Berlin

Possibly I wouldn’t love Berlin so much if it wasn’t such a startling contrast to suddenly be in a place with good food and non-conservative people. (Not to mention better air, bicycles, and recycling bins.) Everyone is on bicycles in Berlin in the summer, it seems. Armies of bicycles are locked up and down every street, outside every building. Bicycle paths wind through the city, often sharing the sidewalk instead of the street and, as an added bonus, there are tiny little traffic lights just for the bicycles.

I rent a bicycle from an awesome dude who repairs bikes that would be thrown away and rents them out on an honor system for dirt cheap prices. You take it, ride it, bring it back and pay then, and pay much less than you would have spent riding public transport all day. Which, btw, is something that has to be said in Moscow’s favor: the public transit system in Moscow is cheap, uncomplicated, and fast, not to mention gorgeous (in the metro), none of which I would really say about Berlin. But hey, miniature bicycle traffic lights.

The Berlin Party Scene.

Something I’d heard was pretty special, but I hadn’t realized the full extent of it until we are lucky enough to land with a couchsurfing host so fully plugged into the scene that he downloads enough information on us to last several weekends if not months of party. The party here never stops, quite literally. Parties start on Friday or even Thursday, build to a crescendo on Saturday or Sunday, and wind down on Monday or Tuesday. Someone tells me about a bar that has been open without shutting its doors day or night for even an hour since sometime in the ‘80s.  

We wind up at a club called Sisyphos at around midnight or 1 on the Friday that we arrive, me still taking big breaths of the much cleaner and fresher, as well as more marijuana-scented, air. The club seems slightly disappointing at first, there is a cool outdoor area with colored cloths and sofas and tall lights decorated like indoor lamps with shades, but a lot of this is closed and only one dance room seems to be open, a large dark space of flashing white lights and techno only slightly less heavy than the smog of cigarette smoke and dry ice machines that fills the room. Bits and pieces of the dancers are illuminated in the strobes, flailing. My friend and I hear a rumor of more rooms, we like little nooks and crannies and most of all variety, so we set out to comb the dark corners, but there’s nothing except a darkness so complete that at one point we literally are feeling the wall with our hands trying to find the exit. Back outside into the chill, unwilling to dance in the dark smoke-filled orc pit. However it’s early hours yet, and eventually another room does open, a sort of outdoor gardening shed with some small high stained glass windows and much better music. We drink radler (English shandy: beer with lemonade or similar, much more popular here than anywhere I’ve noticed before, and named, apparently, for cyclists) and dance in the new room as the morning lightens.

Our host warned us that the dress code here is super casual, but I don’t think anything could have prepared us for just how casual Sisyphos is. People literally look like they came from the gym. The most prevalent items of clothing are running shoes, track suits and little gym bags; it’s the odd person who’s properly dressed up for a night out. We feel overdressed in pretty normal day wear dresses; probably the first time I’ve ever felt that way at a club. Though there is one girl who gets major points for wearing a black satin dress with just the nipples cut out (braless, of course). Outside they’ve opened up more space, wooden platforms among trees and on an island in a small pond where some water lilies bloom. Apparently more areas will open as Saturday toils onward and perhaps Saturday night would have been the time to come here. Still we enjoy ourselves; as the morning wears on to warmth we sit on top of an old truck parked permanently and covered in decayed couch cushions and tired hippies to watch the be-track-suited clubbers wandering wide-eyed and blinking out of the orc pit into the light of day. It’s the crowning view of the whole area and we stay a long time as other people come and go around us.

An American and a Brit sit with us on the cushions for a bit, the American loud and excited that we are an American and a Brit too, the Brit so massively high that his infrequent and nearly unintelligible mumblings come from miles away. They have a third friend too, from Israel, and at one point someone in the circling crowd spots him and has something akin to a double-rainbow meltdown; the Israeli disappears in an orgy of hugging and disbelief. “I brought him,” the American keeps saying. “That happens everywhere we go. Was that the best thing you’ve seen all morning? Tell me that wasn’t the best thing you’ve seen all morning.”

“It was definitely something I’ve seen this morning…” I respond, wishing he’d go away, which eventually he does, to be replaced with a young French boy with black curly hair who bends over our perch on the front of the bus. “Are you French?” He whispers urgently.

 “No,” we say, “sorry.”

“Oh no.” His face is doom laden. “Did you see some French people here?”

“Yes, there were some French people here, but they left.”

“You don’t know where they went?”

“No. But it’s a good place to see people, stay here and look for them.”

“I don’t know what they look like.” A pause. “They know the person I am staying with.”

“Well maybe look for that person? It’s not a huge place.”

“I don’t know what he looks like. All I know is that the French people who were on the bus know the person I’m staying with.” The boy sits morosely behind us for some time.

Eventually he’s replaced by a girl who does a belly flop and lies with her face hanging off the front of the bus, not twitching or making a sound, and the party grinds on.             

The next weekend we go to a party in an approximately twelve story building that’s been hermetically sound sealed and filled with different floors and rooms of party. Still a little on the dark and smoke-filled orc pit side for my taste, though I love all the fog and if it weren’t for the cigarette smoke it’d be fine. Outside is better with a fire pit and broken down couches and freshly painted bits of the Berlin wall here and there. The music is just beginning outside, which promises to be fun, when at last we decide to cycle home through the awakening morning of the city. 

New York on a piece of the Berlin Wall