I was feeling a little hungover when I woke up and knew exactly what I needed to sort me out - a beer. I ended up drinking three of them as I waited for Sach to emerge and chatted to Miles the Canadian barman, asking him a million questions about his German skills, how he got his job at the hostel, how easy he found it to do something like he had and how highly he would recommend it. After a long while, Sach and I finally set out into the glorious sunshine to grab a kebab breakfast before our planned day of storming through as much of our sightseeing checklist as possible. First stop: the Brandenburg Gate. There was a street market in full swing when we got there and we quickly headed to the cocktail stall for some mojitos. It was there where we met Tim, Mario and Klaus, visiting from near Munich, and quickly latched on to their partying-in-the-sun attitude. A lot of football talk later, they asked what we had planned for the evening, and by a massive coincidence they were planning to go to a bar called Klö, the same as we were. After a few more mojitos, we all decided to hop in a taxi and head along to a cafe near the East Side Gallery where the guys said we could get some beers and sit down by the river. Casting my mind back, I don't think I even looked in the direction of the Brandenburg Gate. Sightseeing over.
After a few more drinks by the river we left the guys, and Sach and I walked along the East Side Gallery to find a train station. The gallery is a series of murals painted along a remaining stretch of the Berlin wall, but I don't remember much of it at all. I don't think I was all that drunk, but maybe I was just in the mood to keep partying and enjoying the weather, leaving the culture for another day. At the end of the gallery we found an outdoor beach party place called Yaam; sand, hammocks, basketball, beer, jerk chicken, Raga MCs and brilliant sunshine, it is a fantastic and strange place to be in the middle of a city. However, along with the gallery itself, it's under threat in a city where capitalist development and artistic, cultural integrity are at constant war. Unfortunately, most of the art and culture is losing.
We found a mediterranean restaurant in a breezy, peaceful residential street where we sat outside and had some amazing lamb skewers and a soft drink (at last). The owner kindly gave us some free Ouzo, but unfortunately neither of us like it. We still had to obligingly work our way through it though, as there was nowhere near our table where we could pour it away.
We were raucously greeted by the guys in the Klö bar, who were there with the rest of their visiting group. The absolutely mental conversations and jokes we had with them there are almost impossible to explain, as is the bar itself. Half ghost train, half bric-a-brac store, 'klö' is actually the German equivalent of the word 'loo', which goes a long way to explain the puerile internet clips and TV sketches they show on the TVs and why my seat was an actual toilet. It has so many nooks and crannies that some of the fun is in trying to find the oddest area to sit, and the whole place seems to be animated with hydraulics, including our table which bounced up and down randomly. The DJ spent the whole night making insulting comments about each and every person in the bar, and when he targeted me, and I shouted back "Im Englisch, bitte" in my finest German, he replied "I love the English. Especially when they stay at home". Zing!
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| Some of the guys in Das Klö |
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| What the beer comes in |
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| My seat |
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| Our random friends |
It sounds like you are having way too much fun in Berlin, move on quickly before you get to like it too much. Or better still get a job out there so we can all come and visit!
ReplyDeleteYour poor liver. Sounds great.
ReplyDelete