How to Visit Berlin

Arrive in Berlin after you’d been on the road for the entire day, durring which you and your friends drove across the better part of continental Europe. You are done with eating Christmas food with family, you are in Berlin to party and play with friends from the German capitol.

Start with the party portion of the program as soon as you are done finding a parking spot for your car and distributing suitcases between friends’ apartments, so that you and your guests are divided equally between them and everybody has a bed to sleep in. Get drunk with your old friends. Realize you didn’t distribute the suitcases correctly just before you want to go to bed and lug your own suitcase for 15 minutes across town to the apartment you just left a half an hour ago. Don’t mind this.

Wake up the next day, a little tired from all the driving and a lot hungover from all the drinking. Decide to skip out on sightseeing your visiting friends are planing on doing, during which exciting things await them, among others, the Brandenburg Gate. Instead, have breakfast at 2PM, then sit around the living room with one of your friends and chill out like you used to when you both still lived in the same city. Start feeling like you’re on holiday.

Don’t really leave the flat for a few days. It’s cold and rainy and you only have two pairs of shoes with you: one suede and the other one leather, none of which will do when it’s raining. For New Years Eve, stay in with all your friends, hanging around the apartment, listening to music and drinking. A lot. Go out at 4AM and dance to a bad DJ set. At 6AM decide you want a proper Berlin party experience and take a cab to Berghain.

Stand in the que for about an hour and feel a little worried that you might not get in. The bouncers have a system you can’t decode, there dosen’t seem to be a direct connection with people who get a nod and a “ja” and those who are dismissed with an abrupt “nein.” Receive a nod and a “ja.” Feel relieved and ready to party.

Slowly have all your friends dissolve and leave you. Meet a designer named Timo and hang out with him. When he tells you he wants to move to London, tell him he’s crazy and he should just stay put. Also tell him he’s beautiful a few times.

Get in a taxi in the wee afternoon hours. Show the taxi driver the address in your iPhone Notepad and melt into the leather backseats of a beige Mercedes. You will be home in 15 minutes. The taxifare will be 10 euros plus a two euro tip, because the taxi driver was nice and quiet the entire time, but left the radio on a pleasantly humming volume, that was gently putting you to sleep. This will go down as the ultimate taxi experience of your entire life. Swag.

The following day, vegetate with your friend, watch Britain’s next top model B2B, hydrate, and try your darndest to stay alive.

Go for a walk around the city with your non-Berlin friends for the first time the next day. Notice how the streets are wide and how you can always see the sky, because the space above your head isn’t cluttered with buildings. Think about how breathing suddenly comes much easier. Think about all the times you couldn’t breathe in the past year, because the city felt claustrophobic.

Spend the following days drinking wine and beer and eating way too much all around town, before your friends leave Berlin for their homes. You don’t have to go yet, so you plan on hanging around for a little while longer. Move to your cousin, so you don’t overstay your welcome at your friends and also because you want to hang out with her too.

Go to the turkish supermarket the next day and buy fresh vegetables and fruit for 5 euros. Go to a nearby caffe and have mouled wine, before returning home, where you will cook dinner for your new and old Berlin friends. Start feeling incredibly sane and relaxed.

Take your time getting to know the city, because you can. Take two hour walks every day, and discover Berlin, one small piece after another. Notice how calm everybody is, and how all the sounds seem almost as if they were muffled. When an ambulance rushes by you one night as you’ll be walking home, remind yourself you haven’t heard one for days at an end.

Finally see the goddamn Brandenburg Gate.

Spend the next week working remotely from Berlin, cooking dinners and drinking wine with your Berlin friends. Bake a pie twice and feel oddly satisfied by the notion that you are enjoying things, which don’t include binge drinking.

Start walking slower, start thinking clearer. Smile at a boy in a coffee shop. Notice how your entire being feels lighter.

Go to a lot of underground clubs that play awesome techno music. You geniually love electro and you feel like you’ve found somebody who adores it just as much as you do. That someone is the city of Berlin. Dance until you can’t dance anymore, than take a disco nap on one of the couches and go dance some more. End up dancing at an after party in a field somewhere in the middle of Berlin. End up being the last on the dance floor of some Jewish techno club. End up having mimosas for brunch on a Sunday and going to Berghain again. Have the time of your life. Feel young, feel crazy, feel free. This is a story you will tell friends for many years to come; the story about the time you went to Berlin for NYE and ended up staying a month.

At some point, reluctantly get in your car on a Monday morning and drive home. Watch the city getting smaller in your rearview mirror and feel the bitter taste of all things ending in your mouth. Tell yourself you will be back soon and hope you really will be.