The first time I went to Berlin it was my first real solo trip and it changed my life, sparking a passion that eventually inspired me to move alone to Turkey for a year. On my second trip, I spent one week in Berlin and felt just as inspired. As a storyteller, I decided to give myself a challenging writing assignment (especially for someone like me who struggles with being concise): Recap every day for seven days, in real time, in exactly seven sentences per day. Berlin is a dynamic, fun, unpredictable city that is constantly on the cutting edge of everything cool in design, food, art, offbeat experiences and more. A week in Berlin is not nearly enough; the city deserves more. But seven days is a good start. It’s still more than the 36 hours I spent in Warsaw after I left Berlin.
Sunday in Berlin
My memory of the flea market in Mauer Park today is a blur. Namely, scoring the most incredible, worn-in leather backpack for 30 euros; eating a fluffy pudding/custard concoction called ‘quark’ in banana and chocolate flavors with mini-M&M’s on top; being chased by an eccentric man eating a weiner because he wanted me to take a picture of his Charlie Chaplin statue. A few feet away, some Berliners formed a crowd, cameras out, to take photos of a Lego-sized yellow tugboat floating in a puddle.
The rain had drenched Berlin during my morning sleep and started again just as I left Mauer Park, so I believe that cosmically I was meant to find that backpack. After feeling pouty about spending time on a class paper for my NYU Journalism program rather than exploring, the downpour gave me the perfect excuse to sit down in the pink cafe next door with an iced lemon cake and ginger tea and bang out what I believe was a pretty good article.
Later in the evening back in Prenzlaur Berg a man screeched – literally – to a halt in front of the burger joint where I was sitting (don’t judge, it was the nearest place broadcasting the Olympics), walked in, expressed something in German with a deep, guttural sound from his throat, and then walked out carrying a large carrot in his mouth. While sitting there I was also visited by a very tiny, clean-looking, grey baby mouse.
Monday in Berlin
The day started with both success and failure with a visit to Vodaphone on Schoenhauser Allee, where I did at least get to practice my latent Turkish with the Turkish man working there named Senturk. I knew Berlin had a large Turkish Population but once I made my way to Kreuzberg this afternoon, I felt for sure I was back in Istanbul when I saw several cay houses, too many doner stands to count, and one conspicuous Turkcell storefront. I came to Kreuzberg in 2006; in 2012, after a living for a year in Turkey, my perspective is completely different. The highpoint of the day was an in-depth lesson in mid-century modern vintage furniture courtesy of Malte at Stilspiel, one of the shops I’m covering for a shopping-focused travel guide and app called Shopikon.
Did you know that before the 1970’s, rosewood and teakwood were commonly used in furniture production but then exportation was halted on account of negative affects to the environment, and now those types of wood are rare and expensive?
My dinner tonight at Yorkschlossen, a German pub that smelled just like a New York pub, was temporarily interrupted by some loud Sicilian boys at the next table over who were wildly discussing politics.
Tuesday in Berlin
Added to the list of things I love about Germany: communal tables everywhere (the obvious result is a sense of community, even with strangers, which is nice when you’re traveling alone).
My breakfast was organic, homemade ice cream from a place called Caramello in Freidrichshain. This fluffy stuff was so mind-bogglingly good (as my dad would say) that after walking away with my dark chocolate/bourbon vanilla cone to eat it on the way to the u-bahn I backtracked and sat down on one of the colored cube chairs outside the ice cream parlor; the flavors deserved my full attention. It was the best ice cream I’ve ever had, and yes it was worth one sentence just to say that.
I went on a pub tour and met some other lone travelers, and among them was a young boy named Frans from Holland who was on a road trip from his home town there (pop. 1,000) to a wedding in Prague, and since he’d never before been to Berlin he decided to stop for a few days. First he told me that the radio music in the car didn’t interest him much because there was no Christian Rock or Country the way there is in the states, and then he told me that in Holland he works at a zoo as a monkey feeder and that his favorite thing is watching at night to see if the monkeys pick out their correctly colored toothbrushes. I said “ah, you had me at the Christian Rock, but with the monkeys I know you’re kidding,” and he said “oh, I was serious about the music.”
Wednesday in Berlin
Vegan restaurant Kopps in Mitte, where I ate lunch, is just off a street called Grosse Hamburger Strasse, and I’m sure I’m not the only person who finds that funny and apropos. For dinner in Kreuzberg I ate a delicious cheeseburger from Burgermeister, a food stand under the Schlesisches Strasse U-bahn station in a facility that used to be a public bathroom. Even if they’re flipping patties where there used to be a toilet, the burger was as far as you can get from a Grosse Hamburger – it was one of the best I’ve had!
I did a 3.5-hour walking tour focusing on Berlin’s alternative counterculture and learned a lot about different street and graffiti artists. Especially interesting are the rivalries, like the one between Robbo and Banksy and newer artists’ tendency to do paste-ups with paper and homemade glue rather than spray paint to create less permanent damage to surfaces.
Added to the list of things I love about this city: despite being landlocked, there’s an abundance of ‘beach bars’ created by throwing down some sand on the river banks, putting up some tiki torches and slinging beers from wooden stands. And once again I wondered if New York would ever be as cool as Berlin.
Thursday in Berlin
The best part of my trip to Berlin is actually the work I’m doing here for Shopikon and the opportunity it affords me to meet and speak with local business owners and hear how passionate they are about whatever it is they love, be it comic books, vintage furniture or, today’s category, flowers. Brutto Gusto is a flower shop and art exhibition space owned by Geer Pouls, a Dutchman who first moved to Berlin in the 1970s and spent such magical, wild times with people like David Bowie and Iggy Pop that he felt homesick after moving away and came back in 2008 to open his shop in Mitte. I loved hearing his ideas on the interrelationship between flowers and art, his mission to give flowers ‘love and respect’ by selling them alongside beautiful glass or ceramic vases, and his beginnings as a flower designer when he was a child in Rotterdam growing amaryllises in his parents’ garden.
Later in the day I went to what I’ve been told is Berlin’s most cutting-edge neighborhood, Neukolln, and I ate a lunch of cold cucumber soup and sourdough-wrapped beetroot at a table alongside a painted VW bus parked in a garden at a very Berlin-esque, quirky caravan hotel and restaurant called Huttenpalast. Next door was a treasure trove of a bookstore, where I found a beautifully illustrated childrens’ book called Die Grosse Reise von Fraulein Pauline, which translates to ‘The Great Journey of Miss Pauline,’ and I had to buy it, for obvious reasons (my real name is Pauline).
Around 7PM I was trying on shoes at a store on Rosenthaler Strasse when the shopkeeper stuck his head out the door, looked up and said “the world looks like it’s dying!” I thought maybe that was a dramatization of the situation or something got lost in translation, but a few minutes later when marble-sized hail started falling from the sky and bouncing into the store next to my feet I realized I should never underestimate the power of the weather here in Berlin.
Friday in Berlin
On of the things at the top of my to-do list in Berlin was to re-visit Tacheles, a place very unique and Berlin with an interesting, albeit sad, story. Despite the efforts of the security team hired by the bank that has repossessed the building, a group of people who are ironically now squatting there, many of the artists have stayed and there is a really incredible metalwork yard in the back that is open to the public. I was ecstatic to find that the prices for a lot of the artwork there weren’t prohibitive, so I bought a metal sculpture of a girl with her head bent down by an artist named Ucar. I was really happy to be able to support one of the artists and the cause of Tacheles as well as bring a piece of it home with me.
At 8PM I met up with Jennifer, the daughter of my parents’ neighbors’ friends, and we started the evening with drinks at a wine bar in the newly hip ‘Kreuzkolln’ area (where Kreuzberg and Neukolln meet), and then went to a raw space where Jennifer’s artist friend had an exhibition: three pieces of his art that included an empty wooden frame, a canvas painted green with two Mickey Mouse-esque eyes staring into the room, and another black canvas with two stripes painted at the bottom. Later, we went on to our final destination in a neighborhood called Wedding where some warehouses have been converted into huge party spaces including one place that had a basement with a DJ playing electro-pop and upstairs a very thick, wide bar made out of styrofoam. I only lasted until 3AM, just when things start really bumping in this city, but I capped off the night with a doner kebab just like a real Berliner.
Saturday in Berlin
I spent the first half of my last day in Berlin doing my favorite thing to do, in any city: walking without any real destination, my wandering purposefully aimless. Prenzlaur Berg, the neighborhood where I’ve been staying, is full of so many welcoming cafes and indie shops that it would take a year of constant traipsing just to unearth all, or maybe not even all, of its charms (but I’d gladly volunteer to take on that challenge).
I went to Freidrichshain in the afternoon to hit the annual Berlin Beer Festival, which claims to be the longest biergarten in the world as it takes over 2.2 km of Karl Marx Allee all the way to Alexanderplatz, and elbowed my way through a very thick, international crowd of people who seemed to have been enjoying their beer for a few hours already, barely managing to avoid spillage or damage to my camera while endeavoring to try just one type of beer.
I ate my fanciest dinner of the week at Cookies Cream, a speakeasy-style vegetarian restaurant that with an almost-hidden entrance marked by a giant blinking chandelier in the service alley of the Westin Grand Hotel.
After dinner I walked up Freidrichstrasse and then across Museum Sinsel, past the Lustgarten and Berliner Dome, where I remembered from my first trip to Berlin six years ago that standing on the bridge over the Spree allows for a partial view of the sunset. The city has changed a lot since then – formerly undiscovered areas are now on the tourist track, and the hipster ‘hoods have shifted south and east; I’d taken my camera to look for empty lots that had previously held junky street art installations and instead found brand new apartment buildings standing in their place – but it’s still my favorite city in the world and I’m sad to leave not knowing when I’ll be back.
In the words of John F Kennedy: ich bin ein Berliner!