Berlin
Base rather than backdrop — dancing, training, music, people, and a standing habit of leaving it regularly.
Berlin is the base. Not the backdrop to a job — the place the rest of it is organised around.
A week here has dancing in it, training in it, music in it, and a lot of people in it. I’ve never been good at the version of life where work is the main event and everything else is recovery time. The things outside work aren’t a break from the week; they’re most of what makes it worth having.
The city is unusually good for that. It runs late, it’s cheap enough to be spontaneous, and almost nobody is performing. You can be new to a room and it doesn’t cost you anything.
The other half of living here is leaving it. Berlin sits in the middle of everything, and I’ve used that — somewhere around thirty countries so far, most of them in short bursts rather than grand trips. A long weekend somewhere I’ve never been is the single best return on time I’ve found.
That’s what the rest of this section is for.