Berlin to Austria

It is amazing just how far you can drive a German car. A Volkswagen will last forever, a Mercedes taxi regularly clocks up over 300,000 kilometers in its lifetime and BMWs in Berlin can get stolen up to ten times before they start to lose their appeal. But what about that bastion of East German engineering, the Trabant?

Well, this little beauty got all the way down to Annaberg near Salzburg in Austria. Then it obviously gave up the ghost ... and some enterprising restaurant owner nailed a sign to it.

Kaffee Burger

Just the other day I headed around the corner to one of the city’s favourite East German retro locations: Kaffee Burger. Yeah, you probably know it. If you've stayed in Berlin for more than two nights you definitely do. If you somehow missed it, then there's no other way around it: you're going to have to come back.

It’s not a Café at all of course. It’s a unique hovel of original retro furnishings and papier-mâché walls, with all the trimmings. It’s a club and a bar all in one – but it’s not like any of those horrible big places that you are thinking of called “Melt” or “Liquid” or whatever. It’s a genuine former East German bar to start with and there is way too much brown. The drinks board still shows prices in Ost-Marks. It feels like everyone's a communist brother or sister, united together in good spirits. Actually, everyone’s a tourist (or pretending to be one) and is probably trying to get laid.

The music is good fun too - mainly because the slide from Indie to Pop just happens so seamlessly and, most importantly, because no one is afraid to dance. Most nocturnal Berliners spend all their night at a club looking for an excuse NOT to dance. And there are so many ways to do that: you can smoke, continuously order cheap drinks or just stand there looking bored and play with your fringe. That’s not the way in Kaffee Burger though. People dance and sweat and kiss.

At about 3am I was standing at the edge of the dance floor looking across to one of the older guys who I had come in with - he was still whipping around like a frog in a blender. Beside me a young American couple, who had just got to know each other, had broken off their snogging and were looking on in amazement: “Who let that bald guy in? He's going crazy!”, she said.

I went home at 5. It was Monday after all.

The Beauty Board

This week I was in the bathroom of my local café, when I found myself looking at something quite unique. No, get your mind out of the gutter - it was a Beauty Board for men. To the surprise of other patrons, I quickly took a photo to record the moment.

It's not often these days that - as a man - you go to the bathroom and are confronted with a broad range of grooming equipment. If it is there, you are probably staying at an expensive hotel and it's generally not self-serve. Tips are even sometimes required. So, at first glance I was pretty impressed with this fixture. But, now that I've had the chance think about it, I'm not so sure. It's a nice idea, but it is also a trifle dodgy.

It's the personal nature of some of the items that really has me uncertain. I mean the hair gel and the mousse are fair enough for Berliners (although most of them would be carrying it already). Even the mouthwash may be useful on occasions. But a shaver? A toothbrush? I think this is crossing the line. You really should have to bring your own toothbrush and shaver to a café if you plan to do your full ablutions there. These really are personal items in my opinion.

By the way: first reader to guess the name of the café get's a free German-style toiletries bag. You know, the one with the hook on it, that they always hang up behind the bathroom door when they stay over?

Gentry Fication

This place on the left on Brunnenstraße is just one of many apartment blocks that has been cleared in Berlin recently, to get rid of squatters and make way for something new. On the front of the building is the graffitied message "we are all staying". Although the squatters were kicked out over a year ago - nothing has since happened to the site.

Squatting was back in the Berlin news again this last week with the highly publicised forced eviction of the inhabitants of Liebigstraße in Berlin-Friedrichshain. The tenants - who had previously been squatters - had been told by the landlords to leave ages ago, but they had been fighting in the courts up until the last minute to be able to remain in the building. In the end big business, and the riot police, won out of course. But 2500 police were needed for the operation, 40 of them were injured.

Wandering about on Saturday night in Kreuzberg, I saw the remains of the protesters. They had been fenced in by police because they had been taking part in a non-registered demonstration. That sounds surprisingly like something else in the news recently. Police were seemingly afraid that the demo would turn into something similar to what happened on Friday night, as protesters damaged windows and cars in central Berlin as they passed through.

For me the whole media hullaballoo and the accompanying protests are not just about evicting squatters, but are part of a larger issue. The squatters were just one of the many subcultures that were previously permitted to happily exist in Berlin up until about twenty years ago. But since then the city has started to undergo rapid gentrification. And THAT'S what people are up in arms about.

Putting up with squatters goes hand in hand with tolerating drunk punks and completely untalented musicians on the U-Bahn, so the argument goes. It's what gives Berlin its charm. It's what makes the city cool. To outsiders the argument might seem unrealistic. But, it does have some credence I think. After all no-one wants wealthy people like these two on the right moving in to their area, do they?