Tales a place can tell

When seeing a new place, I have to figure for a while what kind of tale it has to tell. Maybe I am a bit more thin skinned than others, but it can actually take me a while and stop my thoughts until I understood what exactly I‘m feeling and where my thoughts are going from here. If my thoughts want to go a direction that does not feel right, I want to run. No, I don‘t just want to run, I start running immediately.

For many reasons, Hamburg, the city I grew up in always had this effect on me. Germany’s second biggest city and to some people the most beautiful place in the world with millionaire‘s residents around its „Alster“ river would always direct my thoughts down a way I did not like. It made me ride the trains at night for hours, always crossing the bridges and seeing the lights flying by.

And I fled the place when I had the chance, so that now I find myself deeper in the west of Germany, in reach of medieval places such as Aachen, but in my daily life mostly stuck in partly developed city centers around old industrial centers. It is a place of lost urbanity that makes me shiver, sometimes even cry, but in a way I got used to. Whenever I see ruins of old castles or villages somewhere in this unreal landscape, I think of all the secrets the rests of these walls may know. I think of the blood and the pain it takes to keep going through the centuries it has been, and it makes me shiver even more.

When I was in Berlin a few months ago, I had a lot of fun with guessing which part I was in, east or west. Very often I could tell by the kind of facades around, but sometimes I had to search the ground for the metal line that still marks the separation the wall had once fulfilled, to see where I was, and I felt a certain wonder for this once divided city that had for decades withstand the battle of ideas to rule the world.

And when I was in Budapest only recently, I loved how old the buildings in the city were. I fell in love with every balcony, and with the mixing of facades. I even stood and wondered in front of murals on old soviet buildings, and my friend with me was surprised by these buildings actually causing some positive thoughts within me.
„I love places that show the battle of ideas and the heartbreaking absurdity of history“, I tried to explain while looking out of the window early in the morning and seeing the same combination of architecture from there as well. Also the gray concrete slabs next to classic buildings from the early 19 hundreds told a tale a heart could response to, even without being on the site of the builders to the slightest amount.
A battle of ideas.

There are so many more tales that places can tell. Some can only be felt by holes in a wall, as I had discovered when I was in Szczecin, Poland, and had been amazed by restored, classic buildings in rainbow colors, only to enter a street that still had bullet holes from 1945 in it.

Sometimes I can even be so thin skinned, I cannot take being in a place at all. Or, I have to carefully work myself through its tale.