Kiezgefühl

Next Saturday there's a Soupport your Kiez (Kiez = hood) party in our neighbourhood and I'm quite excited to see a different side to our new neighbourhood and the people here. There will be music and soup, too, which sounds like an interesting idea.

Since we moved to Friedrichshain I have often been thinking to myself about the differences to Prenzlauer Berg.

For one thing, there's a LOT more dog crap on the street here than in our old neighbourhood – I wonder if there are more dogs here, or just untidier people? I have also noticed that there are a lot of Kitas, kids and children's clothes shops around, so it didn't surprise me to read that Friedrichshain has become the most child dense part of Berlin. In Friedrichshain we see more punks, in Prenzlauer Berg we noticed more hipsters. Friedrichshain has more clubs and loudness: the only club in Prenzlauer Berg, Icon, is now closing because the inhabitants of a new apartment building next to it don't like living next to a club (well why did you move there, then?!). Maybe the much feared gentrification is further along in P'berg. In Friedrichshain our neighbours, too, are noisier: they play dubious music and a lot of techno throughout the weekends, day and night – where as in P'berg we were mostly disturbed by garden parties and children singing badly and too early in the Innenhof. In our new Kiez we greet the staff at the downstairs restaurant, the seamstress, the artist who has a gallery in the courtyard and random neighbours of course – that didn't happen i P'Berg, although that could of course just have been our own fault. One big difference seems to be that there are clearly more German speakers in Friedrichshain – for better of for worse.

Maybe in another year we should move to Kreuzberg to know what it's like there?