Berlin is big into New Year’s Eve, so when I got an invite to spend the holiday there with friends, I jumped at the chance. And it’s true that Berlin is one of the best places to celebrate the New Year, but there’s a big caveat to that — you probably want to be into clubbing. There’s a huge street party around the Brandenburg Gate, but the same basic rules apply there as in Times Square in New York City: get there early, expect long lines and huge crowds and cold temperatures, assume you may not be able to leave for a while.

A more sensible plan is to snag a ticket for one of the many events around the city, but they’re all club music¹ and if that wasn’t my scene before the heart attack it certainly isn’t now.² I had kind of hoped to find some quiet cocktail lounge or piano club to gently waft into 2024, but that’s not really the scene in Berlin. Maybe someone more dialed in could have turned up some cabaret show somewhere. I ended up grabbing a long dinner with friends and then heading to a small house party.³

But it didn’t feel like we missed the main event, because Berlin sets off fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Not the city, mind you, but thousands of citizens in the city. They sell them in grocery stores, and starting about the 30^th you can start to hear them being set off here and there. By about midday on the 31^st they’ve formed a kind of steady background noise — you won’t go more than 15 minutes before hearing some kind of explosion — and as soon as it gets dark it’s constant.

I walked past at least three groups of people setting off fireworks in the streets while walking to the U-Bahn on my way to dinner, hours before midnight. At the other end, the center of the city, you could position yourself in any major intersection and watch fireworks being set off in all four directions. The hallway in the apartment building spelled of smoke and gunpowder.⁴ The crescendo hit around 12:30 in the morning as everyone burned off most of their ordinance, and by midday on January 1^st it was all basically over. Germans have a reputation for being stolid, the sorts of people who refuse to cross against the light even when there’s no traffic in sight. And there’s some truth to that, except apparently on New Year’s, when you can watch someone double-fisting lit Roman candles while dancing around on a street corner in Alexanderplatz.

I’m continuing my streak of doing basically nothing. I did make it out to a Christmas Market just down the road⁵ which was nice. But having severely cut back on alcohol meant I stuck to kinderpunsch and cutting out unhealthy food meant no fried cheese.⁶ Maybe next year I’ll feel more comfortable loosening up.⁷

I’ve been trying to plot out, in very broad strokes, my next six months. That probably means finding a place in Portugal sooner than I expected, if only because I’m going to otherwise run out of the absolutely critical life-saving medications I’m supposed to be on from now until eternity. So I’m suddenly faced with a harrowing ordeal of questions ranging from the mundane — how do I get internet hooked up and find a doctor? — to the monumental — where am I going to live for at least the next five years?

What makes this worse is that I’m completely unprepared for this. I had always thought I’d get my residency card and then could take my time relocating to Portugal. I was expecting to spend a year or two just deciding where in the country I wanted to live by spending a few weeks here and a few weeks in between other destinations. Instead, I need a fixed address. So for now I’m looking for some temporary housing, probably furnished, which means at some point shortly I’m going to be doing all this again.

But, hey, here I am, working with a timetable I didn’t have much to do with. But I’ll figure it out. Temporary housing means I get to make small, reversible decisions before I need to make the big ones. I can take my time before I deal with the broader questions. I’m currently in the airport, waiting to fly back to London for The Smoke. After that I’m just sitting around for a week, doing next to nothing again. More time for the long, slow process of figuring things out.

Next: London (LHR) to Munich (MUC)
Prev: London (LHR) to Berlin (BER)

Footnotes

¹ And in Berlin, that’s 90% techno

² I honestly don’t know how my heart would fair getting pummeled by massively loud subwoofers for a couple hours but it’s not like I have any yearning to find out, either.

³ To give you a sense of the level of debauchery, when we arrived people were sitting around playing Secret Hitler. There was a cheese spread. Someone brought hummus.

⁴ I sincerely hope no one was setting off fireworks inside, but since the building was still standing I suspect it was just coming in from the courtyard.

⁵ “Down the road” in this case being in front of a lovely baroque palace which was all lit up for the occasion.

⁶ Or frites with mayo, or pizza, or fried dough, or potato pancakes, or käsespätzle, or toasted garlic loaves, or churros, or gnocchi fried in butter and drenched in parmesan. I went for the healthiest option I could find — a vegan ham and cheese with sundried tomato spread on focaccia — and it was just kind of aggressively okay.

⁷ The burger joint/beer hall I went to later in the week offered three kinds of non-alcoholic beers, including a hefeweizen, which I was very grateful for.

I was always more of an enthusiastic drinker than a prolific one. I really enjoyed hanging out in swanky bars with friends and having a couple of cocktails, or finding a sunny beer garden on a lazy afternoon and drinking throughout the afternoon. Non-alcoholic drinks preserve at least the structure of the experience, and that’s not nothing.