#luften

Berlin — After moving to Berlin from Honolulu, Wyatt Gordon was surprised when his new German roommate marched into his bedroom at 8 a.m. and threw open the windows. It turned out that his cohabitant, Laura, maintained a strict ventilation regime. Three times a day, at precise times, all the windows in the apartment needed to be opened. It didn’t matter whether it was the dead of winter or a weekend morning, or if Gordon had company - rules were rules.“ I had men and women in my bed that I’d brought home from the club or wherever,” said Gordon, now 35, a city planner originally from Richmond. As is common on Berlin weekends, they would crawl into bed around dawn - “only to be woken up an hour later by a blast of ice-cold air,” he recalled. “How do you explain to the person laying in bed next to you that this is what the German culture demands of us?”