newcomer in xberg ost

November 5, 2009 | Aftermath 17, 3175 | 18:26

before moving to kreuzberg ost i really beleived i would miss prenzlauer berg a lot and feel really lost and lonely - the opposite is true in fact.

where else can you get the best burgers in the city at a place that’s 100% focused on the burger itself - Burgermeister - fuck quiet commodity - sit in the middle of an intersection, below the metro tracks in the cold and meditate on the burger. be the burger. i love it.

the intriguing danger about this kiez is the daily opportunity of endless drifting from bar to bar, which seem to never close. from authentic pubs like the Mysliwska with great polish beer, the romantic and pretty but notorious at friday night Salon Schmück, the provincial-squat-style Farbfernseher with straight electronic music in the middle of nowhere on Skalitzer Straße, the exquisite latino-spanish Mezcal and Margarita specialized Lupita hidden in a top floor behind the grey concrete blocks at Kottbusser Tor next to Monarch club, 80s-modernist queer bar Möbel Olfe, or my personal favorite: Hotel Bar, with the finest funk, boogaloo, soul, rockabilly and spanish 60s music - i always get stuck there at some point.

i rediscovered an relaxed atmosphere and unpretentious authenticity i thought would be lost in berlin, but maybe i’ve been stuck in gentrified prenzlauer berg and yuppified mitte for too long, waiting, looking backwards to the old times there, when the NBI was still a small cozy bar and the Kohlenquelle didn’t have toilets yet and unrenovated August Fengler didn’t look like any other hipster bar…

also never before i was able to have coffee breakfast at 7 in the morning on a friday at a turkish bakery after a too long night and have a rather civilized discussion about honor, knives, murder, culture and life itself with a bald 120kg muscles, gold chain and gold rings packed monster of a kurdish hardcore gangster…

let’s see how i think about all of this when i’m not the naive and optimistic xberg-newcomer anymore. ^_^

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