New: Raw food in Berlin!

As the weather is getting colder (only +5C now), it's natural to think of nothing but eating. I got the opportunity to write an article about new vegetarian restaurants in Berlin, so the past week and a half my life has revolved around food. 2011 has been a great year for vegetarians and vegans in the city: NINE veggie restaurants have opened since February. When my mom was here, I dragged her along to Lucky Leek and Kopps, and since then I've been exploring raw food with A. There are two new raw food restaurants in Berlin: Gesund & sündig in Wilmersdorf and café style LebensfRoh in Kreuzberg.

Gesund & sündig
Germany's first raw food restaurant opened in June. The location and the opening hours reveal that most of the diners at Gesund und sündig come from the sports centre that the restaurant is connected to. Luckily it's along the Ringbahn and thus within reach even for a Friedrichshainer. A more central location is under consideration for the new year, we were told. Everything on the menu here is raw and vegan. As a starter we share a plate of delicious "Sweet and sour sushi" (€7.90): a mixture of sunflower seeds and sauerkraut replace the rice, and the centre is carrot, zucchini and pineapple sticks – because of the seaweed, it still clearly tastes like sushi. In Pizza Crudo del la Casa (€7.90) the base is made with dried seeds and has a slightly bitter, nutty flavour which the tomato sauce and roasted vegetables balance with their mild and sweet taste. The "ricotta" on top is made of cashews. Pasta is replaced with sliced courgette in the "lasagna" (€8.50), and the side salad is instantly a new favourite: rucola and pear with a garlic dressing. Everything is as bright and colourful on the palate as on the plate. I tried a super healthy green smoothie (€2.80) while A played it safe with a fresh apple juice (€3) – we pretended to be health nuts and skipped beer and wine. Gesund & sündig is definitively not just for hippies, but dinner there was delicious, interesting and filling. If only it was a little closer to home: I'm certain we'd visit again and bring tons of adventurous friends with us!

LebensfRoh 

This homely café opened next to Görlizer Park in August. They're not very busy on the Tuesday morning when we've decided to have breakfast there. The café is filled with sunlight and the lonely voice of Kurt Cobain singing from the Unplugged album – I had the song "Jesus don't want me for a Sunbeam" stuck in my head all day afterwards. For breakfast the choice is between raw müsli (€4) and chestnut porridge (€3), but a plate of raw food crackers with assorted spreads, olives and veggies sounds like Berlin breakfast to me (small plate, €5). The porridge is nice: slightly sweet, sticky and a little grainy. For another euro it comes with fresh fruit or warm fruit puree. The Hertzhafter Teller is simple: two crackers piled with different spreads, a salad, olives and some grapes. They're out of many items, and so I'm asked if it's ok to use a milk-based spread, too, rather than vegan. The plate is nice, but not exactly as filling as a Berliner might expect after having paid €5. If I'm around the area, I might want to pop by again to try their raw courgette pasta or one of their daily dinner specials to really make up my mind about LebensfRoh.

Betahaus

Two weeks ago, at the Screen Print Festival 2011 in Stattbad Wedding, our new friend R told E and me about Open Design City, a space in Kreuzberg where you can rent tools and appliances and get help for your more ambitious design projects. We were particularly interested in screen printing possibilities, but also curious to know what other things can be made there, like with laser cutters or soldering equipment.

The ODC is a part of Betahaus, so to familiarise with ODC you have to go on a tour of Betahaus, a shared office space where you can rent a desk by the day or by the month. Tours are available twice a week and are free of charge. I now know three people who work there, so I was curious to see what it's like.

E and I were on time like proper Finns tend to be – R was nowhere to be seen. Later I saw her message on Facebook, saying she'd been held back at the office.

Betahaus is very impressive: it's big, it's airy, it's light. If it wouldn't sound so corny, I'd describe it as an inspiring environment. The Open Design City space, on the other hand, seemed small. There was no one there to explain precisely what tools are available and what the possibilities there are, so that part of the tour was very disappointing.

As we sat down in the downstairs café afterwards, an American girl who'd also been on the tour asked to join us. We had a nice chat among graphic designers and as we were leaving AS wanted us to reveal which guy from the guided tour we would date if we HAD to. She was quite taken with the amount of cute guys she spotted at the premises. We made diffuse plans to meet up at an art gallery later in the week – so if nothing else, I made another friend today!

Possible new home

Today we viewed an apartment in Friedrichshain that I really, really liked. It wasn't flashy and white, but comfortable and homey with a big balcony. We have to wait until at least Monday to hear if we have been short-listed for an application interview with the owners.

We have seen 18 apartments and now have two and a half weeks to find somewhere to move. Panic.

O brother, the weather just got nice

Ironically, just after my brother's visit is over, when it was about +13 every day and rained most of the time, it seems like summer has arrived. We did have some fun without the sun and we got hold of a third bicycle, so we could zoom around the city together. I'd say we did about 25-30 kilometres in four days. We also ate a lot to make up for it :) We took M to our favourite pizza place, we had sushi twice and some middle-of-the-night-falafels (kebab for him) and of course, in proper Berlin-style, we ate breakfast out every morning. The most glamorous breakfast was the Sunday brunch at Pasternak on Knaackstraße, the most random one a traditional German flammkuchen in Café Sibylle on Karl-Marx-allee. I think his favourite things were chilling in Mauerpark, playing Kicker (foosball) in bars and seeing the prices of food and beer. It was sad to let my little brother travel on on Wednesday morning – now he's at Rock im Park in Nürnberg. We haven't heard from him since he left, and I'm a little worried that his "Mitfahrgelegenheit" car-share turned out to be with an axe-murderer... But then again, the men in my family suck at keeping in touch.

Other than that, we are looking for an apartment. I'm starting to panic a little. We just came home after seeing a cute 55 square metre apartment on Gubenerstraße in Friedrichshain, but there were about 30 other people there to see it too... Yesterday we sent an application for an almost perfect apartment on Weidenweg, also F'hain, only to hear back that the realtor isn't sure we make enough money between us, and asking us if we would consider getting a guarantor for our lease... And we're in our thirties, for god's sake! So we keep searching.

Apartment in a distant corner of Prenzlauer Berg, 74 m2, 600 euro: too child friendly, thus too far away from all other forms of life.

Summer and bureaucracy

My head is spinning whenever I step outside because all the trees are blooming and it smells incredible; like summer and childhood. Today the weather is fab, +24°C, which for a Finn definitively is summer – compared to Ireland, I don't even know what to call this. We enjoyed breakfast/lunch at the corner bakery, sitting outside, then took a walk around Falkplatz and Mauerpark. I love working part-time!


A signed a lease for his very own studio space today! He's really excited and I really hope it will be great.

We're also looking for a new apartment and we're seeing our first one today, here in Prenzl'berg. I don't think we'll take the first one we view, but it feels exciting to actually go out there and see something. This one is 62m2 and the warm rent (includes heating, water and so on) is only €462. But it would make a lot of sense for us to try to find an apartment near Volkspark Freidrichshain, since it would be close to the studio, and an equal distance from both our jobs. I emailed four other places today, so hopefully we will find our gem in a few weeks!

Another weight was lifted off my shoulders: I finally have German health insurance! I got my employers to put me on pay roll and now I don't have to worry about hardly any bureaucracy at all. I only needed to get my Lohnsteuerkarte at the Bürgeramt and to go to a Krankenkasse to sign up, which was all fairly painless. Because we want to move, we will face more bureaucracy: we need a Schufa paper (credit rating), a Mietschuldenfreiheitsbescheinigung (statement from our current landlord that we don't owe on rent) and copies of our passports and bank statements...

Looking for work

I am seriously trying to find a job now, no more horsing around. We've both had interviews and we are both doing a trial: I will do a trial issue of a well known Berlin-mag next month, and next week A is doing a two day trial at an IT company. Apparently that's how it works here; you will be tested first. In a way that's good, then you will know what the job is like and if you like it. Both of us will still keep looking, but at least we can feel good about ourselves; we were picked for something!

Here's a a few links that I have found useful while looking for work – they are leaning towards media and the creative fields a little, but there's a few more general sites, too:

The Local's ads
Exberliner ads
A collection of adverts via Toytown
Jobs in Berlin
Work for the EU
International development jobs
Film and TV industry jobs
Design jobs
Creative jobs

More good tips are welcome!

Working it

I had my first job interview of 2010 today, with a magazine here in Berlin. The situation seems to be tough, they told me they had 60 replies in two days. The meeting went well, but I don't know if I should be excited or not – to be honest, I'm not sure what happened: I was in and out in 15 minutes! They are testing one designer for the January issue, then apparently me for February. It could be the perfect job; it comes with responsibility and seniority, it's part-time and it's not far from where I live. It could be a disaster; I would manage three people I didn't meet, I would work with the owners (which I have wowed not to do again...) and the pay might not be great. So I will go on like before: take things one day at the time and look out for more opportunities that will come my way.

P.s. How cool would it be to be able to get by on just a part-time job?! I would have half of the month free to take holidays and to sleep in!

Expanding our horizons

It still seems to be a slow process to find an apartment here in Berlin. Our friends stayed over for a few nights and had 5 viewings set up for three days, but none of the places were quite right. Yesterday we took a stroll around Pankow, and were quite pleasantly surprised. Specially the area around Florastrasse seemed quaint and had all the services you'd need. We found a really quirky café that we will definitively return to, called Café & Salon Eigenartich; a second hand and antiquities shop combined with a café. We felt like we were having tea in someone's private apartment! We might be visiting Pankow more often, because our friends were quite impressed.

Berlin apartment hunting

Before we moved to Berlin, we were under the impression it would be easy as pie to find an apartment here. We only booked accommodation for three nights, optimistically. When we got here, we sat down at a cafe with free w-lan (wifi), opened our laptops and didn't know what to do. There only seemed to be a few new apartments posted a day, and we had skimmed through them in a half hour. And we didn't have any apartments to go view, even if we tried to reply to adverts. These are the websites we found useful:

http://berlin.de.craigslist.org/apa
http://berlin.de.craigslist.org/sub
http://kleinanzeigen.zitty.de
www.toytowngermany.com/forum/index.php?showforum=225
www.studenten-wg.de
www.immobilienscout24.de/
www.immowelt.de
www.wg-gesucht.de

People also glue posters on traffic light poles about looking for tenants. Answer as many ads as possible by texting, calling and emailing. Don't be picky, because you never know. It's likely that you will be most disappointed by the best sounding places. We found our apartment based on a one sentence ad without pictures. Texting was most efficient for us. Some language skills are necessary, except perhaps when dealing with Craigslist and Toytown. On Immoscout24 and on Immowelt you can set up searches that alert you when new adverts that match your criteria are added. We didn't find them very helpful, mostly because we were not looking for a one year lease, which is the standard, and we preferred furnished apartments. Craigslist has many scam ads, so beware. Before replying to the ads I googled the email address "in quotation marks", and many of them came up on scam lists.

I hope this helps.