Christina has just admonished me for trying to take the empty soda bottles, along with our plates, back into the self-service restaurant on Falckensteinstrasse. It’s not a telling-off, per se, rather an explanation.

“Leave them on the table; people will come along and collect them – they make some money on recycling.”

Who will? “Homeless people, students, poor people,” she says matter of factly. “They redeem the deposit paid on purchase.”

How much, I enquire,  a change of career perhaps imminent?
“Anything between 15 cents and 50 cents,” she says.

Cripes, the pfennig drops. That’s why you see people walking around, accompanied by the steady clink-clink of bags of bottles, either rummaging through bins or collecting bottles off tables or pavements. You only have to grab a few bottles each day to buy lunch. Well, 20.

It makes one wonder why all societies don’t do this. For one, it helps the less better off – “students, homeless, poor people” – scrape a living; it may even deter begging – you don’t see much begging in Berlin, mainly people coming onto trains and selling the German equivalent of the Big Issue, all preceded by some explanatory spiel (spiel that seems to be rewarded with everyone digging deep into their pockets).

The scheme also promotes sustainable living. People take their bottles back to the shops that sold them, and they get rewarded for it. Feral youths in the UK could do this instead of mugging people. Everyone’s a winner.

We had the system in the UK in the 1970s, with deposits paid on big bottles of drinks, such as RWhites and Corona – you kept the bottles and got the cash back. It no longer exists, though I can’t fathom why not.

* Nein green bottles, sitting on the wall? Should be nicht, or kein, I think boss!

Tim Berlin drink, Berlin life, Kreuzberg, berlin

I’ve danced in an old public toilet converted into a club; I’ve visited a flat converted from an old public crapper, I’ve even taken a leak inside a public toilet (yes, so wow, like I so have!)

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?

Tim Berlin architecture, Berlin drink, Berlin life, Berlin walls, Food, Kreuzberg, berlin, transport Berlin food, Berlin transport, Berlin Wall, Kreuzberg, Schlesischer Tor