Steampunk bar

I'd never heard of steampunk before, so when a new theme bar opened and I made my friend L check it out with me, she had to explain the whole science fiction genre to me from Victorian aesthetic to Jules Verne adventure. Looking at the lovingly assembled Aetherloge 12° says a lot, too. The hand-built big, wooden bar, enforced with bolted steel plates, shelters the exotic rum and absinthe bottles and a set of decorative, brass pipes. What isn't hand-built is at least tweaked to perfectly suit the purpose, like the lamps; orbs that sit in simple iron holders, omitting a pleasing yellow light around the bar. As my friend was leaving Berlin for the winter, she made us promise that we were going to patron the customer-less bar and make sure it doesn't go out of business – but it seems like business has picked up and we now have to go on a week night to get a table. I guess it's apt that a steam punk bar allows smoking indoors to create a veil of mystery, but thankfully on weeknights the veil is thin.

Sweet was yesterday, sweet is the weekend

On Tuesday we made beetroot soup and apple pie for E, who's still waiting for her Prince A to arrive in Berlin (tomorrow!). Yesterday I shared a cheese platter and later a glass of red wine at Süß war Gestern (photo) with AK, a Polish girl I've been introduced to by a mutual friend in Dublin. Today, I'm staying at home, wearing woollen socks and drinking tea. I need to rest up for a busy weekend: on Friday a new club, Der Geheime Garten, is opening in Friedrichshain, on Saturday it's Torstrassenfestival (I'm very excited to see Hush Hush perform in KaffeeBurger at 15.30) on Sunday it's an open doors day at the Nordische Botschaften, the Nordic Embassies (I interpret that as an opportunity to buy Finnish bread and cinnamon rolls). No rest then!

Familiarising with the Ostkreuz Kiez

Yesterday we helped move E into her new, big, empty apartment. It took us seven minutes to move her stuff and the furniture we donated downstairs, after another half hour it was all in the hallway of her building. Pretty efficient. We found Will, a man with a van, on Craigslist Berlin who charged €25 per hour for driving and a little lifting. He is from Wales, drives and old fire engine and seemed very sweet.

After inaugurating the apartment with a few post-move beers, we met S and L for delicious Asian tapas at Transit on Sonntagstrasse. When we changed locations to next door bar So Frosch – a slightly creepy, frog-themed, whiskey bar – R and I joined us after a day of touristing. Despite the over-the-top theme it's a nice bar: the service was great, the whiskey list very impressive, the cocktails delicious and the prices fair. I got a bit envious of R and I's smoked salmon sandwiches (€2.10 each) that looked properly English and very fresh. Maybe this will become E's local pub and I'll get another go at a So Frosch cocktail (Bushmills, lime syrup and apple juice; €5) and a sandwich.

We ended up for one more drink at the nearby Tussi Lounge – the corner of Sonntagstrasse and Holteistrasse. If ever a bar could be described as retro style, then this is it. It's very cute, and the funny thing is that it's a hair salon, too, so you can get a blow dry while you sip on your cocktail. We didn't, though!

E sent me a text message this morning saying she survived her first night in her new home, even if it was pretty exciting. I'm glad, but not surprised.

So Frosch

Tussi Lounge

The Bermuda triangle & Pop shopping

Summer.Pop.Shopping.

E returned to Berlin on Wednesday and I'm feeling a lot stronger, if not completely cured from my cough, so we've been wining and dining around Friedrichshain for the past few days. Also, the very entertaining R and I are visiting Berlin this week, so with them we drank even more.

Like in the Bermuda triangle, we seem to gravitate towards the same little area in Friedrichshain: we end up on Gärtnerstrasse because of Yoyo Foodworld (amazing vegan burgers!), Kaufbar (like having coffee and waffles at your grandmother's) and Szimpla (cheap drinks). We find ourselves on Wühlischstrasse because we eating at Spätzle & Knödel (delicious, heavy German fare) and Datscha (Russian cuisine, vodka and an amazing Sunday brunch) or bringing our guests to Hops & Barley (micro brewery for the beer-geeky tourists). Often we head down Simon-Dach-Strasse to have a vodka with rhubarb juice at Kpnt A.Müller (cosy, cheap drinks), and if Kapten is full the backup plan is that we continue walking south to the RAW Tempel area. This is where we have been bouncing around for the last few days.

Yesterday we broke the pattern by visiting Summer.Pop.Shopping at the Alte Münze in Mitte – a designer shopping event by the same people who organise the Holy.Shit.Shopping Christmas market. My biggest criticism is that the entry is three euro; I find it crazy to charge people to enter a market! Other than that, it was good fun – I came home one cool t-shirt richer, 15 euro poorer.

HBC party for rich people

You're Only Massive

On Friday we were invited to see our friends from Berlin band You're Only Massive perform as a warm-up for, and later on with, Hanin Elias for her record release party at .HBC on Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse. To my great surprise my rock'n'roll/metal/hard core brother was really excited to see Hanin – I think he had a little mini-crush on her. She was insanely charismatic on stage, so no surprise. The gigs were good, but the room got insanely warm and everyone was sweating and smelly. There was not much comfort in drink, because a small Pilsner Urquell cost €3, and to a Friedrichshainer that is just unforgivable. A vodka mix drink cost €7. We won't be going there for a drink any time soon!

After the gig we hung out with our friends for a few hours, using up their drink tickets. My party-fit brother and I agreed that we still wanted to go somewhere else for drinks, and arranged to meet up with a few guys in Friedrichshain; they'd go by taxi, we'd come by bike. This was at maybe 5 am. On the way M and K got really tired and I could see that they just wanted to go to sleep – but on Frankfurter Tor the two guys were waiting. We ended up in Paule's Metal Eck on Simon-Dach-Strasse and as the sun was coming up we forced ourselves to drink one more beer... We were home at about 7am.

A shopping and beer drinking weekend

It was another rough weekend. Nice, too: my friend K was visiting Berlin and we got to catch up a bit: she's getting a divorce, is planning to move to Melbourne and has a new romance going on. I felt really dull in comparison.

Straight from the airport we headed for Kaufbar for coffee and breakfast that instead turned into four beers and a pack of cigarettes. Like I said, there was a lot of catching up to do! On our way to Kaufbar we took a detour to the lovely Broke & Schön shop on Krossener straße and did some unplanned shopping. I've wanted to go there for a while because I was told it's a great new shop where everything is really cheap and cute, which it was.

In the evening we attended the goodbye-dinner for the clever Dr. R, who had to head back to Finland after almost two weeks of celebrating getting her degree. Somehow she always ends up in Paule's Metal Eck and Rosi's, so it was only fitting that that's how her last night in Berlin ended, too. From Rosi's we walked her to the S-bahn: she was pretty drunk and we were seriously concerned that she wouldn't make it to the airport in time for her 7am flight – but she did. Yesterday she did confess to me on Facebook that it had been a bit tricky, since she was falling asleep everywhere!

After a night of very little sleep, we weren't able to do much on Saturday. We had breakfast/brunch at one of our Friedrichshain favourites, the book shop and organic café, Cafe Tasso, on Frankfurter Allee. That's pretty much it. In the evening we tried to go for drinks, but only got as far as to drink one "Bauernhochzeit" drink at Szimpla before feeling overwhelmingly tired.

I was almost glad when Sunday came along and we could just chill at Mauerpark in the sun, until it was time to take K back to the airport...

Party monster (spring in the air)

This past week I have been celebrating way too much. I've had good reasons, of course: Friday was R's dissertation party at my favourite crazy bar, Zyankali (home at 4am). On Saturday we celebrated S' 30th birthday (home at 6am). On Tuesday we had deadline drinks with colleagues (home at 10pm), and on Wednesday we had a work party – that got seriously weird and crazy with English writers proposing and with friends hooking up with male nannies (home at 6am). On the bright side, I now know that spring is so far along now that at 6 am it's bright and the birds are chirping! This has meant that I have been eating mostly crap, sleeping at odd hours and not checking my emails. Sorry.

Today I was a nice between-parties-day, and A and I got some veggie hang-over food at Vöner – a vegan döner restaurant on Boxhagenerstraße 56. Best french fries in Berlin!!! Good seitan döner, too, really fresh and with great sauces, but slightly let down by the dry dürum bread.

K arrives to Berlin for a weekend of fun tomorrow: she's getting divorced and needs to be cheered up – and Finnish girls like to drink. So after Sunday I can finally try to say: 'I'm never drinking alcohol again!' and pretend to mean it.

No shopping, just brunching

Brunch buffet at Morgenrot, Prenzlauer Berg

 

On Thursday A's friends from Finland were going to fly to Berlin to see Suicide Commando at K-17. Their flight was cancelled, because the Berlin airports ran out of de-icing fluid – unbelievable! It's winter every year, you wouldn't think it would cause such chaos. The boys flew in on Friday instead, and got tickets for Monster Magnet at Postbahnhof. I had a "girls night in German" with S and S, and at 2am we decided to meet up with the guys for a beer at legendary Paules Metal Eck on Simon-Dach-Strasse. I was home at 5am, and needed to be at a photo shoot on Saturday at 11.30.

After the very successful photo shoot some colleagues and I decided to go to Morgenrot on Kastanienallee for breakfast – I still hadn't eaten anything and was feeling pretty weak. Plus I haven't been there in ages and I looooove their vegan/vegetarian brunch! A and I still made a half-assed attempt at Christmas shopping, but were too tired and too uninterested for it to go well. At least I got to visit the new English books store at Kulturkaufhaus Dussmann – thank god I was too tired to shop, even for myself :)

Today we talked the Finnish boys into trying our favourite brunch at Datcha with us. We all agreed, once again, that it really is worth to pay €9.80 per person for. I don't think I'll have to eat all day now! The guys wanted to still make an effort as tourists, so instead of coming to our flat for a nap, they went to the Erotikmuseum in Charlottenburg. I opted to go visit our Kiezweihnacht Christmas market at the Samariterstrasse church. It wasn't very big or special, but I did manage to buy a great Christmas present there... But it's for the secret santa present at next weeks Christmas get-together, so I won't reveal it, at least yet!

Kiezweihnachtmarkt, Friedrichshain

The office Christmas party

This week I have mostly been eating out and curing hangovers. I have not done any significant Christmas shopping and have not been resting for the long work week ahead... Sigh.

Our company Christmas party was on Tuesday. We ate a three course meal at Gugelhof, a pretty fancy restaurant on Kollwitzplatz, and then we took the party to White Trash, and when they closed, to Kaffee Burger. I was home at 8 o'clock in the morning – and it wasn't even an extraordinary fun night... There was some drama though: unrequited love, juicy gossip, over-sharing and some boy-on-boy / girl-on-girl kissing. None by me, thank god! Still I was too hung over to go to work the next day :P

Austrian week

No Kangaroo, Austrian ski hut restaurant in Kreuzberg

By chance I have been into all things Austrian this week. On Wednesday I showed my (Austrian) tandem partner a very cute Austrian café, Marketta's Greisslerei, that has just opened up in Mitte, next to my work. And yesterday we finally got around to checking out the Austrian restaurant No Kangaroo in Kreuzberg.

Mohnweckerl with Bergkäse

S instantly fell in love with Marketta's Greisslerei. They have Holunderblütensaft (elder flower juice), Mohnweckerls (white braided bread with poppy seeds and salt on top), Liptauerkäse (paprika flavoured quark), Bergkäse (Austrian hard cheese) and Buchteln (a tray baked bun filled with plum jam) – all of which I tried and loved. All of which met S' high, Austrian standards. I'm now addicted to the Mohnweckerls with Bergkäse: they're so salty and so good! I had one of them, a Buchtel-bun and drank a latte-type coffee for €6,80. Not bad for Mitte. I'll be back (pun intended!)!

The Austrian ski hut that is No Kangaroo was a different story. I thought Austrians are quiet and cool types, who drink Almdudler and speak with a slightly funny accent. No. Apparently they are rowdy, loud and have questionable taste in music. As we waited outside the restaurant for S and D, the schlager music was turned louder and people started to yell along. We thought this was just a one-song-thing, but it went on for the whole night. S explained that it is typical after-ski behaviour. At least I think that's what she said: it was so loud that it was difficult to hear each other. I guess that's what you get for going to a themed restaurant: there's ski lift benches at the bar, skis nailed to the walls, the whole interior is built to look like an old, wooden ski hut and you go through a forest to get to the toilet. It's kind of fun, though, and if you're out to drink and be loud, No Kangaroo would certainly meet your needs. A and I drank beer and Almdudler and ordered knödel with fried egg and an aubergine schnitzel with potato salad for dinner. For dessert we drank strong fruit liquor and shared a Kaiserschmarrn. It all came to about €40 and S deemed it all very Austrian and good. We asked the waiter if it's always so loud and he said it only gets louder as the ski season gets closer. Maybe we'll go back next summer when it's quiet again...

P.S. S explained why the restaurant is called "No Kangaroo": apparently Austria gets mixed up with Australia a LOT :D

Aubergine schnitzel, €7,50

Kaiserschmarrn, €8,50 – it's HUGE

At the "beach"

Is the weather up or down? Coming or going? Personally I've loved it now that the temperatures are lingering in the low +20's and I'm able to enjoy the sun without melting in it. I have not been to the beach once this summer, mostly because when it was hot, it was too hot to move. As a sorry replacement to the real thing, beach-less Friedrichshain offers a variety of beach bars. My latest find is Oranke Orange at a very unexpected location on Karl-Marx-Allee; sun chairs, sand and a little wading pool in the midst of all the pompous socialist architecture. It's not the beach but it's something!

My week as a tourist

It's been busy: I finished my design project last week, then on Saturday my friend M came to visit us for a week, we met up with both her friends and ours, and on Wednesday my mom moved in with us, too.

M left a cool and rainy Berlin today, I walked her to the U-bahn just over an hour ago. I was very proud of myself: I didn't lose my patience once, even if I find it quite straining to have guests stay for so long. We visited Mauerpark on a Sunday, ate pizzas at A Magica, had vodka-rhubarbs in Kptn Müller, introduced everyone to vegan fast-food at Yoyo, popped by our local Friedrichshain brewery, Hops and Barley, ate at our downstairs favourite-restaurant several times, had a lot of ice-cream, drank beer in Viktoriapark at sunset, showed off horror-bar Zyankali, cycled to Treptower Park to check out the Soviet memorial, did a guided tour at Hohenschönhausen Memorial, the former GDR remad prison, and drank Berliner Weiße mit rot in Volkspark Friedrichshain. Not bad. I think I'll have a nap now. Or go to the Humana second hand department store on Frankfurter Tor with my mom :)

A place in the shade

On Friday we finally found ourselves in this shaded little beer garden, on the corner of Gubener straße and Grünberger straße, that we already noticed in spring. Jägerklause is not a cute, picturesque beer garden, but more punky and relaxed (however, there is a play corner for kids), with rock playing in the background and the friendly, tattooed staff sells a handful of different beverages. Mostly Jägerklause is just a great place to escape the sun, have a cold beer and barbecued burgers or sausages (or a vegetarian cheese burger!).

First attempt at clubbing

"What the hell are you doing in Berlin?" "Boy, did you pick the wrong city to live in!" People say this to me often. Why do I get such harsh comments? Because I don't like techno. Sue me.

Yesterday was my first clubbing experience since we moved here almost a year ago. We ended a long, fun night out in Friedrichshain by going to Rosi's. It was a Karrera Club 'Indie Pop Disko' night and the music was pretty mainstream, I thought, not too monotonous or boring. It's a cool bar with lots of outdoor space and I could imagine finding myself there again, if friends or tourists want to go dancing. I got a reminder of why it's at the same time such fun and so annoying to go out with your single friends: boys are hovering, friends disappear to smooch in dark corners of the bar and you end up having the awkward "sorry, but I have a boyfriend" conversations. By Berlin standards we left early, at 6 am, and I was home at 7. It was nice to walk home when the sun was coming up and the birds were singing. It felt like a summer morning – except that it was only +6°C warm...

Tonight my friends invited me to the Russendisko at Kaffee Burger in Mitte, but I don't think I'm up for such madness two nights in a row :) I'm a bad Berliner...

Happy Paddy's Day!

It's time for me to prove I'm the right person for the job: it's my first issue that's going to print this week. I feel stressed: I've been trying to find a cover image, I'm looking for interns, I'm doing illustrations, designing ads... And this week we are in design, so it will get busier and busier. Then, next Wednesday, it's all over – until next month. Such is the cycle of life in the publishing world.


The weather has been absolutely horrible and cold. I learned the German expression for it: April Wetter. That's when you thought it was nice and sunny and spring was coming – and then it starts to snow.

Tomorrow is St Patrick's Day, which will have to be celebrated somehow, preferably in an Irish pub in Berlin. The word on the street is that you better turn up early to get a seat tomorrow. I have no doubt, as there is a shitload of Irish people living here and it should be good craic. I wonder if I can get Bulmers cider (known on the continent as Magners) on tap here?

Waiting for the sun

Waiting for warmth, actually. We did have breakfast (maybe more like lunch) outside in the sun again today, but with our winter coats firmly buttoned and our scarves tightly tied.

I have another good reason to wait for warmer times: last Friday we celebrated A's and our friend M's new jobs, first by eating dumplings at Yumcha Heroes on Weinbergsweg, then with a beer and cake at cosy St Oberholz café on Rosenthaler Platz. We might have once again ended up in BR101, and possibly in absinth bar Druide, too... Anyway, to cut to the chase: You know how you can order a Berliner Weisse beer "mit rot" or "mit grün" syrup? Here you can order it with rhubarb flavour – soooo yummy! I have a feeling I will drink many of these this summer.

No sugar, please

I decided to try not to eat sugar this week, to ease my addiction a little. I'm off to a rocky start, though; I stopped by the office, where I saw cookies and accidentally ate one. We had a meeting across the street in a café and I ordered a chai latte (it came with one of those tiny amaretto cookies, that taste like nothing but amaretto and sugar). I got home and found some of my Swedish marzipan pastries next to my computer and had one for dessert. Maybe I'll do better tomorrow.

The weekend was long and humid, filled with junk food. We celebrated my job and drank so many cheap cocktails on Friday, that we didn't even want to change bars, but stayed in BR101 until 4 o'clock... It was a great night, almost all of our friends made it and even a new Italian one. On Sunday we were invited to a free screening of the star filled musical Nine (trailer here) – very confusing to see dubbed films in the cinema! I think we were lucky though, I think the thick, fake Italian accents would have driven us crazy in English! After the film we cured our hangovers at the famous Kreuzburger, that surprisingly also does an impressive array of veggie burgers!

Prenzlberg treats

We have a friend borrowing our living room at the moment, so my leisure time is all out of whack :) We've kept busy, anyway: I discovered a great tea salon, a great bar for watching Tatort, an amazing restaurant, a white wine I actually liked and I ate ratatouille made with the recipe from the film Ratatouille!

The T Room close to Senefelderplatz is a very nice place for a pot of tea and cakes, English style. I would go back just for the café's own smoky tea blend – yum!

I will return to Volksbar on Schönhauser Allee for a dose of Tatort or maybe just a frothy chai latte...

We were lucky enough to be treated to lunch on Saturday and happened to pick an excellent restaurant on Kollwitzplatz for our three course meal. We will find more excuses to go back to Gugelhof, for sure! One of them will be to drink this fantastic, organic Janson Bernhard white Riesling our waitress recommended.

I am still looking for work, but oh, that's so dull. I am also working myself up to a frenzy about health insurance: in Germany it's mandatory to have it – but we don't. I have heard of people being demanded to pay insurance fees retrospectively if they can't prove they have been insured from the moment they moved to Germany. Ouch.

Free dinner

I don't know about free lunches, but in Berlin there IS such a thing as free dinners! Our friend, who lives in Neukölln, invited us to her local for free food yesterday. B-Lage serves one meal a week for a mere "spende", aka donation, to it's customers every Wednesday. We were a little suspicious, us being vegetarians and also not knowing many nice places in Neukölln. This bar certainly is as cosy and hip as any place in Prenzlauer Berg. DJ's play electronic music, the walls have cute spray-art and it has that cool run-down look. We arrived something to eight and after that the place started to slowly get crowded. Food was served around 8.30pm, and by then the bar was full and the queue for food circled room. The dish of the day was "curryous"; mash with a grain in it, maybe rice, accompanied by a delicious Indian-style spicy spinach sauce with pineapple. The food is always vegetarian, and this week vegan as well. Still, maybe the best part of the night was that all of us who gathered are learning German, and so we spoke German the whole night!

Halloween – all year round!

I think I have written about Zyankali before. It's a tiny little cellar bar in Kreuzberg and we got accidentally very, very drunk there once, forgetting that the tasty house brew, Zyankalibräu, is 8,5% strong... We were there on Halloween and had a great time – the owner even played us some Finnish music :D But the thing is, the bar looks the same all year long; like the set for a horror film. There are skeletons and skulls everywhere, it's dark and gloomy and even our table was a coffin with a glass lid, so we could see the "mummified body" in it – can you see it in the photo? Very cool. Not to every ones taste, I can imagine.