And 10 things that didn't make their own post

As I've been running round Berlin over the last five months, I've seen lots of things that say something about the way of life here. Some are significant and/or special to this city, like the wall or massive breakfasts on Sundays. And some are less so, but still give some idea about what it is like to live here. Most I've been able to catch on camera in some way and post about. But there are some that I haven't - and so here are 10 final things that I think makes Berlin brilliant and different.

1. Spielplätze. Every afternoon playgrounds across Berlin are filled to the brim with children and parents (mums and lots of dads). This is not only is this because the playgrounds are amazing - pirate ship climbing frames, trampolines and zip wires - but because since everyone lives in flats, these are people's gardens. And their communal nature is no bad thing for creating a proper neighbourhood atmosphere (well, in Friedrichshain at least) that many people elsewhere romanticise about where kids play together and neighbourhoods stop and chat.

2. Those weird pink tubes. According to the Pollems website, these tubes that wind across move groundwater around and away from buildings.

3. Spätis. Not only do these off-licenses have a pretty huge selection of beer and soft drinks (including about 7 types of coke, no monopoly here Coca Cola), they can double up as a cheap bar in the summer if you don't mind sitting outside on their benches and tables. Where else can you get a round for 70 cents per person? Perfect place to unwind when you get your Feierabend at 3am.

4. Ice cream. I remember spending all my pocket money on ice creams during a German school trip 15 years ago, and the love of ice cream has not diminished here. All summer long (and even now into autumn) there are huge queues outside ice cream parlours. Everyone says the one in Falkensteinstraße is the best, but my fave is Eispiraten on Grünberger Straße. Two scoops for a euro!

5. Broken and empty bottles. You have to watch you put your feet/ride your bike on Saturday and Sunday mornings to avoid the broken beer bottles that pretty much litter the streets. The homeless bottle collectors do a good job at weekends, and council street cleaners in the week (as my four year old brother put it 'they've cleaned up the party'), but they never get it all.

6. Pong. They love a bit of table tennis here, and have a couple of tables in every decent neighbourhood park or square. Good thing about it is you can play even if you're complete crap - but just watch out for the regulars who might challenge you to a game only to scare you off. Man in white cap in Travelplatz did this to us.

7. Rain. This summer has been a bit of a washout at times. But while there has been some drizzle, mostly when the rain comes, it pours. Which means you are often cycling along at 100 miles an hour, looking over your shoulder, and trying to make it home before the big, black thundercloud unleashes its shower over you. If you do, you can enjoy thunder, lightning and then double rainbows from the dry. If not, drowned rat sums you up.

8. Swimming in the lake. There are tons of great lakes around Berlin that you can have a dip in. The bottom is a bit sludgy and squelchy in some, but once you get over it, they are great. You can choose tiny patches of bankside that are more secluded like Schlachtensee or the pine forested north bank of Müggelsee (you might have to walk round a bit to find a spot), nudist sections (FKK) of the main beaches if that's your thing, or the Badeschiff if you prefer a trendy-infused swimming pool over lake water. But for a lovely, open, sandy bottomed beach - its got to be Strandbad Wannsee.

9. Leisure time more generally. Maybe its because I'm not working full-time here, but I do get the impression that Berliners take their free time more seriously than Brits. Everyone wishes you a 'Schönen Feierabend' (literally celebration evening, or happy end of work) and there is tons of organised (e.g. climbing and parcour clubs), semi-organised (e.g. 32 urban beach bars, grill-boats to rent, flea-market kareoke and u-v crazy golf) and non-organised (picnics in the park) to do.

10. Helping out during house moves. I've already blogged about how flats come with literally just the kitchen sink and you have to deck them out with washing machine, wire the electricity and paint the floors/ceilings/walls. Well the nice thing is that whenever people move here, they invite their friends to help them out and take them out for some lunch/drinks afterwards. Pretty essential if you're moving from the second to the fifth floor across town - and Joe and I are slowly banking up some points for when we need some help to move out of our flat next year.

Volkspark Wuhlheide

At 27km, this run was my longest so far, and according to my training guide, 3km short of the longest I should do before the big day itself. So inevitably, it required a new park to run through. Leaving the city parks behind me, I headed out to Volkspark Wuhlheide, which is just by Köpenick, a once medieval town south east of Berlin that has now been engulfed by the city's administrative borders.

 As I ran down along the river by Treptower Park and into the woodland of the Volkspark Wuhlheide, I noticed how many different ways people were using the parks. After the previous day's sunshine when people had been pedalo-ing, ping-ponging and picnicing, people were cycling, walking, playing and even raving at an all-weekend festival in the park.

Its my impression that Berliners seem to use their parks and green space much more than people in London other European cities I've visited. This may be because the bigger parks - like Volkspark Wuhlheide - have more on offer. As you can see from the map, there are walking and cycle lanes, football pitches and skatebording areas, horseriding centres, an organic garden, a model village of Berlin and Brandenburg buildings, openair swimming pools and theatres, and of course the obligatory children's climbing frames. They were simply designed for people to spend a lot of their free time here.

But it also seems that people here relish spending their free time in the great outdoors - even if that is within the city boundaries. The Timeout equivalents - Tip and Zitty - have been featuring outdoor activities since I've been here; the 10 best lakes, undiscovered outdoor escapes etc. Doing a cycling tour out to one of the surrounding lakes, forests or towns seems to be way more popular here - for those in their 20s as well as 70s. And the neighbourhood parks are busy early into the evening with people having a beer and/or BBQ. Why this is - fewer gardens, or colder winters - I don't know, but whatever the reason, its good news for summertime runners.

The Turkish Market and Landwehrkanal

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'.

The canal is a pretty busy place. Pleasure boats go up and down it, joggers run alongside it, people relax by it, laying out on its banks in the afternoon sun, playing a game of pétanque just down from Glogauer Straße or mini golf by the inland harbour further along.

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.

While I'm on the subject of canals, if you're looking for an altogether different canal experience then you should give the Spreewald a try. Its an area of tiny waterways and canals about 100km south east of Berlin that were created when the land was irrigated. I spent the weekend there with friends, paddling around in the sunshine, past meadows with baby goats and cute little houses and places to stop off and get a beer. All very wholesome and wind and the willows.

 

Currywurst

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.

It is pretty popular - according to Wiki, 800 million portions are served each year. It is a firm part of Berlin popular culture - and it has a book, song, film and museum (in Berlin) dedicated to it.

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.

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Tempelhof airport

Just did a half marathon without even realising it; had one of the Forest Gump days when you can just keep going for ages. I had just intended to go up the hill to Neukölln and draw the 'stem' of my flower, but when I got out to the edge of the airport, I couldn't resist going round it.

Couldn't resist running round an airport? I know it might sound mad, but Tempelhof has been closed since 2008 and is in the process of being turned into a huge park. It has huge, windswept grassland for wild flowers, birds and kite surfers, and concrete tracks for inline skaters, cyclists and joggers - round the outside or directly down the runway in the middle. For those less sporty, there are BBQ areas, a beer garden and festivals in the summer (as well as the runners preparation area for the Berlin marathon). And so no-one forgets its original purpose or historic airlift in 1948/9, the airport building and a couple of old planes remain.

 

The airport was closed in an effort to consolidate Berlin's air traffic to two main airports. I am pretty amazed (and pleased) that city officials decided to turn it into a park - they must have fought off stiff lobbying from property developers. But it is not the first time old transport venues have been turned into parks. My old map of Berlin shows that Görlitzer Park was once an railway station.

Recycling and fleamarkets

Running round the same suburban streets as earlier in the week. Normal people leading normal lives in an unremarkable sort of way. So seems sensible to write something about a very normal, and nearly everyday activity here - recycling. Germany is really into recycling. Lots of sources say they are the number one country for recycling in the world, with the average consumer recycling 76kg every year. There are laws that support it - in the early 90s a law was passed which meant that food and drink producers have to take back their packaging for recycling. And as even Lord Alan demonstrated this week, waste management is big business. In Germany, the sector makes 50 billion euros a year.

So what does it practically mean for you or me? Firstly you have to sort your household rubbish into bins for paper, food, glass, plastics which have a green 'recyclable' dot on them, and other. So you have to have lots of bins! Then you have to sort your glass. Brown, green and white can go into bins in the street - but not on Sunday - when it is against the law to make a loud noise. But you can also make some money out of it. Stores will buy back empty bottles - for about 8 euro cents each. After a good weekend that could mean nearly two euros! This hasn't passed some entrepreneurial types by. There are plenty of homeless people out and about on Friday and Saturday nights picking up the discarded bottles of trendy hipsters on their night out.

The recycling philosophy doesn't just stop at household waste. It feels very much like an engrained way of life here. There are tons of great flea markets across Berlin where you can pick up anything from antiques like 19th century globes, 1950s armchairs and 1930s radios, to more modern items such as shower heads, inline skates and even 1980s jumpsuits! There is a good, but bit pricey one on Boxhagener Platz every Sunday, a bigger more eclectic one at Mauerpark again on Sundays and my favourite in Treptower Park (Eichenstr 4) on Saturdays. There are no nice cafés and its a bit dirty (think I did see a rat) but its cheap, you can bargain and where else can you buy a collection of toilet wheelchairs?

Spreepark

 

My marathon training plan has me taking it up a notch with 15km run around Treptower Park and Planterswald in the east of the city. I actually ran round a bit of it in my moving-house-internet-less days which is how I came across the abandoned amusement rides that I mentioned in an earlier post. Peering through fence which is overgrown with greenery, the rides look like they belong to a magical, but eery, fantasy land. There are rusting rollercoasters, swan-boats that seem to have triumphed over a T-rex now slumped on his side, and a huge ferris wheel that still peeks out from above the tree tops. In my previous post I said that the owner had taken some of the rides with him to Peru. I've since found out that he also tried to take them back to Germany, with 180kg of cocaine hidden in them, and promptly got jailed for drug smuggling.

Normally you can't get inside unless you jump the fence. But last weekend the park was opened for a weekend festival. The rides weren't working, but we were with our friend who used to go as a kid and explained how scared he was the first time he realised it was actually not within his Dad's power to stop the ride. With so many people around, it wasn't as spooky as when you peer into the 

woodland silence, but I did get to sit in the 

T'Rex's mouth without being scared it might spring into life. Also found this article describing the campaign angle to the festival - that income from the growing Berlin tourist industry should be more fairly distributed among the city, and that we need to reconsider capitalist lifestyles that allow no time for leisure. And I would definitely agree with that.

Where am I?

In a bar on Broadway Market in London there is a brilliant artwork which consists of loads and loads of pictures of red front doors in (I assume) London. Like a book shelf, a front door is a bit of statement - are you traditional (red, racing green, navy blue with brass door knob), slick and modern (duck egg blue or other pastel colour and (at the time of writing) frosted stencils for numbers), or do you not care what others think of you (same colour and style as when you moved in 8 years ago). In central Berlin, practically everyone lives in apartments behind a communal door so you don't have the ability to project something about yourself to the people passing at street level (window boxes I can come onto in time). But that has not prevented me from finding doorways and street signs interesting!

In Berlin street numbers are either illuminated cubes attached to the wall or hanging down from the porch ceiling, or more old-fashioned tin plaques which (if you're lucky) point in the direction that the numbers go in down the street. Sometimes numbers are odd on one side and even on the other, and other times they go up one side of the street and come down the other. Helpfully, signs on street corners tell you what numbers are along the next block and sometimes an explanation about the name of the street. So Sonntagstraße is not so-called because it is a nice place to hang out on Sundays, but after Johann Sonntag, who was a late 18th century landowner and leased out the fields round today's Boxhagener Straße to farming families. And Ede-und-Unku Weg is named after a 1931 book which was included in those burned as part of the 1933 book burning, as part of the city's remembrance of victims of the Nazi era.