I've had a few friends and family out to visit now, and they've all commented on the amount of graffiti in east Berlin. Both its ubiquity and size. It really is everywhere, from small doorway ledges to table tennis tables to massive sides of buildings. It comes in lots of different forms - you've got your normal teenager tags and playful stencils, of for example a guy pissing up against the wall, or a dog in space. And as well as graffiti that can be done quickly in the dead of night, there are also intricate works of art which must take days (and therefore need permission) to make.
Over the Oberbaum bridge from Friedrichshain to Kreuzberg, there are always tons of people taking pictures of a huge piece of graffiti of a professional man whose hands are tied together with clock handcuffs. A salutary warning of the dangers of being bound to your work by time that you imagine many of the residents of the bars and clubs around Schlesisches Tor heed. A little further down the road is another of a giant head - made up of many smaller bodies - about to eat one of the small bodies. Answers on a postcard to the meaning of this please. The italian artist who created this - Blu - doesn't just make static images, but - like a cartoon - creates amazing graffiti films like
this with characters running over walls, down streets and across buildings.
A little further downstream is another huge piece of art, and this one is firmly in the tourists guides and in the scripts of the many tourists boat comperes that are go out through east Berlin and the canals of Kreuzberg. Molecule man represents the three eastern boroughs of Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain and Treptower and provides a pretty good backdrop to a riverside run as the sun rises or sets, or a swim in the Badeschiff - a floating swimming pool in the river.
And now - as the city tries to pull more tourists to the east, the graffiti is becoming a tourist attraction in itself. You can buy books about it and get guided tours. And I think this is helping to change how some - who have usually associated it as a form of anti-social behaviour - view graffiti. Less as a sign that demarcates a dodgy ally or run down area, and more as an art form in its own right, which is organic, accessible and collaborative.
I said right from the start that I did not move to Berlin because I was pushed away from a London that I could no longer bear. Quite the opposite. I was pulled by the attraction of doing something different which was just enough to tempt me away from the area of North-East London that I live in and love. So it is no surprise that I have ended up living pretty near an area that it pretty much Dalston's Berlin equivalent. Running or walking down the Landwehrkanal, which runs from the Spree in the east, through Kreuzberg to the Tiergarten and beyond, reminds me of the Lee Navigation that then turns off into the Hertford Union Canal as runs past Victoria Park towards Islington. There is a extremely strong Turkish community here, as there is in the strip of road between Dalston and Stoke Newington. Both sell great falafels, although the ones here are much more cinnamony. And there are concerned mumbles from the original community about the influx of young trendies to the area, especially Neukölln, pushing up rent prices and turning every second shop into the 'conceptual space'.
Every Tuesday and Friday, there is a huge Turkish market by Kottbusser Damm which sells fruit, veg, flowers, mounds upon mounds of feta cheese, olives, bread, dried fruits and baklava as well as fabrics, clothes, more types of buttons than I have seen in my life and handmade mustard (even whisky mustard). The real find though, that my Swedish friend introduced me to, is a guy selling Ghanaian food there. For 4 euros you can get a bowl of veg stew, beans, rice and cooked banana and some mind-alteringly hot sauce. Amazing.
Ok, so Currywurst might be on every tourist's to-do list, but locals eat it too! And contrary to what every Currywurst virgin I've met thinks, it is not made out of curried meat. Rather it is a normal sausage with either a very mildly curried tomato ketchup and curry powder, or tomato ketchup and curry powder.
I was a total sceptic at first, but am now a complete convert. There is much debate about where serves the best Currywurst in Berlin. This Curryfenster in Lichtenberg unfortunately does not feature in any of the top ten lists, which are headed by Curry 36 in West Kreuzberg (Mehringdamm 36), and Konnopke's in Prenzlauerberg (Schönhauseralle 44) (the oldest one in town). You can pretty much find them anywhere, and if you're in a queue for a club, they can often come to you. Late at night, guys with a mobile grill worn as a rucksack, wander around the streets serving currywurst. It might not be the best, but at 4am, it works.
I couldn't have been less motivated. It was 6:30am and drizzling heavily. Half of my mouth was in sheer agony and I knew that the majority of today's route took me 3km past power stations, cement factories and water plants. But this is the sort of image that makes up the classic 'training-really-hard-for-something-and-overcoming-the-odds' montage clip that sets films apart. But I hadn't been running since my wisdom tooth came out and I was feeling guilty.
