"The love is back" - Loveparade 2006

After a two year absence, the world's most famous electronic music festival came back in style on the weekend, attracting 1.2 Million guests to the 'party mile' in Berlin's Tiergarten.

With the "The Love is Back" slogan plastered on t-shirts, buildings and billboards all over the city - this year's Loveparade no doubt benefited from a commercially savvy approach to it's organisation. After being abandoned by the Berlin city council in 2003, the project was privately financed this year by Germany's gym-king, Rainer Schaller, the owner of McFit Fitness.

According to ravers, Saturday's parade had a bit of a different feel to it - not least because the Loveparade's initial founder, Dr Motte, was absent from this year's line-up. Nevertheless, to bemused outsiders, the festival remains largely the same - grinding techno music with too much bass, wierd and wonderful costumes and thousands of overly-tanned bodies from the McFitness generation. al

Time for something new

With the football world cup finally over, Berliners are slowly getting back to what they do best - looking cool in crazy locations. Without doubt, this weekend's hottest destination was Badeschiff, a luxurious swimming pool that floats in the Spree River.

Since 2004, the converted barge (Badeschiff means 'bathing ship' in German) has been a magnet for Berlin's scenesters - its mixture of lectures, arthouse films and dj's managing to keep the young crowd entertained even when the sun isn't shining.

Arguably, another reason for the pool's success is that it finally allows people to do what they have always wanted: have a cooling swim in the tempting, yet heavily polluted, Spree River. alA super-cool local practices the Berlin art of "seeing and being seen".