Week 5, Day 4

Still having a good time! Saturday consisted of a leisurely breakfast, followed by a food shop because my £100 budget won't last long if I eat out everyday (even with Manchester's best efforts to pay me without contract!). Spent the afternoon in Mitte having coffee and wandering around Berlin's enormous bookshop Dussmann. This place has just about everything if you can read German. Had dinner at the Spätzle Express. As I've just discovered, it has a rather grander website than its food would suggest, which is extremely cheap but delicious and filling. The only downside was our fellow group of diners made up of Italians - why are they always so loud?! Then it was off to a couple of bars. The first, near Görlitzer Bahnhof, involved an embarrassing incidence. I was stood on some steps which separated the 2 rooms which made up the bar. As I moved to get to a recently vacated seat my foot missed the bottom step and I almost ended up lying flat across the coffee table and the 4 Germans sat around it. The only way I could save myself was to kneel at the foot of the table (prayer-like). And this was all prior to any alcohol having even passed my lips.

Nothing so embarrassing happened at the next bar, somewhere in Kreuzköln, except I made the barman very happy by inflating his tip. Tipping here is much cheaper than in the UK. There's none of this 12% business. More like 5%. This bar was a little quieter than the last (playing up to stereotype with 1980s/90s soft rock rather than 1990s Britpop) and also had a more varied mix of clientele. The previous one was a young crowd. Here, there were some 20-30 some-things seated around the 3-4 tables, 3 seemingly lonely men propped-up one side of the bar, a group of 4 middle-aged friends, consisting of 2 couples (Woman A and Man B, according to Florian, on a possible swingers outing), propped up the other, and in between there was us. The waiter, judging by his meticulous attention to the cleaning of the glasses, clearly thought he was destined for a better class of establishment some day soon.

5 Things I love about Berlin:

1. The space - there's so much room on its wide, leafy streets. And the flats are palatial and cheap.
2. The bars - the best ones are the small, cosy ones, preferably not in Mitte. Downside is the smoking. The smoking ban here was short-lived so its back to smelling like an ashtray, and feeling like you've smoked the damn things yourself. Favourites: Minibar
3. The cafe culture - something that is sorely missing in the UK. Favourites: Goldmarie; Kaffeehaus Brandauer,
4. The long breakfasts - OK, so this isn't something particular to Berlin, but breakfast is generally sold here until 4pm (someplaces till 5), which tells you something about the pace of life.
5. The cold - not like English damp cold, it's lovely and crisp.