August 2024 was a good month for me. After 12 years of being on a visa in the UK, I became a permanent resident. I now live in the UK visa-free. It was a lot of money and a very stressful (but ultimately easy) Life in the UK test.

I celebrated by going to a conference in Berlin. The conference was terrible. It was not at all what it was marketed to be, and shortly after I gave my presentation and watched the couple of nice people I’d eaten lunch with, I snuck off to see a little bit of the city. I’d been to Germany when I was 16, but being there as an adult was a totally new experience.

Berlin is the capital and the largest city in Germany. With over 3 million residents, it is a city full of history and culture.

I walked a lot. I went to the Berlin Wall to see what separated East and West Berlin from 1961 to 1989. The wall is now covered in art and images that bring colour to the sorid history.

From there, I walked to the Holocaust memorial. The memorial is a series of concrete slabs, and people often ignore the importance of what those slabs are and often sit on them, jump between them or tag them with antisemetic slogans.

I spent the next day on Museum Island. The weather was nice, and I have a thing for artwork, so I wandered around looking for Miro (Although I didn’t find any).

I ended the day at the Jewish Museum. The museum was opened in 2001 and is one of the largest of its kind in Europe. It presents the history of Jews in Germany from the Middle Ages to the present day.

The museum was powerful and moving, and a stark reminder that while the date may have changed, the attitude of people toward Jews has not.

The conference may have sucked, but in the end, I did get a job doing a workshop for a language school in Belarus, and I got to see a new city in Germany. Not bad for 3 days away.