Berlin: Arguably Useful!

Wow, remember this blog? I sure (vaguely) do! Been a madcap set of weeks between a series of writing and short-stint work assignments, and the excellent but exhausting goodness of a move into Chicago proper after a transitional month in the burbs. I'm rooting and nesting in an excellent deal of a place and getting my feet under me in a more long-range way, and now, almost a month after my last post and ages since my return, I'm catching up on some Useful posts. Up first: Berlin! After the jump, random advice from a dubiously educated cat.

Logistics
Berlin has one of the all-time great transit systems in the world. Sleek, fast, reliable, and relatively affordable; it's also run on the "no barriers, but transit cops may check for tickets and fine you hundreds of euro if you're cheating" system. I went almost a month without encountering a check, but that's not a bet I'd advise making. Instead, go with a pass that matches your time there - you can go with a tourist pass that offers local discounts, or the more local-oriented time-linked passes. If you're there long enough to consider a monthly card, you might also consider the "10-Uhr" card, which is valid from 10 AM til 3 AM daily. I slightly regretted going with this (you save €20-30, as I recall) but if you're there for fun and not for work, you can ensure you take relaxing neighborhood morning time and save on transit to boot.

Beyond this: get to know your Kiez! These micro-neighborhoods will always have a bakery (or two), usually a local grocery outlet, and a few cafes/bars/etc. If you're there for any length of time, it pays to become a regular - try the rich variety of breads at the bakery over the course of a week, get to know the folks at your favorite cafe, etc.

As language goes, you'll have no trouble finding English-speakers anywhere you go. If you're looking to practice your German, spend more time out of the major tourist zones (Alexanderplatz, neighborhoods near Museuminsel) - but even in Charlottenburg or Prenzlauer Berg you'll find lots of spots where German is the go-to language.

Food
Berlin's a stellar street-food and fast-food city. Dönner kebab and currywurst are the famous ones; most major U-Bahn stops will have stands nearby serving these, though the stand near the Ka-De-We (huge shopping mecca in West Berlin) has locally-sourced, tasty options. Currywurst stand Konnopke's in Prenzlauer Berg is famous, and... fine? There's not a lot of quality variation here, to be honest; I can't even tell if Curry 36, my favorite, is just my favorite because it's the first I had last year. If you're not feeling street food, still keep an eye out for places called imbiss - these tend to be cheap options, though some are still from-scratch, daily-changing menus.

International food is thoroughly on the scene; there's been a ramen explosion, and a weekly Thai market in Preussen Park offers legit homemade stuff that's cheap and tasty. Kantstraße is another area to seek this out. The big player here, tho, as the origins of the Dönner kebab suggest, is Turkish, with Neuköln still the place to look for a range of delicious options. (Imren grill may have given me the best kebab of my life.)

Beyond this, options abound and the city changes relatively quickly. Some specific recs from this summer: Italian restaurant Lavanderia Vecchia offers a steal of a lunch menu, and is reputed to have fantastic family-style feasts at night. Shiori is excellent for clean, slightly forward-looking Japanese food in a killer environment: less than a dozen guests at a bar surrounding the two chefs for the night. The Bird is a highly-praised steakhouse whose burgers are viciously good. The people at all these spots were a huge part of their excellence, but the food was right on across the board.

Entertainment
Because of the timing of my trips, I've not been able to be in Berlin during the full swing of their cultural season. There's tons of summer programming (movies in the park, dance classes in the parks, an open-air theater near the river) worth digging into, and in the regular swing of things you'd want to check out affordable access to concerts and opera, but I'm me so we're gonna focus here on theatre!

The big houses in town (at least within my limited early-stage experience) are Volksbühne, Schaubühne, Berliner Ensemble and Deutsches Theater. There are a few others that probably belong in the conversation, but these are the ones I've seen, so we'll focus on them.

Volksbühne recently had its artistic director pushed out after decades at the wheel; his house style had been fairly political, energetic, and playfully avant-garde. (I saw their Apokalypse, whose text was the Book of Revelations, and which was funnier and livelier than just about anything I saw that year.) In my (again, extremely limited!) experience, Schaubühne, while similarly experimental, was more dour and grim in their approach to Schiller's Wallenstein Trilogy (even cut down to a 3-hour no-intermission rendition). I can't speak to the Deutsches Theater's approach much beyond their rowdy, throw-everything-at-the-wall-who-cares-what-sticks Ubu Roi, which I loved. And Berliner Ensemble is probably, to most casual theatergoers, the most famous, Brecht's old company, still performing a repertoire of his work along with a rotating array of new pieces and classics from the canon. Their artistic director left this past season as well, though most of their productions will stay in rotation for the time being; I believe their Robert Wilson collaborations may be departing, however.

All companies offer extremely affordable tickets, with starting prices at €7-15, depending on the company, the theatre space, and in some cases the production. If you're a student, you have tons of discounts available to you for advance purchase, starting as cheap as €5. Same day returns and standing-room tickets are similarly cheap.

Finally, most theatres will note if they have performances with surtitles in English; if you know the shows well, it seems to me it would be just as fun to attend without them, but they're there if you want 'em.

Museums
Berlin has a stupid-huge number of museums, with focus areas ranging all over the place. They're strong on antiquities - Germany being where, in large part, the 19th-century vogue for archaeology first took root. The Neues, Altes, and Pergamon Museums work in tandem on this; the Neues and Altes are a bit more traditional as museums go, where the major appeal of the Pergamon is their full-scale reconstruction of relocated buildings/facades from the ancient world. At present, the eponymous Pergamon Altar is off limits to the public, but the Ishtar Gate and a Roman forum facade are both on display. Particularly if your travels take you to Berlin and you're unlikely to make it to, say, Rome, this can be a great way to start getting a sense of scope.

All three are on Museuminsel, where you can get a combo ticket; if you want to see the Pergamon, however, make sure you book in advance with a timed reservation. The lines out of this place are outlandish, so just hack through their website. More on this later in this section.

My favorite museum from a collections standpoint was the Hamburger Bahnhoff, a converted train station that's now the modern art museum. They've got a great, succinct collection of twentieth-century artists (Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, many others), a central gallery with rotating installations, and another wing of exhibitions that, on my visit, showed a retrospective of installation artworks since the mid-twentieth century. It's a handy short walk from the central train station, should you find yourself in that area.

Finally, if you're visiting for a week or longer and plan to spend a decent amount of time in museums, seriously explore getting an annual city museum membership. For €25, you get time-limited access to seventeen museums and a few more cultural and research institutions (basically off-peak entrance hours daily). At €50, you get entrance without time restrictions, and even better - if you're a student, you can knock that €50 down to €25. Note that if you go this route, you may want to book timed entry tickets (free) to the Pergamon or Neues museum, lest you get stuck in line. Those tickets will come via email, but you can just show your phone when you walk up to the door past the queue.

Miscelaneous
Berlin is an all-time great thrift city. Shops are fine (again, probably better for womenswear than menswear) but the weekly "flohmarkets" (flea markets) are what you want to find. The biggest and most famous one is the one in Mauerpark, with its karaoke pit and a huge sprawl of vendors. But it's very much been discovered, and a lot of what's there is new made-in-China cheap stuff designed to be sold in that environment rather than what you're really after, which are the oddball finds, whether that's Cold War era tea tins or military surplus or discarded A-frame dresses. For those - well, check out Mauerpark, because it's a scene worth seeing, but also check out the neighborhood flea markets on Saturdays and Sundays. Neuköln's is quite good, as is the RAW Flohmarkt in Friedrichshain.

Finally, I'll just add that Becketts Kopf ("Beckett's Head") is a thoroughly great cocktail bar in Prenzlauer Berg. Not just because last summer I had a sprawling discussion with a pair of Swedes, an Irishman, and a German about Brexit and the EU and Whether Sweden Was Any Good, although that helps - but it's a great, swank little spot with solid cocktails and good folk running the joint.

Up next: some UK usefulness! See you in 2019, probably!