Europe Day 4: Berlin Tempelhof
An evening in the park and on the runway
The Tempelhof Airport Park was a fascinating place in Berlin. The pictures don’t capture its huge-ness or the surreal-ness of being able to walk on a runway for planes (up until 2008)! The whole space has been preserved and repurposed, even the buildings- apparently you can rent office space in the departure lounges, book the arrivals hall for events, even use the luggage carrousel to bring the party food out the kitchen. The sprawling area between the runways has been turned into playing fields, the rest for picnics and braais. There is even a very artistic mini-golf course. On the runaways you have walkers, runners, cyclists, olympics-ready rollerbladers taking off as well as first timers frequently crashing down. Oskar and I only walked, apart from a few dabbles into the sport of race-walking to get away from some very determined bees attracted by our beverages (European bees are persistent!).
A section of the airport park that we passed, had people living in a fenced off section with repurposed white shipping containers. It turned out that this was temporary housing provided to some of the Ukrainians who had made their way to Berlin. As I traveled North through Europe, more subtle signs appeared to remind me that war was ongoing, close, and many had become refugees. Given my family’s history, I had been wondering on how I would respond to a live encounter with something that could bring up elements from my past. This one was too startling for me to process, found just between a disused runway and a Dadaist mini-golf course. A very South African response: to just walk on.