Weekend With is an ongoing Instagram series that features people we like photographing places we’d like to be. Follow @thecut on Instagram to join in, and tag your photos with #weekendwith when you travel somewhere new.
New York City–based photographer and director Mayan Toledo (@thisismayan) met her two best friends, Anna and Maya, when they were all living in Tel Aviv. Now they all live in different cities, but they recently met up for a ten-day trip to Berlin. “We all came from having breakups or endings of all sorts, so having time together felt like an incubator of closeness and comfort,” explains Toledo. Scroll down for her photos from the trip.
“The three of us came to meet in Berlin for Maya’s birthday, Maya came from Tel Aviv, Anna came from London, and I came from New York. On the first day, Maya’s wallet got stolen, Anna missed her flight and joined us on the second day after 24 hours at Heathrow and when I landed, I found out the airline lost my bag. It was a pretty rough start but at least we were all on the same page. There was a lot of bed time for sure.”
“Our days were short the entire time we were there. The lack of sun and long nights going out in Berlin completely reversed our sense of time.”
“We walked to a strange area with a deserted amusement park that was just left as is. There was a really long path through the woods to get there and it totally felt like a horror film set. It was cool to find a place that is so untouched in the middle of the city and we were the only people there for a while.”
“At the abandoned amusement park, when we found the Ferris wheel and tried to sneak into the property.”
“It was freezing cold the entire time we were in Berlin but we wanted to change and take more photos there. This was an in-between moment.”
“Maya by the water in Müggelsee on her 20th birthday. Not sure what we were thinking but we packed swimsuits to take with us to the town with a fake beach just outside of Berlin. We thought we can take photos in them but when we got there we saw that people are actually ice skating and it was so freezing we were barely able to take our coats off for this one photo.”
“On our last few days in Berlin we switched to this Airbnb. When I met the owner to pick up keys, he had the sweetest and most friendly dog ever. Once we got to the house, we realized it’s pretty much dedicated to the dog with a photo calendar, little trinkets, and all these cute pictures. There were six beds in the house but we all stayed in one room.”
“While we were resting in the back seat [of a cab], the driver completely fell in love with Anna. [She] was blasting old Hebrew songs and then singing ‘Primadonna’ to him. He was from Lebanon but knew a lot about Israel because he spent a few years working there.”
