New year, new 'Frau'

Say hello to AFNL 2.0!

This newsletter used to be a blog and it was almost a Tiktok.

(You can thank me later.)

I took some good advice from writer Zulie Rane and decided to focus on my strengths.

When I started writing the blog version of Alte Frau, New Life in 2022, I wanted to do two things: share our journey as new immigrants to Berlin; and highlight things about Berlin that maybe people outside Germany weren’t aware of - the long history, the art, the culture, the counter-culture, everything.

But I found that I got bogged down in all of the background work of building and maintaining a website - and I already had a personal website I was neglecting! I could never get the blog to look or work the way that I wanted. And I spent so much time fiddling, that I rarely got to writing.

So, by moving to Substack, I’m letting them take care of the back end and I will focus on communicating - writing about all the things I want people to know about living in Berlin.

It’s an awesome city - though not for the faint of heart.

I’m going to leave the blog up for the time being (at least until my domain comes up for renewal). But I will be gradually moving my old content over here, and mixing it in with new updates.

At least online, you really can be two places at the same time!

Coming up:

On Monday, I’m planning a re-post of an earlier article on Berlin’s “altbau” apartment buildings.

Next Friday, I’ll look at the recent protests in Berlin against the anti-immigrant plans of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party.