Bowie's Berlin

         Of course no trip to Berlin for me could be complete, or even really begun, without a Bowie pilgrimage. First stop Hansa Studios, where the Berlin trilogy was recorded in sight of the wall.

There may or may not have been some tearing up here...

           Then we (me and my second intrepid CS host whose idea this phase actually was) bike South and West to the flat where Bowie lived. Clearly not the first rabid Bowie fans to arrive. A couple of doors down is Neues Ufer, a new name for an old bar—apparently the first openly gay bar in Berlin and oft frequented by Bowie and Iggy Pop when they lived next door.  The inside is tastefully done in giant pictures of none other than the man himself. Ufer, my host tells me, means riverbank and can be a slang term in German for being gay. As in, ‘oh, he’s from the other riverbank’. The barman tells us that the bar has had very few problems in its long openly gay history, though once someone threw a brick through the window and Bowie paid to have it repaired.

And so were lots of Bowie fans.

             And so we sit chatting on a sidewalk Bowie and Iggy sat and chatted on, by a window Bowie paid for, sipping beers. The clientele has stayed pleasantly colorful: I'm pleased to see a very Englishman in New York fellow stroll down the street with flowers in his hat and pinstripes on his trousers, his nails tastefully done in blue and black, to order a double espresso then sit in front of the bar studying a map and discretely dipping cocaine.

            I also think about Bowie’s newer Berlin references from Walking the Dead, indeed the song is in my head a lot, but don't follow them up. Except for some visits to Potsdamer Platz, which is hard to miss.

The train through Potsdamer Platz

Had to get the train
From Potsdamer Platz
You never knew that
That I could do that
Just walking the dead

Sitting in the Dschungel
On Nürnberger Straße
A man lost in time
Near KaDeWe
Just walking the dead

KaDeWe is an old department store I never make it too, and the Dschungel (jungle) bar is long gone. However late on the last night I am there I receive a gift from the Bowie cosmos: my new friends take me to a bar decorated like an elven glade, in my opinion, and its name is also Dschungel.