Around 8pm I close the door behind me, and since it rained today, the trees are giving off an incredibly sugary aroma. It's dusk and I look to my right through a glass door to a grassy garden and a few stone steps that lead to somewhere I can't see. I like to imagine that the garden continues over there… but I know it leads to a wire fence and a construction site. I go over to my bike, there is a circular cut-out in the wall dividing this courtyard from the next. Last winter, if you looked through the cut-out, you would see that someone built an igloo for children to play in. I climb on my bike and steer through this courtyard, and then the next one, swiftly dismounting in the large entrance tunnel, where a lantern automatically turns on and the walls are projected with the patterns from the light. As I open the large 19th century door to get out on the street, a few people are standing on the sidewalk, enjoying the first ice creams of the season. Kastanienallee has a way of making you feel like you are on vacation with its sidewalk atmosphere. I get on my bike again and wait for a turn to join the street, well the little piece of it between the tram tracks and the cars. Usually I'm ready to get off of the thin asphalt path as soon as possible and turn right onto Oderberger, but the construction there has gotten dangerous as well. I stand up on my bike, look behind me, switch to the asphalt strip between the tracks and pound out the next block. Time skips ahead and the tram is coming up behind me as I take my right onto Schwedter Straße. I quickly lock up my bike at Kaisers and buy a few things for dinner. Coming back out, I bike on the sidewalk on the wrong side of the street so that I can duck into the courtyard of the block. There, a one story gallery, half walled and half glass, slightly raised from the ground, has a different exhibition than it did last time – it's usually painting, but today it has actually been wrapped in colorful, geometric plastic. I don't dismount my bike, but recognize that the wrapping was made from dismantled bags. I turn around, there's nothing going on in the mini-greenhouse that is used for art sometimes, too…. Back on the street, I take the left onto Rheinsberger Straße. I dodge the construction sites that seem to be doubling every two months. Last year I used to be able to look down this street clear to the end; all the buildings are about the same height, so the perspective really pulled you in to that final building. But I don't go quite that far before stopping off to open another one of those large 19th century doors.