flohmarkt

How to furnish your flat for the price of a cup of tea (ok, maybe two cups. And a croissant)

Is there a human being alive on the plant who doesn’t have an Ikea LACK coffee table? My colleagues and friends have been joking a lot recently that all I seem to be doing these days is dragging about heavy furniture. They find this hilarious because I am five feet tall with the athletic build of a baby chipmunk, and it is true, in the last few weeks thanks to a simultaneous office move and house move I have been spending a great deal of my time hoicking massive great desks, beds etc around the city. All those facts aside,...

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This little piggy went to market

I know what you’re thinking: damn, that’s a cool umbrella. What do Berliners hate the most? Tourists. What do tourists hate the most? Tourists also. Tourists come to Berlin for one of two reasons: either to see the splendour of German modernity directly parallel to the horror of remnants of a tortured past, or to be, like, totally alternative and underground and do non-touristy awesome gritty Berlin stuff. To be fair, the latter is what most Berliners are trying to do anyway. And all of this is relatively moot, because the few real born-and-bred* Berliners are just middle-aged guys trying...

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It’s the little things in life you treasure. (Booyah, Galaxy Quest quote)

Look at this graffiti. Isn’t it fantastic? Hilarious, pun-tacular and inexplicably written in powder blue liquid chalk. That’s what I love about this place: every day I find at least one little thing that makes me grin stupidly in public, usually in front of a mass of people failing to see the humour in a small dog carrying a Brötchen or a man accidentally throwing his phone onto the train tracks immediately before the arrival of the S-Bahn. Odd considering this is a nation that invented the word ‘Schadenfreude’.  Every little weirdness is like a little present and now, as...

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The Plague

“And ye shalt all be punished for your sins by damage of yon intestynes and kidneees!” You may or may not be aware, but Germany is in the middle of the biggest health scare since <insert irritating Bild article here>. Its name is EHEC, it’s a virus which might cause permanent damage to your kidneys or intestines, and if it’s feeling really racy that day it might even go the whole hog and kill you. Some newspapers are genuinely calling it a plague, while even the initial skeptics such as myself are starting to get a little uneasy about it...

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