On The Road Again, Part III - Berlin Encore

There were some other bars in the general area that I wanted to visit so I decided to get moving again.
After I finished my beer, I made my way to an indoor market place called Markthalle Neun, where there was supposed to be a good craft beer bar. I made my way through countless stalls selling fruit, cheese and a thousand other things and finally located the bar. It was small and in a corner of the building and there was only 1 customer apart from me. I ordered a beer and all of a sudden was very hungry. I walked back to a stall selling cheese, got a nice block of cheese by way of a snack and sat back down with my beer. The beer was excellent, but the bar man had more interest in his iPad than in talking to the people that fund his pay check and as the only other customer had also wandered off into iPadland, I left after just the one beer.

I walked past another park some 10 minutes later, and again found a dozen people drinking there. As I had really enjoyed my previous park stop, I thought I might as well join in the fun here too, so I bought another bottle of beer and sat down on a bench. The sun warmed my skin, while the beer cooled me down and the birds chirped in the trees. I never realised that drinking on the street could be this idyllic. I could really get used to this.

I visited a couple of other bars throughout the day and spent hours walking around Berlin. It is a great city for walking. After a long day of walking, drinking and sightseeing, I returned to my hostel around midnight a happy man. My first full day in Berlin had been a resounding success. What an amazing city.

                                                                     

I woke up the next morning from the sounds of people leaving. You can always tell in hostels when people are leaving because you hear a constant opening and closing of zippers, folding of plastic bags, people walking in and out of the door, muffled conversations and all those other sounds that indicate that they are packing up and are getting ready to leave. After this had ended, I got up, climbed down from my bed and found that 2 people had vacated their bottom beds. One of those cartoon lightbulbs appeared above my head, and I raced down to reception where I found Caroline again. I explained that there were now 2 free bottom bunks in room 103, and that she would receive my eternal gratitude if she could relocate me to one of them. “Sure.” she said, and 10 seconds later I was the official occupant of bed 2, which pleased me to no end. I thanked her profusely, and she smiled, but then focused on the next customer. I went back upstairs, dragged my bed linen off my bed and relocated to the sanctity of a bed at ground level. I climbed up one final time to grab my phone charger and other possessions and all was well with the world. I had no time to relax though, because I had more things to do. After my shower in the prison block and my reading session on the bench out front, I walked through reception once again and waved goodbye to Caroline for the day.

Throughout my stay, I realized later, whenever I walked through reception, she was there. No matter what time of day it was, or what day of the week, I could always count on Caroline to be there. I don’t know if she just worked really long hours or if it was like that old Droopy cartoon where he chases the wolf. For those of you that haven’t seen it- a convicted criminal (the wolf) escapes from prison (he does this by drawing a door on the wall and then opening it) and flees. The authorities entrust officer Droopy with the task of capturing the fugitive wolf. The wolf tries to lay low and get away unnoticed, but no matter where he goes, he finds Droopy there waiting for him. This starts of with regular, as expected ways to get out of the public eye, by hiding in a cinema, or the crowd at a baseball game, but the escape attempts get more insane as the wolf desperately tries to get away from Droopy. He first escapes to Canada, where Droopy is waiting for him, then to Alaska, where Droopy is reading a book in the first igloo the wolf enters, then to Korea, the Australian outback and a bunch of other places around the world, and every time he sets foot on what he assumes to be safe soil, Droopy is there to greet him. In a final attempt to get away from him, the wolf sets out to sea and has himself eaten by a whale. Ofcourse, as soon as he strikes a match inside the whale’s stomach, he realises that Droopy is also inside the whale, and he gives up. He hands himself in to the authorities and returns to prison. In the final scene, he looks out of the window and sees 200 identical Droopies standing under his window.

I thought that maybe Caroline had identical twin or triplet sisters and that they took shifts behind reception. Or maybe not. Probably not.

The program for the day mainly revolved around the Berlin Mitte neighborhood. The main reason I wanted to go there was that it is the neighborhood where Brewdog have a bar. And I promise you now that that is the last you will hear about Brewdog until I get back home to Dublin in about a week and a half.
I had used the paper map provided by the hostel for navigating the previous day, and wanted to do this again now, but I was forced to concede that using Google Maps on your phone is just easier. I love my paper maps, I have a wall full of them at home, and I always take one when I get somewhere, but an electronic map shows you exactly where to go, what direction you’re facing and how far there is left to go and how long that will take you. You could say that another part of travel folklore bites the dust because of this, but you can’t stop progress and even the staunchest old school backpacker has to admit that it is more convenient. But I do love paper maps.
I was partly walking along the same route I had taken on Monday night, so I figured I might stop off for a beer at Mikkeller, but I found they didn’t open until 3. I wasn’t too upset by this, because this gave me the opportunity to get some more practice time in for my new hobby of park bench drinking. Armed with a cold bottle, I sat down in a small park, waiting for something to happen. A few people walking dogs came past and greeted me, a few cyclists flew by and the odd delivery guy pushed his cart along, but there were no other drinkers to have a chat with. Maybe this was a posh park, where people only drink on Sunday or something. After I finished my beer, I moved on to BrewDog.

The BrewDog bar in Berlin is quite big. I had a look around and found it wasn’t particularly busy. 2 or 3 booths were taken but the large tables in the centre of the room were empty. 3 or 4 people were in the biergarten out back and a blonde girl was behind the bar. I said Gutentag and, even though she addressed me in German, I knew after 2 words that she was Australian. I ordered a beer and we got talking about traveling, Berlin and Australia. She told me that her name was Becky, that she had come to Berlin 4 years earlier and.. you want to finish that sentence yourself? .. yes, she had arrived with the intention of staying for 6 months and had never left.

After all these years of traveling, I’m starting to think that us expats have some sort of sixth sense that draws us to each other. No matter where I go, I somehow always seem to run in to people who have experiences similar to mine. While we were talking, she would regularly walk off to the kitchen in the back of the bar and come back with steaming pizzas. I looked up at the blackboard and found that there was a 2-4-1 pizza deal on weekday afternoons. I decided that I would love some pizza but, as I’m not a big eater, I would never finish 2 whole pizzas. I pointed this out to Becky and she took my hint and said that I could have 1 and get it half prize. See, now that is great service, and when I got home I got in touch with the head of Brewdog’s bar division, and made sure I gave a rave review about the bar in general and Becky in particular. The pizza was delicious, and I ate every last crumb of it. 

My original intention had been to go to BrewDog, have 2 or 3 drinks, and maybe lunch, and then explore more of the area. As it happened, inevitably, Becky was such great company that I spent the entire afternoon there and didn’t leave until the first dinner guests started to trickle in. About halfway through the afternoon, a guy sat down at the end of the bar and it turned out that he knew my new bartender friend from an earlier trip. He was Israeli and lived in Tel Aviv. I always like talking to people when I travel, especially if they’re from a part of the world that I haven’t been to. He didn’t know an awful lot about beer, so I tried to help him in making a selection, but for every beer he tasted he had some dismissive remark- too hoppy, too fruity, to sweet and so on and so on. In the end, he settled on a red ale, and it surprised me that he didn’t dismiss it as too malty. What surprised me even more was that he was very negative about the World War II memorials in Berlin and elsewhere. He told me that the Berlin holocaust memorial was boring and that the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam was lame. I found this a rather strange point of view from someone whose people had been driven to near-extinction less than three quarters of a century earlier but, then again, what do I know? I’m not Jewish and I’ve never been to Israel so I can’t really say anything about their state of mind. Just as I ordered one last beer from Becky, a girl walked in from the biergarten and ordered a couple of drinks. She, too, was Australian. When I remarked on this, she asked me if I was by any chance Dutch, which I am, and she started talking to me in Dutch. This confused me somewhat, but she explained that her husband, who was sat outside, was Dutch so she had built up some proficiency in the language over the years. We talked for a while and then she had to go bring her drinks outside and I had to start thinking about where I would go next. I finished my pint, said goodbye to Becky and my new friend from Tel Aviv, and went on my way, having had a very pleasant afternoon.
                                                         *





The Stone Brewery was founded in San Diego in 1996 and was one of the catalysts of the craft beer boom in the USA. It has since grown considerably and is now the 8^th biggest craft brewery in the USA. Because of the high demand, they have since opened a second brewery in Richmond, Virginia, to supply beer to the US East Coast. In 2015, the brewery announced that they would build a brewery in Berlin to supply the European market directly and this brewery opened in the summer of 2016. The brewery is on the outskirts of Berlin, in the Mariendorf area and I just had to see it. That, however, would be for tomorrow. It is quite a long way out, and to give it a fair share of attention, I would take an afternoon to visit it. Fortunately, Stone also has a bar in central Berlin, not far from where I was now. After a few minutes, I came past a great park and I just knew I had to have a beer there. I bought a bottle in a shop across the street that was presided over by a grumpy Asian woman and sat down on a stone wall besides a small oblong pond. Children were playing all around the park and on the other side of the pond, a group of teenagers were drinking beer and playing music from a Bluetooth speaker. After 10 minutes or so, I noticed that they were only playing music from the 1980s: Toto, Eurythmics, Pat Benatar, Duran Duran. I didn’t mind at all though, I love 80s music, and I can listen to it all day long.
I wondered why these teenagers would play music that was made long before they were born, rather than something contemporary, and all of a sudden I had a very profound thought. Even though I am young at heart and still consider myself to be in the prime of life, I am now, statistically at least, a man of middle age. Each of these children could have easily been my own, if only I could have gotten their mums to sleep with me somewhere around the turn of the century. I couldn’t decide whether I was annoyed because some of them clearly had very good looking mums that I never met, or that I was relieved because I didn’t have the responsibility of raising children. I opened another beer and moved to a different bench to see if I could come up with a solution from a different point of view. After I finished my beer I got up and, as I walked away, I heard a splash in the pond. I turned around and saw that one of the teenagers had thrown an empty vodka bottle in the pond and, upon closer inspection, found that the pond was full of empty bottles and cans. I walked towards the exit and praised myself lucky that I wasn’t responsible for any of these little bastards.

As I exited the park on the North side, I noticed an elevated area made of concrete. It was sheltered from the rest of the park by some bushes and I noticed some homeless people sitting there. The reason I assumed they were homeless is that they had set up old  couches which were surrounded by half a dozen supermarket carts that were filled with sleeping bags, beer cans and those ugly, brightly colored tarpaulin bags homeless people always seem to carry around. They were sitting there, passing round joints and bottles of wine and seemed perfectly happy with their situation. They were laughing and telling jokes and seemed to be having a great time. That is another thing that stood out to me- even the homeless people in Berlin looked happy and carefree and relaxed. This city didn’t stop to amaze me for a minute.

The Stone Brewing bar in central Berlin was only some 10 minutes further up the road from the park (its name, should you ever want to have an outdoor beer, is Der Volkspark am Weinberg and it’s great. But I’m told that the Mauerpark is pretty good too, so I’ll check that out on my next visit to Berlin) When I arrived there, I found that 4 men were doing some serious maintenance to the front of the building. I went inside and first went to the toilet, where I was treated to a dose of loud death metal through the internal PA system. Excellent. I went to the bar and was told by the girl that was manning it that it was Cans Wednesday, which meant that all cans of beer were EUR 3,50, even the big ones. I selected a large can of coconut porter, which was delicious. I sat down outside and watched the maintenance work unfold. When I enquired about what was going on, I was told that there was normally a big shutter on that part of the building, but they were replacing it with an actual wall with windows and a door. Odd but true. The work was accompanied by a large amount of drilling, sawing and hammering. I didn’t mind too much because I had an interesting beer to keep me busy. I spent the night there tasting beers and getting some information about the brewery in the South of Berlin. This information varied wildly, depending on who I asked. Some people said I’d be there in no time, while others proclaimed that it was near the very edge of the world and I would be closer to Tirana than to Berlin when I got there. I decided to see what happened. When the maintenance was finally over, and the windows in place, a bar man came out to the terrace with a tray full of beers. This, he explained, was on the house as a sort of ‘Thank you for putting up with all the noise tonight’ gesture, which was much appreciated by everyone. As luck would have it, he hadn’t counted exactly how many people there were outside so he had poured too many beers, which he left on my table so I got not one but four free beers out of it. As it is bad etiquette to leave directly after you get a free beer (or four) I had another beer before calling it quits. It was pushing midnight now and I still had a 40 minute walk home. When I walked past my favorite park, I now found it deserted, so I decided to have one last beer at BrewDog. The place was completely different now. It was packed to the last seat. All tables were full, including the ones outside, and the bar was full too. I had a pint of grapefruit IPA, which was delicious as always, and then bought a bottle of beer for the way home. I had one final beer in the hostel bar and went to my comfy bottom bed. I had a lot to do the next day, and a lot of ground to cover so I wanted get started early. I took out my book to read for a bit before going to sleep, but I was asleep before I reached the end of the page.

                                                        *

I woke up bright and early the next morning, went through my morning ritual and, after my morning outdoor reading session, stood in front of the elevators again. The elevators in the building were an enigma to me. At no point in my time there did they ever make any sense whatsoever. Whenever I stood in front of the 2 doors on the ground floor, one of the elevators would be somewhere near the top floors, while the other was invariably in the basement. When I pushed the ‘UP’ button, nothing would happen for 10 seconds or so. Then the one on the higher floors would slowly come down to the 6^th or 5^th floor and stop. Then it would go back up again to floor 9 or 10. After some time, the elevator from the basement would come to life and come in my direction, only to shoot straight past the ground floor and upwards to somewhere near the International Space Station. When one of them eventually did come down, it would always go to the basement first and then back up to where I was. On numerous occasions, I would push the 3 button and then see the elevator shoot up to floor 5 or 6, only to find no one waiting there. On nearly every trip back down, we would fly past ground floor and end up in the basement where, as usual, no one was waiting. It was all highly frustrating.

Every now and then, a handful of workers from the hostel’s housekeeping crew would step into or out of the elevator. They were all dressed in black and they all spoke some central European language to each other, Bulgarian or Ukranian or something like that. In all my time there, I didn’t hear even one of them speak a single word of German. As it was a big hostel, there were always housekeeping people rummaging about, putting new linnen on the beds, removing used sheets, or cleaning sinks or floors.
My frustrating encounters with the elevators over for at least a dozen hours or so, I made my way through reception again, waved at Caroline, and made my way outside. 

I had a lot to do today. I only had 2 full days in Berlin left and wanted to get the most out of it. I walked around Alexanderplatz yet again, and thought to myself that this was a great square. It was always busy, it had a world clock in the shape of a globe that would tell you the time anywhere in the world at any time of day, a great fountain that you could sit on and that great mix of people that consists of 50% people in a hurry to get somewhere and 50% people who have no intention of going anywhere at all. It had also been the location of the big protest that was one of the main catalysts for the collapse of the Wall. I stood and looked around. According to my research, on November 4, 1989, about half a million people had gathered here and demanded political reform in East Germany. 4 days later, most members of the government handed in their resignation and the day after that, a day that will forever live on in history, November 9, 1989, the East German government begrudgingly agreed to lift the travel ban between East and West Berlin. The Wall started to come down within hours and the reunited citizens of Berlin began the greatest party in history. All this was live on TV and I watched in amazement as a 15 year old boy. To this day, it is still the greatest thing I have ever seen on TV.





While the Alexanderplatz is an impressive square, there is no way in the world that you would fit half a million people on it. I thought this over and looked up some photos of the protest on my phone and found that a number of buildings that were there now, most obviously the Alexa shopping centre, weren’t there back in the 80s, so that would have created a lot more space. For the umpteenth time since I had come to Berlin, I realised that I was in a historically very significant spot. There was more history on the agenda today because, before I was going to visit breweries, I was going to the Brandenburger Tor. The Brandenburger Tor has always been an important site in German history, even before the Wall was built, and I looked forward to seeing it. When I was halfway there, I walked past a small park and saw something that I hadn’t expected: The Karl Marx statue. I had expected that the statue had been removed after German reunification, but the Germans, with their impeccable understanding of history (though maybe not the cleanest record) had left it there as a reminder of what once was. This was great for two reasons: first of all because of its historic significance, and second because it also featured in the Berlin Wall song I told you about earlier.
Well, technically, the song states “Where Lenin and Marx are still on their pedestals” and this statue was of Marx and Engels, but it was close enough and this very statue features in the video. I crossed the river Spree again and had to make a bit of a detour because the German railways were connecting 2 tracks, which closed off the entire intersection, but after I got around that, I was on the home stretch, so to say, and I could see the Brandenburger Tor in the distance. 

It is an interesting approach, and you can still clearly see that this used to be East Berlin. All the buildings are big and official-looking in the style you still see today in places like Minsk or Kiev. I walked past the Russian Embassy and found a display in front of it explaining that this used to be where the Soviet embassy was, one of the most important buildings in politics during the Cold War. I read it with much interest and then walked down the square that leads up to the Brandenburger Tor. There were several bratwurst vendors on the square, and I thought about sitting down with a beer before going up close, but I noticed that everyone who was already sitting down was constantly swatting away wasps that were attracted to almost-empty soft drink cans and leftover food on the tables, so I decided against it. As I approached the Brandenburger Tor, I saw that there was quite a lot of construction work going on, and people dressed in spandex were running around between all this. I remembered that on Sunday the Berlin marathon would take place and a lot of people were doing their training laps right here, where the finishing line would be on race day. The Brandenburger Tor itself is a pretty impressive piece of work. Its roof is held up by 6 massive pillars and on top of it is a chariot, pulled by 4 horses, carrying the goddess of victory. I looked at it and was happy again to see another monumental part of European history right in front of me. President Kennedy held his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech on the West side of the Brandenburger Tor in June 1963, while the East German army blocked the view from the East by putting up large red banners with hammers and sickles to prevent the citizens of East Berlin from seeing it, and this is generally considered one of the most important speeches of the Cold War. As everybody knows, it was also one of Kennedy’s last because less than 5 months later, on a visit to Dallas, he was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald/the CIA/Space Aliens* 
(*please mark what you think is true)


Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one who’d come here today, ofcourse, as the whole place was swarming with tour groups and people carrying the tool of morons the world over: the selfie stick. 

I shot a couple of photos without these in them, and walked underneath the gate. On the other side, it was much quieter and here, too, people were busy with marathon preparations. A big grandstand was being erected next to what I assumed would be the finishing line, and reachers were putting up speakers and other technical equipment. As I have no interest in running as a pastime, I turned around and walked back in the direction where I had come from. There was more history on the agenda, because I also wanted to see Checkpoint Charlie.

In my mind, I had always imagined that Checkpoint Charlie and the Brandenburger Tor were, if not right next to each other, at the very least in close proximity. I was wrong, as they are over a mile apart. I got a pack of peanuts by way of a mid morning snack and set off. I arrived some 20 minutes later and found that the street leading up to the Checkpoint had long fences with large photos and descriptions of the historic events that had taken place in this part of the city, from the end of the second world war and the partitioning of Germany and Berlin, to the day the Wall came down. It was fascinating and I spent half an hour looking at the photos and reading the captions. While I was reading one of the captions next to a photo of the Wall in the 1970s, I noticed some copper bars in the street. Upon closer inspection, I realised that these marked the border between East and West Berlin back in the day. I entertained myself for a few minutes by crossing from East to West with a single step, and then going back again, and finally took a photo of my boots, with one of them in West Berlin and one in East Berlin. I had a look behind one of the fences that held the exhibitions and found that, for some reason, they had built some sort of Checkpoint Charlie Beach. The area was covered in sand and had a fallafel van, bars, lounge chairs and a beach volleybal court. Now don’t get me wrong, I normally love tacky tourist crap like that, but here it just looked out of place. This was one of the most important historical sites of the 20^th century and someone had set up a mini themepark. It felt like as if someone had built a roller coaster in Auschwitz. It was just wrong.



                   I'm in East and West Berlin


I ignored the fallafel park and moved on to the real focal point of the area: the actual Checkpoint Charlie booth. This was the exact point at the time of the Wall where you crossed from the Soviet occupied East into the US occupied West. The checkpoint itself, quite possibly the most famous passport booth in the world, is still there. It is guarded during the day by actors in 1980s military uniforms, and the booth itself sells badges and, upon closer inspection, the same passport stamps I had gotten at the Eastside Gallery souvenir shop a few days before. I hung around the area for a while, shot some photos of the exhibitions and the checkpoint, walked back and forth through the border a couple of times just for the hell of it and then decided to move on.
I had breweries to visit.





I found a booth selling Berlin’s famous curry wurst, and I decided to have one. I received a cardboard tray with a cut up sausage covered in curry sauce and a wooden fork to pick up the pieces. After two bites I realised that this was the exact same snack that is sold in my native Holland under the name Frikandel. Not that there is anything wrong with those, they are actually quite tasty, but I had expected something specifically Berliner, not a snack that I had had hundreds of times during my teenage years. I still enjoyed it though and made a mental note to have a few more the next time I visited Holland. 

Because the Stone Brewery is quite some distance from the city centre, I had come up with a strategy to cut up the 8 miles or so in several bite size chunks and make my way there in stages. 
I didn’t realize there was a flaw in this plan when I devised it, but we’ll get to that in a minute. It was about a 20 minute walk to the BRLO brewery so I got a can of beer to keep me company on the way over. I gradually left the city centre behind me and walked through neighbourhoods that first became more residential and then more industrial. I passed a dilapidated railway station and thought nothing of it, not realising that it would feature more prominently later, crossed the Landswehr Kanal and, at long last, made it to the BRLO brewery.
The BRLO brewery is an amazing place. The whole site is built out of used shipping containers. 40 of them were used to set up the brewery itself and the restaurant within it, and a few of them are scattered across the large biergarten out the back, housing a bar, a deli and a walk-up to the toilets inside the brewery. I came in through the front door and found the restaurant/bar deserted. I knew this would be the case because on week days this part doesn’t open until 5PM, so I continued on to the biergarten. I was a big fan of the place as soon as I set eyes on it. Picknick tables were scattered around, there was a food outlet, a bar and an ice cream shop. Towards the edge of the biergarten was a kids area with a sand pit and monkey bars. I loved it instantly. I presented myself at the bar in the biergarten and ordered BRLO’s German IPA. What exactly made it German, rather than, you know, just IPA is still not clear to me, but it was delicious. I got talking to the girl behind the bar, and later to a second girl, one of her colleagues, and was again struck by how friendly they were. I tried all of the beers that were available, 4 on draft and a porter in a bottle, and I liked them all. BRLO really make great beer. I sat down at one of the picknick tables and saw a couple of groups come in for lunch. This also surprised me. This was a brewery in an out of the way industrial neighbourhood, yet even on a weekday at 12, the place was already getting busy. I know I’m starting to repeat myself but I fell more in love with Berlin every day. Maybe it was the 6 beers before lunch time that were talking, but I immediately promoted BRLO to my list of favorite breweries. After a couple of happy hours at BRLO, it was time to get going again. I had agreed to meet someone at the Stone Brewery around 3, and this was when I realised that my plan to get there in several walkable stages was malfunctioning. I had already walked 4 miles or so, but I hadn’t gotten closer to Stone in any meaningful way. I had mostly been walking Westwards, while Stone is in the Deep South so to speak so it would still take me 2 hours of walking to get there. I decided on Plan B- the train.

On The Road Again, Part II -Berlin

Because I grew up in Holland, I had been to Germany many times. I had been in the North, in the West, and in the South, but never in the East. Moreover, I had never been to Berlin.
Everybody who had been there, upon returning, immediately turned to me to tell me how much I would love it there.  I had been meaning to go for years, but every time I was close to making it happen, something came up. This year, I had decided, it was finally going to happen.
I thought this over on the plane. While planning this trip, Berlin had been, by far, the place I had looked forward to most. I had spent countless hours researching places to visit, things to do, bars to drink in and a million other things but there was one thing that stood tall above everything else: The Wall. It may seem like ancient history to younger readers but, growing up in the 80s, Berlin, the Wall and the Cold War were important influences on me in my teenage years. Berlin was one of the defining images of my youth. I couldn’t focus on my book and just stared at the seat in front of me. The Wall, the Berlin TV tower, Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenburger Tor. All the images I had seen a million times on TV, all those years ago, all appeared before me again. I checked the time on the watch of the girl sitting next to me and silently wished the pilot would fly faster and then tried to focus on my book. I was as excited as a little boy going to a big football game for the first time, or a teenage girl on her way to a concert of her favorite boy band. I had another drink to kill time and then, at long last, we started our descend.

We touched down just after 5PM local time and as I made my way through the terminal, I saw a sign saying “WILKOMMEN IN BERLIN SCHONEFELD”. A big smile formed on my face. I was in Berlin.
Despite my normally impeccable planning, I had not given much thought to the matter of getting to Berlin proper. I just assumed that there would be a bus from the airport to take me to central Berlin, or at the very least a train station. There was a bus outside the terminal with a sign saying “U RUDOW” on the front. I stepped in and said ‘Central Berlin’. The driver looked and me and said “Wohin gehen sie?” and it all of a sudden occurred to me that this would be a great opportunity to practice my German again. I speak pretty decent German, and about 25% of my work is in German, but it had been a while since I actually had to speak it out in the wild. I explained to him that I wanted to go to Alexanderplatz, and he explained to me that he would drop us off at the Rudow U-bahn station (the U-Bahn is the Berlin subway) which was fine with me. Berlin has an amazing subway system and as I’m very good with subway maps I’d find my way from there.
During our conversation, a girl walked in to the bus and when I sat down, she sat down across from me. She had immediately deducted that I wasn’t from there. And come to that, neither was she. She was from Scotland.
We got talking in the way that 2 strangers on an airport bus do, in the knowledge that we would never see each other again after about an hour from now. She had moved to Berlin some 3 years earlier, with the intension of staying for 6 months but she had never left. (Sounds familiar?)
We got off at Rudow station and had to take the subway in the same direction. After a dozen stations, I had to change trains at Hermannplatz and she continued on the same train so we said goodbye and she went home and I went in search of the train to Alexanderplatz. 6 stops later, the PA system said “Alexanderplatz” and I left the train. The station was swarming with people hurrying in all directions, buskers making music and other panhandlers doing their thing. I already liked it here.

I exited the station, walked out onto the Alexanderplatz, turned my head, and immediately stood transfixed. There, towering high above me and the city, in all its might, stood the famous Berlin TV Tower. A knot formed in my stomach and I swallowed. I knew it straight away.
I had fallen in love with Berlin after one second.





After staring at the tower for about a minute, I managed to pull myself out of the moment, and walked down the square. I wanted to get the check in formalities at the hostel over and done with so that I could explore Berlin. The hostel was just around the corner, literally a minute walk from the Alexanderplatz and it was huge. I found later that it has 10 floors and every floor had 10 dorms with 10 beds each. That is a big hostel. The part of the ground floor that wasn’t taken up by reception and a storage room for bed linnen was occupied by a large bar. I was helped by a girl called Caroline, who was friendly and efficient. To my dismay, I saw that I had been assigned a top bed. Look, I know that hostels are so cheap because they fit 10 or 12 beds in  the same space that a hotel only puts 2, and that, depending on the occupancy rate, you have a 40-50% chance of ending up with a top bunk, but I still don’t like it. I don’t like climbing things, especially late night when I have been drinking, but I accepted my allocated bed and went upstairs. My bed was on the third floor so I took the elevator. That elevator became a source of frustration during my stay, but I’ll tell you more about that later. I messed up my bed linnen, left a tshirt, a book and a waterbottle on my bed, which is hostel speak for ‘this bed is taken’ and went back downstairs. I asked Caroline about the opening hours of the bar and got the answer that every serious drinker wants to hear: it was open 24 hours a day. Good news. I looked at the bar menu and saw that they only had 1 beer on draft: Carlsberg. I’m not a huge fan of Carlsberg, but fortunately they also had a selection of bottled beers so I opted for a bottle of Astra, a beer from Hamburg, but at least it was German so I could stick to my habit of drinking local beer rather than something from a multinational corporation. Or so I thought. I found out later, while doing some research for this story, that Astra was bought in 2003 by Holsten which, in turn, was sold in 2004.. to Carlsberg. But hey, at least I tried.

I drank my beer while I was charging my phone and got talking to a German guy. He was from some other part of Germany, I can’t remember now where exactly but I think it was Dresden, and was in Berlin because he had an important job interview the next day. He was drinking bottles of cider at an impressive rate, and I wondered why he would drink so much if he had a job interview the next morning but I’ve done that myself too so who am I to judge? After I finished my second beer and had recharged my phone, I decided it was time to see something of Berlin other than the subway or my hostel. But what would I go and see?

As it was getting dark by now, I decided to put off sight seeing until the next morning and just go for a beer. I had made a long list of bars that I wanted to visit but I had 5 days here so I had time enough to do that. I had also noticed that Berlin is much bigger than I thought. I knew ofcourse that Berlin is a big city, but it is also very spread out, as I would find out during the week. I typed in the name of a bar that seemed close by and found that it was nearly 2 miles away. Fortunately, I love walking and it would give me the opportunity to get a bit of a feel for the city. I set off and walked down the streets of Berlin. It immediately stood out to me that there is a lot of graffiti in Berlin. I mean A LOT. The ubiquity of it reminded me of Barcelona. Like there, pretty much every vertical surface was covered in paint, and quite a lot of the horizontal surfaces too. I loved it. I took over 30 photos of the graffiti alone in the first 10 minutes of my walk.

After a while, while I was checking my map for directions, I noticed that I was standing in front of a bar called Kaschk, which was also on my list of interesting places. I wasn’t aware that it was there exactly, but I thought I might as well have a look inside. Kaschk markets itself as “Craft beer and craft coffee house”, which is an odd combination if you ask me, but they seem to be doing well. The good thing about this dual purpose is that they are open from 8AM until 2AM because most of the coffee business takes place in the morning, and most of the beer is sold at night, so you can always go there. I walked in and was greeted by the Australian bar man. I checked the beers on offer and found that they had a beer called Lenny’s Weizen so that decided it. Pete McCarthy always said that you should never pass a bar with your name on it, and I think you should never decline a beer that has your name on it.

I sat down at the bar and when the bar man was done cleaning his fancy coffee machine (coffee time was clearly over by now) he came over to talk to me. Like my friend on the airport bus, he had come to Berlin some years ago with the intention of staying for 6 months or maybe a year but he, too, had ended up staying indefinitely. I guess that when you arrive somewhere you really like, you gradually start feeling, somewhere deep down inside, that this is really the place for you. I had the same thing when I first moved to Dublin. My intention was to stay for 6 months. I then decided to make it a full year and go home for Christmas, but that was 12 years ago and I’m still there. The bar man nodded in acknowledgement as I explained this,  and we had a talk that you can only really have with someone else who found themselves in this situation, discussing the advantages and annoyances of not having your friends and family close by and having to find your way with the rules and customs of your new home country. I finished my second beer and told the bar man that I would come back later as there was another very interesting beer on the board, so we shook hands and I went on my way. I had decided to take in one more beery place and then make my way back to the hostel so I set off for Mikkeller.





Mikkeller is a Danish brewery that is revered by beer enthusiasts the world over. Well, technically it is not exactly a brewery as they don’t have an actual brewery of their own, but they come up with an idea for a beer, rent space at an existing brewery and then make the beer. It is an odd way of working, I think personally, but their beer is really good so I’m not in a place to criticise. While Mikkeller does not have a brewery, they do have some 30 bars around the world. Mikkeller being the hip, think-outside-the-box people that they are (or is, it really is only one guy, assisted by a bunch of people doing the paperwork) these bars are not typically in obvious places like Paris or London or Rome, no, they are in places like Reykjavik, Taipe and Warsaw. A lot of people think that Mikkeller are obnoxious hipsters that do exactly the opposite of what they should do, but it works pretty well for them, so they must be doing something right. The thing about Mikkeller bars is this: they have amazing beers, but you easily miss them because they often don’t look like bars. I’ve been to the one in Barcelona half a dozen times and the first time I went there, I walked past it 3 times before I noticed where it was. Inside, it looks like an IKEA showroom that just happens to have 20 beer pumps stuck in the back wall. The entire place is painted white, the floor is a strange, bright shade of blue, and the place is filled with patio furniture made of unpainted wood. It is an odd place, but the beer is amazing and the staff is very knowledgable, and that is ofcourse the main thing. Like in Barcelona, I walked past the bar several times before I realized I had been standing in front of it while checking my map. From the outside, it looks like a house. The only thing that indicates that it is a bar is a small sign with the signature Mikkeller intentionally wacky looks-like-it-was-drawn-by-a-5-year-old artwork. I went in and found that the place looked pretty much like the one in Barcelona, but I didn’t mind. The beer was amazing. I spent an hour or so there, tried a couple of really nice beers and then went back in the direction of the Alexanderplatz. I stopped by Kaschk for my special beer, a Peated strong ale, aged in single malt whisky barrels. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of Barrel Aging, what you do is you brew a beer, then stick it in a used whisky barrel (or rum, or cognac or whatever spirit you prefer) and leave it there for a couple of months. Your beer will now taste like whisky and is probably slightly stronger than it was before. If done well, it is delicious. So was this one. It was amazing and I was glad I had gone back for it. After this great beer, I walked back to my hostel, found that it was reasonably busy in the bar and decided to have one last beer. I had that, and then another and then another one. I don’t know what it is. When I’m in a hostel, I always have the feeling that the biggest party of the year is about to get going and I don’t want to miss it, so I stay up longer and longer. After my third beer, however, I decided to call it quits. Berlin is a city that parties 24 hours a day and the crowd that was assembled in the hostel bar was probably just getting ready to go out, even though it was well after 2AM. I decided to do the smart thing. I finished my beer and went to bed, full of alcohol and excitement. I wanted to get up early the next day. I was going to dive into the history of Berlin.
                                                     

                                                                       Night cap

I woke up early, at around 9, lay on my bed for a few minutes and then got up. I shuffled downstairs, got a towel and went to the shower room. There, I found the first surprise of the hostel: the showers were not in separate cubicles, but in an open plan, prison style room with 6 showers in 2 opposing rows of 3. This didn’t even bother me that much, but I’m sure there are people who are not happy with taking a shower in front of other people. (When I later checked the reviews of the hostel on the Hostelworld website, I found that about a third of the people remarked on this issue and weren’t happy with it.) No, what annoyed me most is that there were no hooks to hang your clothes and towel on so you were left with the choice of putting them on the floor, which was always wet, or putting them on the ledge above the sinks, some 15 feet away. In the end, I hung my clothes and my towel from the window handle and had my shower, and dry clothes at the end of it. Personal grooming over, I went downstairs again, resisted the temptation of having an early beer, and sat down on a bench in front of the hostel. The weather was amazing, 27 degrees Celsius and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. This became my mourning routine in Berlin. I would sit on the bench in front of the hostel, read my book for 20 minutes or so while I was waking up, then have a look at my map and my list of possibly interesting things to do, trying to figure out a plan for the day, while watching Berlin go by. I stared at my map and tried to come up with a place to start. Checkpoint Charlie, The Brandenburger Tor, a brewery? No. There was only one point to start. If I was only going to see one thing in Berlin, it could only be The Wall.
It had to be.

I folded up my map, took my book back to my dorm and went on my way.
The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, but while most of it was demolished, first by the citizens of East Germany who were sick of oppression, and later by more organized state demolition teams, they had the good sense to preserve certain parts of it for historical purposes and as a reminder that something as ridiculous as building a wall through the middle of a large city should never happen again. (This, fortunately, holds true to this day, except in Nicosia, Cyprus, where the people in the Northern part of the country insist they are Turkish while the people in the South maintain that they are Greek. It is a complicated situation, that involves the island being cut up between Northern Cyprus, the Republic of Cyprus, a confusing UN buffer zone and 2 British Navy bases, which gives you the unique opportunity to be in 4 distinct different political regions in the space of an hour without leaving an island about the size of an Irish county.)

The East Side Gallery is the longest continuous part of the Wall that still stands. It stretches for about three quarters of a mile along the river Spree in the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg part of town. I walked across Alexanderplatz again, which was busy as always, past the Alexa shopping mall that, I worked out later, wasn’t there at the time of the Wall. I regularly paused to take a photo of an interesting piece of graffiti, a nice looking building, or some oddity in the street, or just to sit down on a bench and look at the city for a minute or so and to realise how much I liked it here. You know what I said earlier about just knowing that a place is right for you? I had that here too. I hadn’t seen anything of Berlin yet, really, but this place felt like home. After walking for some 50 minutes, I started to notice groups of tourists walking in the direction of the Gallery, and others coming back from there. I was really excited now. I was almost there. And then, 5 minutes later, there it was. Across the street stood the remnants of something I had wanted to see since I was 8 or 9 years old.
The Berlin Wall.






I walked across and put my hand on the Wall when I got there. I was touching history. Moreover, I was touching a piece of history that was incredibly important to me personally.
I had  a look at the dimensions of the wall, and was surprised by the flimsiness of it. It was, maybe, 10 feet tall and no more than a foot thick. You could easily have climbed across it with a ladder. Ofcourse, the Wall itself was not the main deterrent. Behind this wall was a no man's land about 300 feet wide, full of barbed wire, guard dogs and, most importantly, watchtowers with armed guards in them that had the instruction to shoot at everything that moved. All this was in the area behind me as, I first really realized now, I had been in what used to be East Berlin since I got here. 

The East Side Gallery consists of 105 murals, created by artists from all over the world. Most of the painting was done in 1990, with regular restorations happening throughout the years. The political border at the time was actually the river Spree, which lays about 50 yards beyond. All the artwork is on the Eastern side of the wall, facing into what used to be the no-man's land between East and West Germany. It was busy at the Wall, as it always must be, given that it attracts 3 million visitors a year, or over 8000 per day on average. Because of this, there were groups of people waiting everywhere for the opportunity to have their picture taken at a certain mural. I walked along the Wall, admiring the diversity of the artwork. There were murals inspired by peace, ones that had musical themes, parts that showed the people of the world living in harmony and, ofcourse a number of political ones. The most famous section, and curiously the one that needs to be restored most often, is the image of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev kissing the head of state of East Germany, Erich Honecker. It is the image that went across the world when the Gallery was first opened and today it was clearly the most popular section too.
I only had 1 photo taken with myself in it, at the section that shows a shackled arm coming out of a barred prison window. The shackles are held up by  a dove in flight, which symbolizes freedom. This dove is also an excellent bridge to another Wall-related story that I want to tell you and we’ll get to that in a minute.

After I had spent an amazing 40 minutes looking at the artwork, I reached the end of the wall. There I found, inevitably, a souvenir store that sold Berlin Wall tshirts, ashtrays and everything else you expect to find in a souvenir store. This held little interest for me, but while I stood in front of the shop, I saw a girl take out her passport and hand it to the lady in the shop. This had my interest straight away. I walked inside and found a sign that informed me that I could have my passport stamped with 4 different stamps. They were a Euro each, or all 4 for 3 Euro.

I opted to get all 4 of them, the complete set. I’m not entirely sure how the goverment thinks about having official state documents defaced in souvenir shops or Disney World, but I didn’t really care and in any case I had done it with my previous passport, when I visited the Uzipis republic, a breakaway state within Lithuania of about 1 square mile, and I never heard any complaints about it from either the Dutch state department or any border agency around the world.
I got stamps for Checkpoint Charlie, the Wall House (the shop I was in) and, the one I wanted most, for the Deutsche Demokratische Republik- East Germany. The bonus stamp showed the text DDR – 9 November, a reference to the date the Berlin Wall came down. I was very happy with my stamps, so  to celebrate this double whammy of having seen the Wall myself and getting a border stamp from a country that ceased to exist when I was in high school, I decided to have a beer. As luck would have it, there was a bar/restaurant right next to the souvenir shop, so I ordered a large beer and sat down, looking out over the river Spree, the border from back in the days.

To get back to my other Wall story I mentioned earlier, let me take you back to 1983.
With the Cold War still very much on everyones mind in Western Europe, peace rallies were organised all around Europe. The one in Holland took place in Den Haag, the political capital of the country. On a large open field in the city centre, just minutes from the Dutch parliament buildings, half a million people gathered to make it clear that they were sick of the Cold War and that they wanted peace, not weapons. To give the rally a theme, a local band called Klein Orkest (The Small Orchestra) were asked to compose a song to provide a rallying cry. Rather than taking sides, the band came up with a song about Berlin, called Over de Muur (Across the Wall) in which they set out the pros and cons of both socialism in East Berlin and capitalism in West Berlin.

I’ll put the video here, so you can hear the song and see the original video. It is in Dutch, but for those of you who don’t speak that, the song basically explains that in East Berlin, under socialism, everyone is guaranteed a job for life and a place to live, but the downside is that there are shortages of basic staples and you constantly live in fear of being ratted out to the totalitarian state and arrested if you speak your mind. In West Berlin, however, you can say what you want, you can protest the government and do how you please, but unemployment is high and a lot of people are homeless, so the question is which of these systems is preferrable. The only beings that freely moved between East and West Berlin were birds, who could fly over the wall without being shot down.
It is a great song that holds huge significance for me. It is essentially the song of my childhood.
When I decided to go to Berlin, I vowed to visit all the locations that feature in the song. I had already been to one, the Alexanderplatz, which was the location I visited first on the account of my hostel being there, and is the location described in the final line of the song.




I put my beer down and took out my phone. I played the song for the millionth time, but listening to it here, literally on the spot where the Wall once stood, sent a chill down my spine. Over my left shoulder I could see West Berlin, where the people were free at the time of the Wall. Over my right shoulder, East Berlin, where everybody was afraid, and constantly monitored by the state.
I sat there, contemplating this, for 10 minutes or so, trying to figure out how this short strip of wasteland before me could have dominated global politics for decades, but came up empty. What a strange situation.
I regularly get asked that, if the hypothetical situation arose that someone built a functioning time machine, and I could pick one place and time in history to go back to, when and where would I go?
I have thought about this long and hard over the years. Where would I go? The Roman Empire? My own birth? The first pilgrims setting foot on an almost empty North American continent? Australia in the 1970s?
I had my answer now. I would give anything, ANYTHING, to have a look around Berlin in the 1980s for a few days.

Ofcourse, time machines do not exist, so it’s not going to happen, but it has always been a great source of inspiration for me to think about this. As someone who has a deep rooted interest in both geography and history, it has provided me with hours of happy evalution of the possibilities, but I guess I can put the question to bed now.
                                                                       

I finished my beer and said goodbye to the barman. What to do next? I had noticed, while walking towards the Wall, that the Berlin Ramones museum had been doing some pretty aggressive marketing around the area. Every second traffic light or lamp post had been covered in posters, flyers and stickers advertising the museum. I checked my phone to see where it was and found that it was only a 5 minute walk away across the Oberbaumbrucke. I walked across the bridge, again having the strange sensation of walking into what used to be West Berlin.

As a close-to-obsessed Ramones fan, I had to see the Ramones Museum in Berlin. I had visited Johnny Ramone’s grave in Los Angeles, and found that DeeDee Ramone is buried on the same cemetary, had been to Rockaway Beach in New York, the inspiration for one of the Ramones’ most famous songs, and a number of other significant Ramones locations around New York. This museum certainly had to be part of my Ramones travelog. The museum is small, only about as big as a mid-sized pub, but they have really used the space to maximum efficiency by setting up an intricate maze of walls to cut off little sections of the building for specific exhibitions. Upon entering, you find yourself in the reception/Bar/shop area. Here you can buy your entry ticket, a Ramones badge that gives you lifetime access to the museum for a one-off payment of 4,50. You can get the ticket+beer package for 6 Euros, but as I had already picked a beer from the fridge, I found that this deal is only valid with one brand of beer. Not a problem, I was more than happy to pay a bit extra to this fine institution and I now had a beer from the local BRLO brewery. Next to the reception is a small lounge area with couches and a few tables, and a wall full of autographs and photos. These, as it turned out, were from bands that had played there. I looked around for a short while, wondering where these bands would play, but could not find a spot that wasn’t taken up by Ramones memorabilia. They probably play in the lounge area after they remove the furniture. I won’t bore you here with detailed descriptions of all the Ramones exhibits, because if you’re interested in the band, you should go and see it for yourself, but I spent a happy 45 minutes looking at old photos, framed guitar picks, set lists and a million other items, all about the greatest band of all times.

One thing that I do want to mention is a news paper article from September 2004. It was a New York Times article about Johnny Ramone, written 2 days after his death on 15 September 2004. On 15 September 2004, I was in Eindhoven, Holland, attending a gig by The Misfits. Just as the gig was about to start, the news started to trickle in that Johnny Ramone had died a few hours earlier. This delayed the gig by some time as the bands needed to get their heads around the loss of a close friend. Marky Ramone was, at the time, filling in on drums for the Misfits and now had a gig to play.

It was the most emotional gig I have ever attended. The whole night, ofcourse, was one big Johnny Ramone tribute show, and all bands played a number of Ramones covers. It was a night I will never forget.




Having finished viewing the exhibitions, and my beer, I decided to have another beer. I got a large bottle of Bayreuther, the beer that was normally included in the ticket+beer deal, and went outside. The museum has tables and benches out front, so I sat down on one of the benches with my legs stretched out along the length of it. The weather was amazing, 28* C, and I looked at Berlin. I just stared at the traffic, the people walking by and the buildings around me. I drank my beer, got another one and sat down again. After 5 minutes or so, I realised that I would be perfectly happy to spend the rest of my days sitting here on this bench, drinking cold German beer and watching the world go by. I had just seen one of the most important historical sites of my lifetime, and visited an entire museum dedicated to my favorite band. I can’t think of 10 times in my life that I was this happy.

After my beer, and then another, I decided that there was more to life than sitting in front of the Ramones museum, so I handed my bottle back to the bar man, said my goodbyes and went on my way. I had no real set plan for the rest of the day, so I decided to wander around for a bit. 10 minutes or so into my aimless walk, I started to notice something. Even though it was Tuesday afternoon, only slightly after 2PM, nearly everybody was drinking in the street. Most people I came across were carrying open cans and bottles of beer or small bottles of wine, from which they sipped constantly. Mind you, these weren’t mean street drunks like you would find in Dublin or Glasgow, these were people in suits, girls in summer dresses and normal people from every walk of life. 

This was an interesting development. If drinking in the street was allowed, I could have even more fun in Berlin than I was having already. I walked into the first convenience store I saw, got a large bottle of lager and opened it on the doorstep. I took a big gulp of it and felt refreshed. People took it as normal to be drinking on city streets in mid-afternoon on a weekday. One man even raised his can to me in passing and said ‘Prost’. 

Excited about my new found hobby of street drinking, I walked to a park across the street and sat down on a low wall. There were a dozen people on the 20 yard stretch of wall, all drinking and enjoying the September sun. At the center of the park sat a group of twenty-somethings on a bed sheet, with food spread out between them, and half a dozen beers and 2 bottles of wine. Just beyond them lay a guy who, by the look of it, hadn’t slept indoors since St. Patrick’s Day and was taking a nap with his head on a plastic bag full of beers cans. Every minute or so, he would tilt his head slightly, pour a sip of beer in his mouth and return to his relaxing position. Everybody just existed happily side by side in this park. 
What a wonderful city.