well as a touch of reminiscing by walking around the parts of Berlin that I used to live in last time I felt and thought in this way.

I started off the trip by seeing Mahler's 2nd symphony performed by the Berliner Staatsoper conducted by Boulez. Talk about amazing. That piece of music is the most important piece of music I've ever heard (for a variety of reasons that I won't go into here) and to have it performed by an orchestra of that calibre, in Berlin, with Boulez as the conducter and with front row seats was purely awe inspiring. I look forward to the other 3 concerts!