Filed under: alltag, getting dancey, made in berlin, travels | Tags: Alaska, Badeschiff, Bar 25, Eastside Gallery, Kleine Reise
And, just like that, it’s suddenly somehow summer in Berlin. The city has unfolded his lovely jade moth wings and – flutter-flutter-glide – on a benign & balmy breeze, we’re all sailing straight for the moon.
But while I – shameless, wild mother – was out recklessly gallivanting, prancing, flirting, basking, glowing, I completely forgot my baby-child’s birthday. glowlikeberlin, my heart, you turned 1 year old on May 17th! Make a wish, kid, make a wish. I don’t know where any of this is headed but we’re in this together, my nappy little notebook.
(My excuse? I was 10 time zones away, in Alaska, on that day. Glittering glaciers, smoked salmon, whiskey and rollerskates under the midnight sun. I avoided bears, but returned reeking of campfire. Everything, I suddenly realized, is pretty much OK.)
See??!
But back to you, Berlin, baby: it’s been so real because we chose each other. And now I’ve written you the world’s longest love letter, 13 months’ worth of sweet nothings. I crash-landed into your coolly glowing moonscape and I was fiercely in love (was? am), but things are not the same now I’ve seen your ugly side. In summer you’re my acid-trip science-fiction fairy-tale prince. In winter you’re the dragon.
And therein, maybe, lies your magic. Playing us hot and cold, as it were, you freeze us out until we vow to leave you, but we’re back in your gangly, tatooed arms as soon as the sun shines. In June, Berlin explodes – it turns itself inside out and the huddled masses spill into the street, blinking and rubbing their eyes and hungry hungry hungry.
The scars left by six months of fear and loathing can fade fast when your most confusing conundrum is just exactly who will watch your drink whenever you should decide that your spot in the sand has gotten just a little bit too hot for comfort and it’s time to switch from beach to pool.
A hot sunny day at Badeschiff is the kind of situation where everyone is inadvertently walking around with a dopey grin on their face, helplessly happy, lolling around defenselessly as their brains are melted by sunstroke and beer.
Were we in say, LA or Maui, this would be nothing to blog home about. In Berlin it is a delirious dream – I dedicate my post to you, Berlinese summertime.
The timing is appropriate: we find ourselves at the utter apex.
Cruising homewards on my fearlessly green bicycle, leaving Kleine Reise at 5 am on solstice Sunday morning, having spent the (almost) shortest night of the year dancing in that debaucherous basement (dodging the clumsy courtship of disoriented flanneled Canadians and explaining to the random renegade hairdresser that yes, I did agree that my bangs needed trimming, but no, I did not feel that this was the right time nor place to do so, as he brandished his shiny steel shears and twirled them around his finger like a Colt .45), Warschauer Bridge was washed uncharacteristically clean with crisp morning sunlight, the Fernsehturm was blushing pink, there was nowhere to hide my sleepy telltale raccoon eyes. Blink blink!
Berlin: now more than ever I love your wily weirdness. So why does my treacherous gaze keep wandering wistfully to the horizon? Big change is impending. Time will tell.
Filed under: club, food, getting dancey, party, restaurants | Tags: appartement, Fleischerei, Kleine Reise, martini
Wait for it.
Our brave travelers having now survived, for better or for worse, the murderous entirety of February and even the better part of March, we become groggily aware of a change. It’s cold, yes, but Siberian? Hardly. Dark OK, but conspicuously less sinister. And that malignant layer of ice that made walking down the street a mismatched battle against gravity? Melted away like popsicles in July!
You begin to appreciate the little things, like how taking off your gloves outside doesn’t mean you won’t be able to feel your hands by the time you finish fiddling with your ipod.
And sometimes, even, the sun comes out and stays out all day, and the sky is the color of pool-cue-chalk with cartoonishly white, fluffy cloudlings minding their own business up there like innocent baby Zeppelins.
Enough about weather! Rewind two weeks: Zzzzzztt. We find ourselves, froze & hungry & ornery, on your average standard issue February Friday evening, which, as any soldier worth enough spit to polish a boot knows, it is simply SOP to transform with delicious food and cocktails, then just chug along till that crazy train is going off the rails.
Because dinner obviously sets the tone for the entire evening (/morning) to follow, this one was predestined to be solid gold. It all began at Fleischerei (my new favorite restaurant, in case you were wondering.)
Any questions?
There was a gin martini involved, natch. Otherwise I feel like the chandelier pretty much speaks for itself.
Magical as it all was, after something like 3 hours we reached a tentative consensus that it might be time to make moves. Where the dranks at? we asked ourselves ponderously. They were many places, as it turns out.
Note: In the interest of everyone’s safety, one is to take taxicabs from place to place when it is February in Berlin and you are hustling and bustling and growing sloppy. Be advised.
Between apartments of friends and Appartements of strangers and a mysterious Kimchi Princess afterparty we managed to find plenty of sekt for everyone.
It must have been around 4 am by my calculations when we chased the grooves and partykids on to Kleine Reise, the new sweaty underground neon binge basement ahem place to be. (ironically I’ve just noticed that they’re currently shut down due to fire code violations. yikes. not shocked.)
The rest is a lurid smudge of colors and sounds on my mind’s eye, a sucker punch to the nervous system, a great vertiginous, kaleidoscopic tumble into morning.
At 7 a.m. the staff politely informed us that they were closing by cutting the music. Smoked us right out of the party cave with lethal silence.
And now here it is. That moment both profoundly heartbreaking and gloriously ecstatic. We blunder out blinking and gasping into the vast chilly morning, feeling delicate yet rapacious like cosmic discospiders leaving their velveteen lair in search of breakfast. And there it was, painfully bright, blindingly true – a supernova? no, the sun. The classic Berlin sunlit a.m. dull-eyed homeward trudge – that hallmark of the summer months. The first of the year.
Big bright crazy days ahead.
