5. German Comics
This is my favourite (and thus far, least productive way of learning German; reading comics in Deutsch. Going into a comic shop like the one in Kreuzberg is seriously dangerous, and so far everytime I have come out with titles in English and a little Spanish, and absolutely no Deutsch. So I have resolved to stop spending my money and read them online. A recurrent theme in my life.
4. Franziskaner
Some beer in Germany is made out of wheat. Wheat beer. Instead of hops. Anyway this gives the beer a much stronger flavour -- which has been described by me when I was feeling a bit whimsical as 'cloves, banana and bubble-gum' flavoured -- as well as more fizz. It is generally not actually100% wheat, but somewhere around 66% wheat and 33% barley. This is my current favourite, owning largely to the fact that it is readily available from any Getränke-Fachmärkte for about €0.80 for a favourably large bottle, has a happy monk on the front and comes in three varieties. And how I love variety.3. Weird Berlin Museums: The Museum of Broken Relationships
There are a lot of amazing museums in Berlin. In fact there is a whole island of them, its Jurassic Park out there. Unfortunately I hover somewhere between occasional museum goer to outright philistine so I haven't really given the island much of a chance. But here is one that got me to sit up and listen. I quote the museums brochure at length. " When the love affair is over and the angry words of recrimination have faded into the air, what better way to dull the pain than to put on display the tokens of that lost passion? The 250 exhibits in the Museum of Broken Relationships in Berlin are ordinary items with poignant stories attached, such as a pen used to write the now bitterly regretted love letters or the bike a man left on, never to return."
Each time the travelling exhibition pitches up in a new city, people are invited to contribute the tokens of their lost love, which they insist is a more creative and cathartic way of dealing with the refuse. One of my favourites was the story of the Berlin woman who donated an axe she had used to reduce the furniture of her female lover to matchsticks after a bad breakup. “I kept it as a therapeutic tool,” the woman says. Her departed girlfriend returned two weeks later to pick up the furniture only to find it in a splintered pile on the floor.
And the story quoted in the exhibition programme seems to be a favourite. "A well-used prosthetic leg comes with the heart-rending tale of how its owner, a veteran of the Bosnian war, had met a beautiful social worker who helped him to obtain the false limb. “The prosthesis endured longer than our love,” the accompanying note says. Under an elegant wedding dress, a woman has written: “Can I have it back if I re-marry?”
For a long-winded but kinda fun description of the conceptual underpinings of the project see http://www.brokenships.com/doc/mobr_concept.pdf
2.
Rosi's Klub! + Kultur! + Kiezhof!I still don't know what Kiezhof! means.
Rosi's is like a big old house in the middle of nowhere. Actually its just down the road from the middle of Friedrichshain. Anyway it hosts a whole lot of indie nights (a marginalized genre in electro Berlin) and if and when you find it you're pretty much guaranteed a great night of big dance moves, low prices and an unpretentious crowd that just want to kick it.
They play way too much Maximo Park, Franz Ferdinand and every other British or British sounding band of that canon, but the best part is when they play a track sung in German and the crowd erupts into a serious singalong. It's worth the wait.
1. Berlin is Nummer Eins
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