Berlin, second message

Actually this is about flying.

Most of you reading this know that I hadn't flown before. It wasn't because I had a flight scare or something. Well, I have a scare of high places - it developed only when I became a father. I've waken several times from a dream in which I see my kids fall from a window or a balcony. I used to play around at roofs when I was twenty or younger. We even made a film at the roof of a seven-story building with a friend of mine. I photographed with a 8 mm camera when he jumped from a small maintenance shack to the actual roof of the house, only two or three meters from the threshold. No way, man, I'd do that now!

It's just that I haven't felt that travelling is a necessity. And I've been pretty poor all my life. I've put all the extra money I've had into books (and lately clothes, snob that I am).

Now I flew to Germany. The first take-off was quite an experience. The houses and cars and all that escaped me so fast I couldn't believe it. And suddenly I was above clouds. The weather on Friday was so beautiful that there weren't many clouds - I saw more of them when we came back. Boy, were they beautiful. The land seems pretty odd from up there. You recognize that's the stuff the maps are made of, but you don't really realize that until you see it yourself.

We had to land in Helsinki and fly off again to Berlin, so there were two take-offs. My ears went dumb when we came to Berlin, maybe due to bad weather, and I got a bit of a headache. The take-offs and landings were the situations that would've scared me off if that had been the case. When we set off for the return, for a brief moment I had a thought: this thing is up in the air and there's not much to keep it there. But I decided that I won't think of it again. Elina said that it's so absurd to be so high. And that's true. You can't grasp that with rational thought.

When we came back and flew over the Baltic Sea, the weather was so nice that I could see the little flows in the water. It was nice.

Is it common that you want to experience the take-offs again? I mean it wasn't very pleasant, but it was something akin to rollercoaster rides. I don't like those either, but the idea of getting into one speeds up my blood. (Last Summer I declined the idea of going to the rollercoaster with Ottilia, but I think this Summer I can't...)

Next message will be about the books I bought and the book shops in Berlin in general.