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It’s a Sunday night and I’m sitting downstairs at the Chinese & Thai takeway, wearing a combination of ridiculous fake leather leggins and white trainers, the first and and most comfortable clothes I could find. I’m waiting for my food and staring at the pastel-coloured neon signs with badly photoshopped images of the different dishes. It’s the best you can get on a Sunday around here if you want to keep the walking distance to a minimum. The guy prepares my food, he’s singing a song in a language I don’t understand and I sip on an artificially red softdrink. I think the guy’s actually Vietnamese.

It reminds me of that short story by Wladimir Kaminer where he’s out on a mission on the streets of Berlin to find out where the people who run the restaurants and takeaways are really from, and finds out the people from the kebab shop are actually Greek and the Greek restaurant is run by Yugoslavs. Or something like that. They’ve simply realised that the Germans don’t seem to notice a difference anyway, as long as the place looks authentic enough and the music is right so they decided to make a profit from it.

I eat my dinner upstairs in the flat, rice and duck and some coconut milk sauce with vegetables, by far the best you can get on a Sunday. I scoff the food wile sitting on my bed, thinking about life and staring into space. I’ve been back here for over a week now and I don’t feel like I’ve ever left the city. I’m too exhausted to make big changes and I wonder if it’s weird that sometimes I just want to switch off and not live but only exist for a while.