This week brought a few bigger decisions – some still need to be made. One of the easier ones was to change the name of my weekly one-minute videos from “German New Yorker in Berlin” to “In A Berlin Minute”. It seemed helpful to make it apparent immediately that this is just a one-minute video – and that there’s a reason why I don’t go into all the details of a location or event that I filmed.
The aspect that the observations come from a German New Yorker in Berlin probably don’t come into play in the videos so much anyway – that’s more part of the writing that goes along with it.
The title “In A Berlin Minute” derives from the expression “In A New York Minute”, which actually, according to the Urban dictionary, refers to “an instant. Or as Johnny Carson once said, it’s the interval between a Manhattan traffic light turning green and the guy behind you honking his horn. It appears to have originated in Texas around 1967. It is a reference to the frenzied and hectic pace of New Yorkers’ lives. A New Yorker does in an instant what a Texan would take a minute to do.”
Of course, Germans are considered to be very accurate, which would mean a Berlin minute by contrast to the New York minute is exactly 60 seconds… like my weekly videos.
This week’s video gives you a quick glimpse into the U8 subway line and its rollercoaster-style twists and turns. In the 24 weeks I’ve been in Berlin, I’ve lived in 3 apartments – in three different districts – but all of them were on the U8 line. It was time I honored my favorite train. Now I just need to figure out if the next apartment is on the same train line or if I’m actually returning to New York before then. That’s the biggest decision left…
