I’ve heard various descriptions of the toilet: “Viewing platform”, “the lay and display”, “the flush and brush”; or “the continental shelf.” (the word continental applies, I’m sure, to European geography, not the medical condition)

Immediate inspection may hold the key. When I asked mein Deutsche friend, wondering whether the shelf allows immediate assessment as to your state of health, she replied: “Ja, I guess so. Never really thought about it.”

Marcus implied it was down to the lack of splash, and therefore more hygienic. Another chum suggested it was down to the amount of water the flush conserved.

Not every toilet has this shelf life, of course, and it seems das bogs are being slowly replaced with the Anglo pot, but most Deutsche bogs still do. Without going into details, it’s quite irksome, espceially for the senses, albeit sometimes engaging, depending on one’s deposit.

There’s nothing quite like leaving the toilet and thinking, “Well done fellah, still on course for a good innings, you’ve been a good boy.”

The again, there’s nicht worse than leaving thinking, “Easy Tiger!”

For more on this subject, and it may need parental guidance, click here.

It’s depressing, though not as depressing as waking up at 7.30am each day to the sound of drilling and banging, and a balcony on Falkensteinstrasse, Kreuzberg, that resembles a war zone; albeit a war zone ensconced in scaffolding.

Not just scaffolding. It seems the works does not involve repainting, per se, but insulation. The Turkish builders are lining the facier with six-inch thick mottled grey and white polystyrene, cemented to the wall and then cut away, before facing with plaster and filling with some sort of insulating goo. I wonder what colour they will eventually paint it. I rather like the mottled hue; it’s rather now, so textile.

But there was one dream I had not fulfilled, I had never eaten organic food cooked and served from inside a public toilet. Until now, that is.

BurgerMeister in Schlesische Strasse (try pronouncing that when you are drunk, especially given the context) is no ordinary ex-public lavvy.

For one, it’s an old, Prussian green-timber framed former pissoir sat smack bang underneath the U-Bahn tracks at Schlesische Tor. Just to remind you of its former use as one guzzles a cheeseburger, there’s an authentic sign that shouts “Manner” (which I think means urinals).

It’s set on a traffic island too; so it’s not just the yellow New York-style subway trains racketing overhead as you sink your teeth into a chilliburger mitt pommer, but cars flying past at 40mph, too. All that’s missing are the pigeons bombing back and forth between the steel rafters, dropping reminders of their presence onto your meal. Actually, there are no pigeons here.

The seats at BurgerMeister are old metal bicycle stands, covered in padded leather, to keep one comfy, though not too comfy that you loiter around the table for too long (erm, hello, perhaps the trains hurtling overhead and the cars whizzing by might sort that!)

The food is rather good, too. as you’d expect in Kreuzberg, the famously leftwing, alternative and now increasingly trendy multicultural district south of the Spree, the very west of old West Berlin. It was here in Kreuzberg, a district surrounded by the Wall on three sides that only punks, ravers and Turkish immigrants prefered to settle. It’s why there are scores of kebab shops and fast-food places and such a leftwing, laidback vibe.

Fast food here means independent fast food, as it is largely all over town. There are no chains.  Well, there is a McDonald’s, albeit hidden away, off the main street of Skalitzer Strasse. When Ronald M opened up here in late 2007, the riot police were on standby. Kreuzberg punks – famous for torching cars each May Day – once threw a handgrenade into a fine dining room to help thwart gentrification. (”th steamed lobster, sir, comes served with a handgrenade?”)

There’s a Subway sandwich chain here too on Schlesische Strasse, but it, too, seems redundant. Each day that I have passed, often at peak times, it has stood empty. When I did spot a queue it was not for the food but for the cash machine outside. Well, why not, it’s a good cash machine.

Few here frequent such chains here. There’s no need. There’s too much good cheap food anyhow. There’s Baghdad Cafe, for starters; the fabled 24hour kebab shop which for many east Berliners was their first port of call when the wall came crashing down almost 20 years ago this November, letting them stream across the nearby am Oberbaum bridge.

Gawd, they must have been deprived; you’d think a chicken doner would be the last thing on their mind after finally being freed from the social shackles of a paranoid one-party police state.

Of course, BurgerMeister wasn’t open back then. But if it had have been, I wonder how many Ossies would have dreamt of taking their first taste of the west, from a burger shop, on a traffic island, under a dank U-Bahn bridge, where the food is cooked inside a former Prussian public lavvy?

She repeats: “Twenty-six.”
Oh, a commune? Ja!

Images of sixties’ free love or 80s crusty new-age squatters mince to the fore. Other senses stir, menacingly: petunia oil, for one, and dogs on string leads, yapping infinitum. Yeesh!

Berlin is fabled for squats and communes. Stroll down the industrial Kopenicker Strasse, parallel to the river in Kreuzberg leading to Mitte, past the swanky post-industrial riverside bar/restaurant/clubs of Spindler and Klatz or Watergate, and brash, near derelict squats abound, bordered by abanded shopping trolleys, rusting bikes, fenced off with makeshift metal fences draped in slogans shouting the latest political cause. “Spreefeu for alles”, “Nein A100”; “Squat the airport.”

Natalia’s commune is different. Way different. And during her guided tour of her less than humble abode, I’m distinctly impressed. For entree, it’s on the long wide boulevard of Potsdamerstrasse, in Schoneberg, the central west Berlin borough bordered to the east by Kreuzberg, and west by upmarket Charlottenberg. And it boasts a recording studio, a gym, some super-large, neat and well-equipped kitchens, and roof gardens.

Natalia has lucked out. Living a bohemian, frugal life for six months, while working “remote” in Berlin for an international fashion and arts magazine, she has ended up in a groovy commune.

How? “I don’t know.”
“Were you invited?” “Yes, but it’s not so simple. You have to pass a interview, with the committee.”

Here, in this typical Berlin Prussian townhouse block, live 26 untypical people, an array of types you’d never fathom could share life under one roof: a Swiss punk, fabled apparently in the London squatter movement of the 70s and a German air stewardess; a French artist and German communist journalist wit a penchant for DDR furniture; an Italian multimedia artist, an accountant, a carpenter, a Czech musician and a Brazilian illustrator.

Well, it’s not one roof, per se: it’s many roofs, on many levels, skirting ahigh the ubiquitous courtyard, some covered in gardens, some stretches in tiles or concrete, all housing a sprawling, labyrinthine alternative life being lived out in various rooms, mini-flats, kitchens, toilets, stairwells and grass roofs taking in numerous apartments, meandering about on various inter-connected levels, like a maze, albeit with no dead ends.

Accepted by the committee as a temporary guest, Natalia pays 180 euros a month, with minor add-ons for the internet and a charge for “food and non-food” (you know, the stuff you eat and the stuff you don’t eat, like bleach, and toilet paper, and washing-up liquid). Members have allotted roles, depending on skills – the unskilled cook, and clean. Some garden. It works like a dream, says Natalia.

She gives us the full tour. Her room peels off the first floor landing, through an unlocked two-bed “flat” she shares with the Swiss punk. How Swiss is he? “Not very.”

Her quarters are sealed off by a concrete door. “I think his old neighbour had a drinking problem,” she says. So it was divided off, with a mini-Berlin concrete wall slab.

Across the landing stands a sprawling kitchen, large enough for two big sofas and a big breakfast bar. It’s the party area, where the members on this floor, and this side of the building, share cooking and clean-up duties, and partying. Beyond the kitchen lies a back staircase, another room – “this is more private, a couple live here” – and upstairs to more rooms. Before you know it, you are on the roof, covered in grass and soil, boasting plants and vegetables, and other green stuff you smoke. Some commune stereotypes must persist.

The tour throws up a dingey ground-floor recording studio, a room covered in egg cartons, for soundproofing. Next door is a laundry room. There’s a games room, too, and a gym, equipped with treadmill, exercise bike and weights, no less. Upstairs on the fourth floor lies another secret garden, and a boiler room, and another laundry room. The Happy House is massive.

So how does it work? Natalia explains, earnestly. There’s a committee, of all 26 people, who debate goings on, events, difficulties, problems. Apparently the debates can get pretty acrimonious. One night, a drunken householder scrawled some pro-Palestinian graffiti on the living room wall. The committee met to discuss retribution: should he clean it off, leave it, or paint the whole living room? No one could decide, largely because everyone must agree.

“And if someone does not agree?” “Then we leave it.”

The commune is owned by a leftwing-minded man, who treats it much like a housing trust. All the tenants have to do is pay the rent and the bills, and they can do what they like, for as long as they like. Some people have lived here for decades. Children have passed through, too, although when they reach 18 they must pay up the rent or move on.

It seems the only reason why one would leave.

Here arrives my first flatshare dilemma. Do German women prefer the toilet seat down, with the lid up, ready for instant access, or both up, or both down? Mein gott, I’m gonna have to ask or cause more Anglo-German rivalry!

Die toiletten in this old Prussian Kreuzberg apartment is bizarre. Encased in a separate room, just left by the front door, the WC is internatinally normal – long and narrow, almost an architectural afterthought.

However,  the toilet space takes up only half the acreage. What confuses is the long, long, slightly rising shelf which extends back to the small window, about two metres away. Attached is a metal window bar, about two metres long, a tad bent, which you twist when you want to open the window, for der freshen air, ja? It’s cute, albeit in a slightly rustic, possibly primevil way.

Anyways, Welcome to my new abode. I’m renting a room off Martina, who is off to the UK on study leave. Anxious to claw back some cash on her rent in Bristol she has rented it out for two weeks to me, at significantly lower rates than even the cheapest private room in a hostel. I’m glad; it was between me and a German Swiss chap visiting a university here, and I won: “Ja, boo, sucks to you Deutche-Swiss. I got the nod!”

This flat has grosse charm, as nearly all old Prussian apartments in Berlin. Accessed by a Munster-esque huge four-metre high wooden street door – yes, brown, again, and smothered in de rigeur tagging and graffitti – its dank, bare lobby, scarred only by seemingly abandoned prams and bikes leads beyond to a sprawling courtyard; a patch of grass offering a playzone for kids, and a cycle rest for adults. Either side of the front door are steps up.

Martina’s three-bedroom flat boasts the typical 3.5metre high ceilings, which is kinda like living in a squash court, albeit one finished with highly ornate cornicing mitt ubiquitous ceiling rose, all replete with wide oak floorboards. In the corner nestles an old heater, covered in glazed brown tiles with steel grates for ash, coal and air – every bedroom has one, apparently. It’s a sort of inverse Victorian chimney. If chimneys were belly buttons, this would be an “outey”.

Bizarre for a 3.5metre high apartment is the bathroom. Small and compact, it seems to have been cut in half – when I stand in the shower for a douche, my head tackles the ceiling. If I angled the shower head any further up I’d water the plants in the lounge above. I have to crouch – I feel like I’m showering in a submarine. Die douche im Das Boot!

Getting your bearings betwen East and West Berlin is a tad tricky; just when you think you are in the old East, admiring or mocking all the old grim GDR soviet architecure, you realise you are in the West.

Now that little remains of the Wall, it’s path being too difficult to spot, erased by construction of roads, parks and buildings, the only true way to tell east from west is the traffic lights: old East Berlin boasts a rather natty set of walk/don’t walk signs – a green man in a homburg or trilby, not goosestepping, per se, but doing a strident powerwalk, and delivering a rather pungent upper-cut; or a red man, splayed like Jesus on the cross, albeit this christ-like figure is donning a homburg. It almost shouts: “Don’t walk, or we’ll nail you up, paint you red and make you wear a stiff felt hat with a pinch down the middle.”

This is a homburg, as immortalised by the cold figures Adenauer and Brandt!

The picture above shows a coolish bar – ampelmand-stand.de – in the Hackescher Markt, near the Spree, under the arches, exploring the theme. Sooner or later, we reckon traffic lights will become the tourist symbol of Berlin although the green man deckchair design here has Mr Homburg walking a different way to the real sign. Actually, he seems to us to be walking the right way, whereas the right GDR sign almost powerwalks the wrong way – a bit like the regime itself, powerwalkign to oblivion, thankfully.

The old West Berlin lights are the more ubiquitous European variety, a slim androgynous figure, almost skanking or moonwalking. A tad dull, really.

I was warned about the view on this train, or rather the lack of one. The trip to Berlin is nothing but uneventful, the scenery a never-ending pan-flat landscape of rolling cabbage fields, clumps of homes, the odd farmhouse and the odd big town, Aachen, Koln, und Hannover. There was another big town en route but I forget its name, sorry , besides, you’ll never go there.

Only a few minutes late, we pull into Berlin Hauptbahnhof, the new gleaming, steel and glass central station which would look more at home in Canary Wharf. As with all new railway stations, it is part shopping arcade, part terminus, part soulless exchange for people and their wheelie suitcases.