It was Halloween. What better place than a city where nobody dresses normally to celebrate my favorite festivity?
Since when we landed we could breathe a relaxed atmosphere of a spot where everybody can express him/herself more freely than other places. This was remarked by the grandpa wearing a suit themed with the Moon, met on the train from the airport.
My travel mate was Simone, the only hero in Malta who accepted my appeal for a double trip in Krakow and Berlin. I must thank him for the several tips, the historical insights and the wonderful photos he took along the way. You can check his photographic bravura at: https://www.simonephotos.eu or at his Instagram simone_s_photos

In Berlin there is always something happening all day long. And you know what I enjoyed the most? Now, people living there may laugh, but I was impressed by the efficiency of the public transport, the width of choice and the fact that the metro is operating 24 h! I had the nice feeling that I wouldn’t need a car here and yet being able to go anywhere in a space that is like 4 times Malta!
Yes, the city is really big, but you never sense it. It is not overwhelming, it is never overcrowded. You can always find a place for yourself. To this respect, I want to use a word so important to me: balanced.
This is probably what really makes me eager to live in this city!

History

While in the classic European capitals, you see history, in Berlin you breathe it! Yes, true, not many monuments are left and most of the few that you can admire today are reconstructions of the original buildings. However, in Berlin you feel the energy, maybe the ghosts, of what it has been.
When I touched The Wall, I envisioned the people from East Berlin trying to cross it, avoiding the snipers. Heroes by David Bowie echoed in my mind: “I remember, standing by the wall… and the guns, shot above our heads… and we kissed, as if nothing could fall….”

When I crossed the Brandenburg Gate I felt like hearing Kennedy speaking: “Ich bin ein Berliner!” and Reagan echoing: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
When I jumped on the Trabant beside The Wall Museum, my brain was still stuck on music, this time on Achtung Baby, the album by U2 recorded in Berlin short after The Wall collapsed. The Trabant became the symbol of one the biggest music tours in history, after being the motorization icon of the Communist Germany. From propelling the communist revolution, to push the biggest music marketing event ever seen till then! I think that Achtung Baby and the Zoo TV Tour symbolized perfectly the radical change that Berlin went over the years following the wall collapse.
Here is where the magic stands: the erasing of the Nazi capital, with the long surgery provided by the division, gave birth to a new cultural eco-system never seen before, that used the past to break with it!
Where Hitler used to work for a sole race and culture, now you find ethnic restaurants. On the East Side, where communism stood strong, now you find a new shopping mall which is completing the Mercedes Arena, two temples of consumerism and capitalism. The Wall, once the ultimate suppression structure, is now the temple of the street art, the ultimate symbol of freedom of expression.

The legendary Berlin clubs

This same beautiful whirl of contradictions described above, gave life to the biggest and most respected clubs in the world. Techno music is the religion that unites the several sub-cultural identities that populate the social circles of the city. As for everything in modern Berlin, these clubs generated from the ashes of the old system to create something completely new and possibly with an opposite mission. This is how many of these clubs are born. They now reside in former electric power stations or industrial plants. Once, these sites provide the GDR with energy and goods to feed a system based on social and ideological equality. Diversity was banned. Now, in these very places, diversity is mandatory! To ensure this, every good club has a strict door policy, with bouncers that must act even as psychologist, to spot the right fits, maintain a crowd which can be as much heterogeneous as possible, and discard who doesn’t add value to the night or might even cause troubles.
Now there are so many urban legends on how to enter into the best Berliner clubs. Most of these stories are bullshits, like that you must dress in black or that you must be a couple or be gay.
The truth is that every club has its own rules, so each staff of each club has different expectations from you. However, there are some key points that every club cares about, even a place like Matrix that lets in almost everyone:

• No big groups> they don’t want big groups potentially capable of starting a massive fight
• No drunk or high people> from the outsiders of the techno world this may seem surprising, but for the bouncers music is the only drug allowed and I totally support them
• Do not check or play with your phone while on the queue> they want healthy party animals, not social media robots and I totally agree with them as per my song
• Do not pretend> this is what probably fucked me up. I was too quiet and basically pretending I was alone not knowing my other 3 guys at Tresor
• So be yourself> relax! They know people very well so they will notice if you are pretending anyway
• Be informed about the night> check the music, the DJs list and the dress code for that night, so you can show up accordingly and increase your chances to be accepted
• If you speak German is better> if you don’t, you can use a trick: be the first one to speak asking the bouncer at what time DJ X plays. You will look informed and interested in the club’s life and you will be granted the green light 80%)
  I wish I was able to put these into practice, but there is still the next time!
  Anyway, the experience in Berlin was so good that I didn’t mind to be bounced back by every club. Okay, I got in the first night I tried, when I was accepted into Matrix (comfortably placed in front of my hostel) even dressed as a shark! Well, it was Halloween and that was the best costume I had… Even though the average age there is quite low, Matrix is already a nice club, which offered me an outstanding Halloween show inspired to Frankenstein, with the main dancer who unchained from a laboratory arranged on the stage and two ladies coming out of coffins wearing sexy nurse outfits dirty in blood.

I was hoping to rock the following night too and possibly find some weird tattooed girl with the aid of my cousin Michele and his colleagues, who joined me in the second night, when they completed an epic journey by car from Pisa! 13 hours (yeah like the movie) to cover the distance between Pisa and Berlin! They managed like true heroes even though I still don’t understand why they made it!
However, from the night my guys were there things went different… When we asked the bouncer at Watergate if the party was still on, he replied with a smile: “Yes, the party is still on, but… I can’t let you in… For now there are too many guys and not enough girls… We need to keep the right BALANCE, you know…”
Well at least it seemed like they had a criteria, contrary to popular legends about Berlin clubs… And the music was the same everywhere else, at least outside…
But as I said before in my list, I failed the real exam on the third night, a chilly Friday night, when we decided to hit one of the biggest clubs in the city, probably the most prestigious Barghein aside: Tresor.

We set up in front of the entrance 20 minutes before midnight. Our logic was: let’s be the first ones in the queue so we get the sentence immediately and we spare the time behind the queue. In my case it was a wise choice. We were four: me, my cousin and his colleagues. The guys made their way in, then the bouncer stopped my cousin and asked him something in German… Ouch! The bouncer wasn’t happy with the lack of response from my cousin and asked him to leave the queue. An attempt to explain that we were in a group was not enough. Of course, the bouncer took even less to discard me, just waiving his hand to indicate the exit….
Digested the delusion, we got lost in this huge city and across the night trains on the metro. For a while we felt like in The Matrix: Reloaded, when Neo gets trapped in the loop metro station.
After fighting with Google Maps, we spotted the infamous Doctor Pong! A run-down bar, probably made out of an old shop, it has no signs outside, but you can spot a ping-pong table through the big shopping window. The rules are simple:

1. Get your drink
2. Pay 5.00 EUR for a racket
3. Join the others at the table
4. Each player has to bounce the ball on the other player’s pitch, as in the normal game
5. But as you touch the ball you must run to the other side, while the others turn around the table
6. The first who misses the shot is knocked out until only two players are left to run for the first place in a normal game shot.

My cousin is a table tennis master, but at Doctor Pong he failed miserably! :P
Luckily the place shut down before Michele was going to lose his nerves! :D It was time to head to somewhere else. We asked two girls on the way where we could go and they led us to a kind of medieval citadel full of bars and one loud club. It was a little night district where students gather. Useless to say that we were bounced from the main club, but I manage to catch what they bouncer said in German, something like “you can try to the bar in front and they will allow you inside” to which I replied “Gut. Danke”.
We immediately switched to the said bar, where the guys in front of us were bounced. I didn’t waste time and told the bouncers straight forward “we just want to try a local beer before going to sleep”.
They looked at us and said: “What??”
My cousin simply replied while shivering for the cold: “Can we get inside?”
Two seconds that lasted like two minutes. The bouncers scanned us from down to top with an expression that didn’t leave much room for hope and then one guy raised his hand backward with his thumb pointing to… the entrance: “OK….”. We made it! The place was full of happy young people dancing under brick arches like in any typical medieval cantina. The sound system was perfect and it helped the DJ to deliver an unusual mix of music: classics from the 80s reeling in tandem with EDM and even a piece of reaggeton in German! I think this kind of plastic music becomes more amusing if sung in German! They should try this experiment in Native Bar!
Clubs aside, Berlin offers nice bars too, where you can enjoy live music and even true artistic performances. I know that in these 5 days I just scratched the surface, but I could already see that Berlin night life has so much to offer, probably more than we can imagine. We can’t wait to explore more from the very next time!

Potsdam

I was very curious about Potsdam. Not really for the post WWII conference, but for the fact that it is considered a bit of a German Hollywood. Many German movies are shot there and the local stars use to have a mansion by the lake. Plus, there is the real Bridge of Spies, Glienicke Bridge, where the famous spies exchange between the USA and the USSR occurred in 1962 and that was beautifully depicted by Steven Spielberg.
Here, Simone could show off his encyclopedic knowledge about history. He is so fond of WWII and Cold War in particular. It was so great to have him along this trip, a true bigger brother who taught me so much!

The Bridge of Spies is still colored in two different tones of green, to remind that not long ago it stood between two states and two worlds. The area around is peaceful and caressed by an elegant lake which adds value to the movie stars villas. I noticed that they were trying to reconstruct the old wooden houses that the Kaiser had built in Norwegian style, by the lake. I didn’t know that the ancient Norwegian style was so Asian: steep and curvy roofs with dragons on top of them! It’s a pity that a signal was saying that the works have been stopped for now…
However, Potsdam is much more than the Bridge of Spies. The town is really cute, with many hidden gems to offer, until you jump off at the diamond….
The diamond of Potsdam is the Kaiser Summer residence, now premises of Potsdam University. This wide, elegant and imperial complex of three major buildings, handsomely symmetrical, makes you eager to go university immediately!

After the town exploration, the beautiful sunset suggested us that it was time to eat. Of course, we wanted to try something typical German, but the center offered: Thai, Kebab, Italian, Kebab, Lebanese, Kebab, Italian and Thai again…
We were desperate, so we stopped a local to ask where to find a damn German place. What she replied hurt me a lot: “Oh well, if you turn in that street, you will find many pizza or kebab places…”
It looks like young Germans really think that their food is kebab and pizza, unaware of their heritage…. As I said in the Krakow article, we are working hard to build a boring and sad future….
Eventually, we beat globalization once again and found a true German restaurant, proudly serving XXXXL dishes. However, I kept humble and went for an XXL burger. The place offers great food, friendly atmosphere and liters of beer flooding on your table. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name, sorry…

Living in Berlin

Are you fancying moving to Berlin? So your fantasy might not be impossible to turn into reality. The city hosts several giants like: Spotify, Mercedes, eBay, Zalando, Amazon and Universal Music, which logo stands big, reflected on the Spree waters.
My friends Daniele and Vita found employment there relatively easy and according to them the language is not a big issue as most of the companies work in English and will be happy to offer you a German course so you can better integrate into society. After all English is the first language of the city and probably you will learn German by speaking it step by step in a natural way, which is always the best so everything is cool.

As I said at the beginning, there is always something happening in Berlin, any kind of activity to explore and any kind of people you can meet. The city is multifaceted and huge, but everything is reachable within 30 minutes thanks to the great public transport. Last but not lease, don’t forget that you are in the center of Europe, with many other great places in a train’s reach.
From what I could see, Berlin is an outstanding place to live. Just one thing you must watch out: bikes! Berlin bikers are true racers with the license to kill! Do not dare to walk on the cycling lane or you will pay the consequences!

Impressions from Berlin

I must admit that I felt a sense of belonging in Berlin. It is the kind of environment I dream to live in: easy-going, but not chaotic, safe but not strict, peaceful but not boring at all. The German capital is as multicultural as Malta, but way more sophisticated, variegated and efficient. The only thing missing is the sea, but no place is perfect.
To wrap up Berlin according to my senses:

Weather: Tolerable
People: Nice, friendly and original
Food: You find any food from anywhere in the world and everything is good
Cost of living: Low – less than 20 EUR a day to eat (yes really!)
Safety: Good, even the drug dealers are nice and wish you a good evening
Monuments: Careful, they have a high emotional content that may affect you
Transport: Best ever tried, 24h on
Nightlife: Every entrance in a club is like a job interview, but this ritual is part of the fun and you will always find something fit for you!
One recommended experience: Jump on the Trabant parked at The Berlin Wall Museum!

Thanks for reading and now I leave you with a beautiful song by U2 strongly bound to Berlin: