Hiring the car from Liverpool airport yesterday turned out to be extremely convenient because this morning I flew from that airport for a weekend in Berlin. Why Berlin? Well it’s because I have a friend, an infant-faced Greek woman-child called Athena, who loves birthdays more than any other human alive or dead. And today was her 30th birthday, meaning a celebration of epic proportions.
It’s quite an extravagant thing to go abroad for three nights to celebrate someone being born (after all, we only spend three days off work celebrating the birth of the Baby Jesus, the most important baby of them all) and yet it’s been known for a long while that Athena’s birthday was never going to be low-key so we’d prepared. I was at the airport first and by saying that, I don’t mean just the first of our group, I mean I was literally the first person at the airportx . The place was deserted and I had the rare pleasure of approaching the check-in desks with a choice of five orange Sleasyjet employees to choose from. See what I did there? I made the word Easyjet sound different to cause humour. I am great.
I picked the wrong Sleazyjet (!) employee though because she wouldn’t let me take my modestly sized travel bag on as hand luggage. I protested that Sleazyjet (I didn’t say Sleazyjet to her face, I say Easyjet, but she knew I was thinking it) had allowed me to take this very bag on with me on the other occasions I’ve used them, and so surely it wasn’t company policy that the bag was too big, just her unfair opinion? This made her scowl and I begrudgingly put my nice leather bag on the scales to be checked in. She but the ticket around it and wrote something on it before sending it back. I was convinced what she’d written on it was ‘Dump this in Mersey please, Lads’.
I was joined at the bar by my travelling companions, who were Athena and three other girls. The fifth girl, my friend A, would be joining us in Berlin having flown from London. A trip to Germany with me and five girls. I am like James Bond, 007, I am. I was quite pleased with this until Athena pointed out that people wouldn’t look at us and consider me to be a great ladies' man, they would look at us and consider me to be the gay friend. She’s right.
When we arrived in Berlin I took on the role of tour guide, not because I felt that as a boy I would naturally be able to navigate my way around the place without faffing about like a mad ostrich, that would be sexist, but because I’d been here before and knew my way to the train station and into town.
Berlin is a grey place. It’s very much a place of the moment, with it’s eclectic bars and art galleries and what have you, but there’s no escaping it’s oppressive bleakness. It’s pretty much part of it’s character and so coming in the dead of winter helps. I really can’t imagine it in summer. It would be greener, sure, and that would be helped because there are lots of trees, but none the less the buildings are severely grand and full of foreboding. It’s certainly not a pretty city, but that’s not to say it’s ugly. It’s handsome in a no-nonsense way. It’s just very German I suppose, being functional, imperial, and tough. It also works, in as much as the trains are on time to the second and things get fixed, another stereotypical trait of our German pals.
I do quite like it, but you wouldn’t come here for a romantic break or anything like that. You’d come here for… I’m not sure. For the history, certainly. For a cultural eye-opener. For the architecture. That’s a point – whilst the buildings are typically harsh and powerful as I mentioned, some of the new stuff is extraordinary. Some modern architecture is just extreme for extreme’s sake in my opinion. In Britain certainly. Look at some of some of our modern office and residential developments – they’ll look so stupid in ten years time. But in Berlin things have a lasting quality and just seem to fit in wonderfully. I’d argue that Berlin leads the way in Europe for new buildings.
The block we were staying in is a good example. It’s an independent complex of eight individual apartments called Miniloft. You can see pictures at www.miniloft.com. Within minutes A arrived from a separate airport and we got settled in. I had my own apartment on one floor, four girls made themselves at home in another upstairs, and A had her own next door. It was ideal and plush. I loved my place and padded around on it’s headed concrete floors for a bit looking out of the ceiling to floor windows that stretched the entire length of the gaff. It was the sort of sparse, airy, light place that Ikea furniture actually looks good in. It looked like an Ikea catalogue.
So the six of us were now together for the first time and around 5pm we went out for drinks. At 5am we got in from having drinks, me falling through the door, spiralling across the room, falling across my bed and vomiting onto the pristine concrete floor.
In the twelve hours in between we had a high old time. We bar hopped, had a great meal, went to a disappointingly empty and vastly expensive Tiki Bar on my stupid insistence, taxied to more bars, met a bloke called Jens whom I insisted join our party so I could have a bit of male company and a break from the girly natter, a good dance in an indie club where I brought out my shallow repertoire of coin tricks for the amusement of the locals, sung along en-mass to ‘Slideaway’ by Oasis, physically restrained Melanie, one of our party and the girl who did the drawings for me at Christmas, because she’d seen a bloke outside the club who she decided she wanted to go home with, laughed all the way back, and then, post-regurgitation, went to sleep with a big grin on my saturated face.
I think Athena had a great birthday and that was the whole point and so… success.
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