Let Me Take You To a Beach Bar
We first had dinner at this really low-key, but delicious, place in Prenzlauerberg. In true Berliner fashion, we sat outside at a hastily made up table among open air construction scaffolding when the manager realized we had squeezed 4 of us at a two-top table. He recommended great food and we got a bottle of wine. As we drank, a band of street performers set up and started playing Berliner Jazz. Berliner Jazz has guitars and trumpets and saxophones and handsome dudes. That is apparently very important to the music. The guys had just been playing at a restaurant down the street and would play a few songs before moving to the next place. Happy and sated, we wandered deeper into the neighborhood, in search of a beach bar.
A brief introduction to the "Beach Bar": it is exactly what it sounds like. A bar set up to look like a beach. In a land-locked city like Berlin, these tend to crop up all over as soon as the temperature can stably stay in the 70s/80s. There will be a beach bar set up next to abandoned warehouses, or alongside railroad tracks or out by a construction site. This one was special.
We walked along the elevated track, past sex shops and maternity stores standing side by side (I wish I had taken that picture). We walked through an modern-looking outdoor mall with a gym, past train station and an H&M and we turned a corner, across a train-bridge until we found it: a square, boring, unassuming parking garage. At first, we were a little lost: was the entrance the driveway itself (that German word, by the way, is "einfahrt"), or was it the darkened, seemingly locked door with a faded paper sign taped onto it? A man was relieving himself across the street. We saw another group of people walk past us and through the darkened door. We followed. The walk up was exactly as you would expect from a parking garage: cramped, a little smelly, a little hot. We had to walk 5 flights, and at each landing we saw the detritus of a party: a half-full beer bottle here, a pile of rubbled glass there. We finally made it to the top floor, and there it was: our beach bar, called Deck 5 (it was the 5th floor of the garage, of course). We paid the euro entrance fee and wended our way along tents and canvas beach chairs set out on a bed of sand. There were little boardwalks set up along the way and to one side was the bar, wrapped in driftwood and grass skirting. To the other were palm trees set in planters and tiki torches along the railings. A view of half the city, with the TV Tower in the distance. We got there just as the sun was setting, around 10 (have we discussed that the sun sets at like 9:30-10 in the summer? It is bananas.) We found 4 chairs, ordered a bottle of wine from the bar, and sat down. Watching the stars freckle the night sky with my feet in the sand, I was really at the beach. It was AWESOME. After such a long and stressful workweek, it was so.. sigh... perfect to unwind like this.
Tonight are the finals for the Eurovision Song Contest (please just YouTube-search the Russian entry. You will be so sad and happy that you did), and then we also have no work on Monday for a religious holiday. Enjoy your Memorial Day weekends, friends, and I hope they are filled with barbecues and beach bars!
xo,
e
