Rando bit of very late in winter these days snow last week. Probably the last cold-ish weather till next winter (when we’ll still be in lockdown ’cos haha isn’t Germany slash Europe doing well?!? Dying. (Figuratively, yo.)) And the crows are back in their precarious nest high up in that tree in the centre. The small black blob midway from bottom of photo to crown of the thin trunk is them.
Up late a few nights ago and the sound outside changed, went that quiet-loud it does when everything’s blanketed with snow and all the tiny sounds get heard. Snow that’s survived a couple of days now. Haven’t had snow like that or a winter this cold for a few years. I’m still sleeping with the balcony door open, letting in that crisp -6° air. I love how the snow forms soft rime up the bricks of the apartment block opposite, reminds me of mixed ice and rock mountain climbing and how long it’s been since I was hanging onto rock with fingers and toes.
Waking up at midday after an evening of biking to northern Berlin and back and going on a 3-hour walk. Not celebrating Christmas, just impromptu hangout and wandering the empty dark streets of Pankow, Heinersdorf and Weißensee. Waking up to flurries of fat snow and the air feeling that proper winter way it does when it’s got that cold. Snow melted and gone in minutes.
My favourite orange hexagonal airport is closing this week, almost a decade after the original date, making way for the highly blah, much delayed, extremely suss new airport south of the old Flughafen Schönefeld which opened in the middle of a pandemic.
These are a few of my favourite flights into and from Flughafen Berlin-Tegel TXL. First flight was to Brussels for the Roméo Castellucci opera Parsifal, and this flight was to Bologna, four years later for the same. This was one of the first winters with not much snow. Four years previously Berlin had been under layers for weeks.
Remembering my favourite airport this week as it comes to a close.
My favourite orange hexagonal airport is closing this week, almost a decade after the original date, making way for the highly blah, much delayed, extremely suss new airport south of the old Flughafen Schönefeld which opened in the middle of a pandemic.
Living in Wedding, we could get to the airport in a few minutes by bus — even quicker for the taxi drivers who knew the tree-lined shortcut along the canal. Yeah, it was old and creaky, but drop-off to boarding was the quickest and chillest of any airport I’ve been in. Coming in to land from the east across lakes and city I’d read the ground finding Wedding and Uferhallen as we descended. Even getting to the south of Berlin was lazy easy, bus to Hauptbahnhof and M41 to Kreuzberg and Neukölln.
Before this terminal was built in the ’60s, before it was a military airport and one used during the Berlin Airlift, it was home to the Royal Prussian Airship battalion. And before that, the artillery range when the Exercier Platz der Artillerie got pushed west into the Jungfernheide forest from near what’s now the corner of Seestr. and Iranische Str. (which had a different name back then).
Unlike the beautiful Tempelhofer Feld, which has so far avoided necrocapitalist property seizure and ‘development’ and remains an open field like it’s been for hundreds of years, Flughafen Tegel has had the money class salivating along with the government. And being Berlin and Germany, we know they’ll ruin it like they did Potsdamer Platz or the new Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg. It’s what money does.
I first flew from TXL in late-2008, I think, going to London and Whitstable. No photos of that except a grainy one of me returning at night, and I remember hating coming back to face a hard winter and poverty. A year later, Dasniya and I flew early morning to Brussels to work with Roméo Castellucci on the Wagner opera Parsifal. Deep geologic layers of frozen snow and air cold as sharp knives.
Remembering my favourite airport this week as it comes to a close.
As I said to Vass, “I stood at the window watching the snow just pinging out cos complex 3-dimensional particle dynamics in a fluid dynamics medium are legit my jam.”
I thought the first flurry was going to be all we got. Very grateful for this one that coated the trees and grass for a few minutes.
This is the first snow of winter. And it’s already spring. I miss this weather so much, I’m going to blog it excessively.
I really wish I’d held off on my ride this morning for a couple of hours so I could have had the joy of being out in this.
Finishing the year and starting the year doing the work.
2018, I wore a heart rate monitor for all my training, riding, climbing, yoga, whatever. It felt a bit much. 2019, I stuck to riding only. All of which I keep notes of in a training diary in my calendar, ’cos I’m like that. So, 121 rides last year, and 150+ ‘yoga’ (core, strength, stretching, body work type, as well as actual yoga). Less riding than 2018, fewer long rides, virtually no climbing, and other year without doing a ballet or any kind of dance class in a studio, in front of a mirror.
Interesting stuff: The month of May, with almost no going into the red, and plenty of green and blue zones, that was Ramadan. The hole with nothing in it, June and July, that was me having my face peeled off in Spain. The first big ride, in October, was the Women’s 100, and the second was riding the Berliner Mauerweg on Tag der Deutschen Einheit. In retrospect, I can already see in my gappy training that chronic fatigue from a year of over-intensity and stress (surgery was only a part of it) was getting to me, November and half of December is that burnout.
Bike is currently in need of complete rebuild and new components, most of my cycling gear is similarly needing to be retired, but whatever. I keep riding. Every ride has had something in it for me, and it’s been so, so good for my mental and emotional health, as well as keeping my physicality ticking over. And it’s winter, a broken, very much not cold and snowless winter, barely ever below zero, but even that, riding in the cold, wet, dark grot makes me smile.
