glow.like.berlin

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.