I’m liking it well enough here, I guess, but where are all the Black people? There are very, very few, and most of the ones I’ve met are African immigrants to Germany, Senegalese and Nigerian men in Michael Jordan jerseys who sell me crummy weed at exorbitant prices because they are savvy and I am wide-eyed and high on novelty and fairly begging for the authentic! cultural!! experience!!! of being taken for a ride in a strange land, plus the bassist from the band from Madagascar that played at Carnival of Cultures, and one Jamaican rapper I encountered at same, the latter of whose black-and-green-and-yellow things I gravitated to for homesickness for Flatbush, one presumes.

I guess I’ve been looking for the Black people speaking and dressed more or less like this nation’s natives. African-Prussian Vernacular German, anyone? But how does a place come to have such a population if previous residents didn’t specifically travel overseas to the African continent and kidnap and bring back and enslave and force foreign names and language on enough African people that, over generations, a new dimension of civilization eventually comes into being? I don’t know enough about this. Someone told me I’ll see more Black people in the clubs, but who are those people, and where are they the rest of the time?