I’m wondering quite what sort of emporium lies behind the minimalist sign “Dr Pong”?

An olfactory shop? Too drab, the “unit” has but one sign, the rest is grey-fronted nothingness. A perfumier? Again, if you want to sell perfume, say so, big up the products in the front window. Is it a shop designed for goods to combat everyday malodourous entities, such as whiffy feet, BO etc? Maybe.

Actually, no. In fact, Dr Pong is a ping pong bar. Well, it’s a bar, with lots of ping pong tables, all accompanied by beer and techno. Well, this is Berlin.

Berliners appear mad on ping pong. The town is littered with ping pong tables, seemingly on every spare urban space or derelict corner or park (quite why they put an indoor game outside in a park is anone’s guess – for one, the ball is wind-affected).

It all makes you wonder why Germany hasn’t won gold in table tennis. (Actually they are rather good, albeit not as good as the Chinese.)

You might miss Dr Pong. It’s but a grey-fronted former shop, on Eberweldestrasse, just off Schonhauser Allee in Prenzlauer Berg. The only sign is a small name on the door, Dr Pong, written in those golden black letters redolent of your granny’s front door. You’d imagine it to say Dunroamin, whereas what it actually says, is … erm … Dr Pong.

Inside are numerous tables, students drinking, playing techno, and playing ping pong. Obviously.

That’s about all I can say about Dr Pong. But if you want to bat big, check out this video.

The picture above is courtesy of www.DrPong.net

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I was warned. Martina’s apartment in eastern Kreuzberg, where I am now staying, is expecting a “facelift”. What Martina meant to say was “full-on facial reconstruction, mitt plastic surgery and bone transplant, performedwith pneumatic drill”.

OK, that’ a bit hard to say if you are German, despite all their flair with English. Perhaps she should have mimed it, dancing around with a hammer, smacking it against metal and stone structures, and shouting Turkish phrases such as”Woy oy, Mesmet, put the kettle on son, I’m gasping.” This may, or may not have sunk in a bit more. “Oh, I see, what you are saying is, ‘where I’m staying is gonna resemble the wholesale reconstruction of postwar Berlin, albeit focused entirely outside my bedroom wndow, all at one time and not spread over three decades!”

The facade in Falkensteinstrasse, a cute road stuffed with Turkish cafes, ice-cream parlours, retro furniture shops, bars and eateries, is covered in scaffolding, and on this Wednesday morning, at 7.20am, men called Mesmet and Anatoly loudly discussing something worthy of loud discussion.

By 7.40am they are ripping off the rusting old flowerboxes, albeit gently, as if a slight tug every five seconds may not wake me. Well it has, Mesmet, it has woken me. Slight, but loud, repetition does that pre 8am!

I feel like going outside onto the balcony and remonstrating – well, I would, if the old French doors weren’t stuck fast, swathed in sticky plastic sheeting designed to protect the glass (actually, it’s blue-tinted, making me feel as if I’m living on the wrong side of an aquarium): “Look chaps, just give it some serious welly, then I won’t be woken by the odious clang of clawhammer on rusting metal every five to 10 seconds. Go large, Mesmet, go grosse!”

Of course, bleary-eyed, a tad hangover and bandaged solely in boxer shorts, one shouldn’t try to correct a Turkish builder armed with a clawhammer.

Martina said I would be lucky, that for my minor stay here, the builders would not be starting work until  28 – I took that as meaning June 28; sadly, what she meant was 20 to eight. In other words, in English, NOW! 7.40am. Bang on the dot, with German punctuality, they go at it.

Martina, by the way, is now safely ensconsed in Bristol, at some urban planning symposium, probably in some lush Georgian mansion, serenaded each morning by wafts of Mozart and her frohstuck brought to her by a handsome man called Bristol Dave.

I’m renting her room for a fortnight. The Germans, being mildly thrifty – I said thrifty, not tight – are wont to do this. Websites serve such a purpose. The room-renter buggers off for two weeks, or a month, and they let it out to outsiders. People like me. This would not happen in England.

It’s very trusting of Martina, although her condition is contagious in Germany. Her flatmates are very trusting, too. Within minutes of meeting Diana  – a hospital anaesthetist (a profession that would appear handy at 7.40am this Wednesday morning, what with Mesmet and the Clawhammers knocking seven bails of scheisse out of my windowbox) – she has offered to lend me her car, to visit far flung places such as Spandau. Christine, the other flatty, currently applying for jobs, is also very friendly, and keen on meeting new flatmates. But at 7.40am, all she can lend this tired Englishman is her sympathy.

Sorry but that’s not good enough Christina. Perhaps you can put on my boxer shorts and go outside on the balcony and tell them to zip it until 11am. Come to think of it, that may work!

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I met Heinze in Schwarz Sauer, a veteran bar in Kastanienalle, one which apparently popped up four weeks after the wall came down in 1989. It is, locals say, an institution. Whatever, I know it’s open until 5am, every day, and to me that’s a drinking institute.

I’m gehammert, again, on only a few Berliner Pils (disruptive lager, ja – what do they put in it?). It’s all thanks to Heinze and his mate, the barman, Dennis. Yes, German Dennis, or Deutsche Dennis, as he is now known.

Heinze is a tabloid hack, working for a mass-selling paper in Berlin, and he’s telling me some rather fruity things he gets up to, all in the line of work, “of getting the story”. His shady secrets are safe with me (OK, they’re not – bubble gum on string is a good way to retrieve letters from postboxes, apparently).

His secrets are less safe perhaps  with Marta, a rather drunk late 20-something “actress” sipping champagne and ice, who Heinze (OK, OK, not his real name) is keen to “research”. Inadvertently, I set them up. He gets her number and they pootle off home.

For my reward, I’m asked out for a drink the next night, again in Schwarz Sauer, though this time at 7pm. Again, I amble down some kleine bier bitte while Heinze sniffs at a grosse Weissebiere. I notice he is drinking much slower and talking more. His matter of fact asides ring ot like tabloid headlines: “Unemployed punks get €27 from the state to feed their dogs  … each month!!!

Within three hours chewing das fat, he says he will cure any possible Berliner pils hangover with a surprise.

Next door is a currywurst cabin, not the fabled Konopfke Imbisse on Schonhauser Allee, but a place called Curry15. He orders two wurst, covered in the usual phalanx of sweet ketchup and dazzled with curry powder. It’s great, or so I think. Halfway through my mouth is not so much burning but in meltdown. Think chicken nagasaki coated with tobasco washed down with lit petrol and a radiator on full heat as a napkin!

This aint the usual currywurst; this is pain on a plate. If the menu were numbered, it would be G20! The pain hits my tongue, not my lips. My eyes are welling up.

Etiquette and manners burp through my mind.  I’ve disappointed Heinze by withdrawing from a night out dancing to 80s electropop at Kultur Brauerie – well, you would, wouldn’t you – so how, now, do I deal with the burning question. I put down the radioactive sausage and admit defeat.

Heinze laughs. “Wow, my friend, I thought you were enjoying this – lucky I didn’t get you the hot one.”

Heinze has set me up, a little German joke, perhaps… yes, he has ways of making me balk.

He thinks it funny to take me to a currywurst place fabled for dishing out the hottest sauce in christendom. It’s graded one to five on the sharp scale – die scharfeskala – one being “mild”, the other “unterhuman”. I’m served a “three”, thanks largely to the kind lady behind the counter not going along mitt das joke.

“Essen,” she says, holding out some brotchen (bread).

“This will soak up the pain,” laughs Heinze. “Drink will only make it worse.”

The only thing that will ease my pain is for me to push Heinze’s head in a vat of boiling chili sauce. I resist, largely because revenge is a sausage best served cold, plus there is no boiling vat of chili sauce, although there is a large metal shovel nearby (quite why, I don’t know) …

There is, however, a bottle of the “unterhuman” sauce, lifted from the fridge by Eileen – OK, she’ s not called Eileen, but she leaned over to get the sauce, so it sounds apt. (She’s probably called Magdalena, OK!)

I expect the sauce to have a name like Hiroshima Sunday or “Faust – the People’s Sauce”. It is in fact called Magma. Ooh, you can almost imagine the advert, with Satan atop a spewing volcano saying: “Magma, I lava the taste!”

Fittingly, magma sports  a fine thinner layer of dark red liquid atop the more orangey, creamier contents below. “It has to be kept in the fridge for her to handle it,” laughs Heinze.

Heinze tries to make amends, much like a schoolboy pushing himself over to stop his playground chum telling teacher “that he pushed me over and I grazed my knee”. He administers a few drops on the paper plate, which Eileen, the consummate chili firefighter, then douses in sweet ketchup, to cushion the blow.

In seconds, Heinze appears to be in agony craving brot to soften the gehammert blow.

“Try it Tim?”

“Fuck off Heinze!”

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Prenzlauer Berg, and all of central Berlin come to think of it, is a cafe society. Cafes are everywhere, full, it seems, most times of the day. Hardly surprising given that half the town seems to be freelancing; editing, designing, web-producing, screenplay writing, screenplay designing – I’ve lost count of freelance filmmakers, writers, journos, playwrights, and designers I’ve shared a quick chat with over ein kaffe bitte.

Everyone is freelance, including Ricardo, an italian journalist filtering out yarns about the Berlin capital. “I on’t know anyone here with  ull-time job,” he says, pating his dog nder the table at Cafe Liebling, a trendy wifi-friendly coffee and cake shop in Dunckertsrasse, on Helmholtz Platz.

With all this freelancing, with its intermittent pay and limited conditions (ie none), people seem to have little or no money. Funny then they hang around in cafes where a coffee is €2 a pop. The answer is, order once, and pay once, but sit there all day. Hardly a great business model for cafe owners who are probably as poor as their customers.

I glance over at my bike; there’s a five-year-old looking at it. Leave. The. Bike. Alone, my mind thinks. My expression works on a different premise. I smile at the mum, as if saying, “aaaah, how cute”. Glad mum doesn’t realise I’m really thinking, “if your kid so much as attempts to bolt crop my steel-reinforced padlock and dose the rottweiler next to it with rohipnol or poisoned meat chunks, I shall have words!”

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