Neulich, im Büro …

Neukölln, 2012.

Derby Square Bookstore, 215 Essex Street, in Salem, MA – what a wonderful place!

And after browsing through these pictures, imagine how the owner of the shop looked like.

Exactly!
Wow.

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First of all: you must not bring poison, weapons, or “obscene material” into the US. Whatever that means. Interestingly enough, the first store I encountered leaving the airplane at Miami airport was a store for, let’s say … obscene objects.

Leaving Detroit Airport after 24 hours of air conditioning was a bit of a shock. Random fact: if you want to go from Fahrenheit to Celsius, you calculate (°C – 32) / 1.8.

A colleague wrote:

Great to get so much help from people. You are in the Midwest. It is a special place in the world.

I find it always hard to describe people, to describe a way of living. Are people different in different countries? Many friends and colleagues asked me this when I returned from my 18 months in Norway and Finland. Yes, they are different – but is very hard to give specific answers. What I find most interesting is: when I hear people talking to each other in Ann Arbor, I cannot hear within the first seconds whether these people are strangers or family members. Because they are much warmer to strangers, not superficial at all.

Things seem to have less distance here.

Checking for ways to spend my evenings within the first weeks, I found two activities that sounded promising:

• “Autumn Invasive Plant Removal Walk”, Thu 15 September, 6pm – 7pm
• “Princess and Pirate Party”, Sun 11 September, 5pm – 7pm. “Fee: $35 (includes Pizza)”. Oh yeah!

My house & backyard:

My neighbourhood:

My cat Dojia aka Muffin:

My flatmates are amazing. I went to three stores for cell phone contracts – they had pretty similar offers, but in one of them they played “Can’t touch this” by MC Hammer, so there wasn’t really much of a choice for me (the clerk replied “We keep it real!” when I remarked upon MC Hammer; also, my number is 734-604-9854). You can get absolutely unsweetened (!) icetea here, which was a bit of a surprise for me. Pickeral (or Pickerel) lake is clearly the most beautiful place in the US. In Miami, you don’t get far without speaking Spanish. Boehr is pronounced “bear”, and “salesperson” is actually an official job description (“Peter Porter, Salesperson, XYZ Company”).
It’s been 42 hours since I arrived in Ann Arbor. More to come soon.

Eiko Fried
C/O Amanda Taylor
220 South 7th Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
UNITED STATES

Goodbye Berlin. I will miss you.

Not everything is art, or has to be. So I bought a tiny little camera to capture all the small things that make life so colorful and diverse. I don’t consider this to be photography in the way I would define it. These are reality-snapshots, exactly what my photography is not.

I like it already.