I'm much better at blogging when feeling depressive and therefore reflective. But tonight I feel flipping fantastic. For no apparent reason. There I was standing in the snow at Ostkreuz S-Bahn station waiting for the train, and it hit me. Not the train, that wouldn't be so good. But life hit me.

And now I come to write this, I realise I was hit by the subconscious "Six Month Anniversary" train. Cos yes it's been that long, and I have survived exactly half a year in Berlin, out on my own, in the big wide world. But it wasn't the feeling of surviving that hit me, or the one of triumph, instead it was the simpler, but less tangible, notion of belonging.

I surveyed the snowy S-Bahn tracks, the ugly boarded up and dilapidated shacks on the platform, the drunk teenage Germans with beers in hand, and the grey and dull landscape of east Berlin. And I realised that this is *my* city. I looked at the big brown thing which I had no idea what it was (a water storage tower for steam trains, apparently), the big square tower block sticking into the air which I had no idea what it was (a hotel perhaps?), and glanced at the Fernsehturm, disappearing into the mist above the sprawling city. And I realised that this is *my* city. I may not know what things are, I may be standing in a former Communist industrial eyesore once behind the Iron Curtain, but this is my city. Those ugly buildings are beautiful to me; those unknown structures are adventures waiting to happen; and those drunken Germans could have been friends in a different circumstance.

And I may not speak very good German, I may not have a local pub where everybody knows my name, I may be struggling financially, and this may have impacted on the rate in which I am making new friends at the moment, but I am finally where I belong. And I'm feeling great. And I can navigate the fick out of the public transport system. Take that world! :)