On Saturday, I arrived home in the evening after a long day of trekking around Schöneberg, and my host mom, Sabine, poked her head into my room as I was taking off my coat. She told me that she was about to head out to see a gallery opening in Charlottenburg. "Möchtest du mit mir kommen?" she asked.
Before I left for Germany, I wrote a list of goals: bars, shops, and museums I wanted to visit, places I'd like to sketch, and also some goals about the kind of mindset I wanted to have throughout my time abroad. I wrote down, I am going on an ADVENTURE! Talk to strangers! Say yes to see new places! Stay up late! Wander!
I have a tendency to let anxiety keep me from seeking new experiences, and I knew I didn't want to let that habit define my time abroad. I fixated on the idea of saying yes to invitations and new experiences. Easier said than done, maybe, but this was something I could practice and track.
My instinct was to tell Sabine, "I'm too tired" (I was tired). But I caught myself. Here was my first opportunity; instead, I put my coat back on.
We talked a little bit in German on the train into Charlottenburg and walked mostly in silence down a rain-soaked street to the gallery. Inside, Sabine seemed to know everyone, introducing me to so many artists I forgot most of their names as soon as I learned them, including an old man named Herr Müller who she said has come to every one of her students' final exhibitions for as long as she's been teaching. "My students always say that it is a good omen when he comes to an exhibition," Sabine told me. "He is not an artist, he is not a critic, but he goes to every gallery opening in the city." She waved her hand in front of her face----a gesture that I've learned means someone is crazy----and laughed.
As the gallery filled with more people, to my surprise Sabine told me she wanted to take me to a favorite restaurant of hers, a place she used to go to when she was a student in Berlin decades ago. It's called Terzo Mondo, and was founded in 1972 by a Greek man named Kostas. Apparently, it hasn't been changed at all in the 50 years since.
As we hurried along Mommenstraße to catch a bus, Sabine told me that she often sees people she knows at galleries, and that seeing how much people have changed reminds her of how much time has passed. Still, she said, it's wonderful how even in this vast city, she always seems to find friends or old acquaintances at openings like tonight's. She paused, finding the right words. "Art… verbindet," she said. "I'm not sure how to say it in English."
But I understood. Art connects people, across time and difference and distance.
Terzo Mondo is a beautiful warm red and golden place. Thousands of paper airplanes are stuck by their points to the ceiling, giving the front room the impression of a cave inhabited by motionless multicolored bats.
We found a seat and the waitress brought us massive menus designed like newspapers. She removed the candle stub from our table, and lit a brand new one which glimmered in the dim light. We ordered wine and huge plates of Greek food.
A few days earlier, I'd complained to a classmate that my host mom was so difficult to talk to, so hesitant to volunteer details about herself and her work. But now, between periods of silence filled by the charming chatter of the restaurant, Sabine began to share stories about moving from Stuttgart to Berlin, about her family, her travels to Greece as a teenager. I learned about what it was like to be a young artist in Berlin when the wall came down in 1989 and the subsidies upon which Berlin had been subsisting suddenly dried up.
Terzo Mondo is owned now by its founder's son. Sabine pointed the owner out to me multiple times as he mingled throughout the restaurant, and grabbed my hand suddenly to point out that Kostas, the restaurant's founder, was there too. Everyone in the restaurant seemed to know each other, getting up to look at the art on the walls and take photographs together. Some of the artists I'd met at the gallery came in, waving enthusiastically to us from the bar.
After a while, the owner got up on a small platform and began an acoustic set of Greek, German, and English songs. Eventually, Kostas joined him to sing a Greek love song. His voice was deep and soft and textured, as layered as the art-covered walls of the room. People got up to dance in the spaces between the tables, taking Kostas's hands as he sang. Sabine beamed at me. "He is really a piece of the old West Berlin," she told me, "He reminds people of another time. It is really special that he is here tonight."
Here is a place where threads of time have knotted up, where certain things don't change. One tiny community in the dense network of people and places and histories that makes up the metropolis. It is not a place I would have found on my own, and at some point while I sat there listening to Kostas and his son sing, I felt a swell of gratitude to Sabine for having brought me there, and to myself, for saying yes.
We stayed in Terzo Mondo almost until midnight, and when we left, the white candle at our table had burned down once more to a stub. I suppose as Sabine and I headed back to the bus stop together, the waitress must have lit a new one, while Kostas and his son began another song.
Your're the best!