I moved to Berlin in the winter of 2005, visiting the city for the first time on the day it became my home. My decision to move there was spontaneous, based on the offer of a free apartment for three months while I was waiting for my application for Canadian permanent residence to be reviewed. I knew only three people in the city, and my LambdaMOO friend Yaro met me at the airport and helped me wrestle my six boxes (everything I now owned) into a cab and up the several flight to my friend’s apartment in Prenzlauerberg. The apartment was large, old fashioned (with a coal stove!) and located in a great neighborhood. Yaro, who had grown up in the Soviet circus, taught me bow to light the stove. I think half the reason I later married him was our shared habit of taking long afternoon and evening walks around the city, which often last 3-4 hours, and once lasted 9 hours, until after the sun came up in the morning.

Yaro had lived in the city for 9 years before I arrived, but saw more of it in 3 months than he had in the period prior to my arrival. We both brought our cameras on these walks, and that’s when I first got into the habit of taking photos, which had previously been a sporadic practice centered on vacations. I wasn’t very good at it, at first, but over those months I took many thousands of shots and learned to use my camera well enough to consistently get a few images I liked. During that time I also learned to post-process in Photoshop, which I’d been using for many years to prepare images for printing in traditional book manuscripts and for websites. I learned to manipulate the photos in Painter and other apps, and printed the finished images on an excellent A3 printer gifted to me by a friend.

Berlin was a great town to wander and to live in, but not a great town for finding employment, and so Yaro and left after five years and moved to Bern, where I remain. But I have an abiding love for Berlin and visit whenever possible, chasing memories of a wonderful time in my life when I had nothing but free time to spend on photography and art. Without this interval, and without Yaro’s support, I would never have come so far in my practice, and I continue to be grateful for the new worlds that Berlin allowed me to explore.