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 right to be paranoid about the 240 euro bike. Leaving it outside my Prenzlauer Berg abode, in a bike stand for two weekend nights, I return to find it keeled over. After unlocking it, I find the back wheel has buckled. Bang goes my 150 euros resale.

Not so. The bike man at spezialrad.de bike shop, or fahrradstadt, is ever-so helpful, and immediately pushes it back into shape, studiously twisting and reprogramming the spokes to engineer the perfect turning circle.

He tells me that at weekends, some kids have an excess of “criminal energy”, and it has become a bit of a sport for them to stamp on bikes lying prone, and alone, in stands such as mine. It’s a mild crime compared to the unruly, armed feral youths in London, for whom the vandalism of stamping on a bike wheel is but fare for toddlers.

Unfortunately, and rather embarrassingly, I have cycled through some dog scheisse – an everyday hazard in Berlin, especially given the size of the dogs and the fact they run free, nicht lead. The wheel is turning right before Stefan’s very nose.

He recounts a tale, about how one day he had been biking through puddles, only to get home and smell dog scheisse. He checked his clothes, his boots, but no trace of the evil dirt. Dreizig minuten later,  still somewhat befuddled, he looked in the mirror and spotted a fleck  right under his nose.

“I’d had my mudguards removed and it sprayed up … I always call them scheisseguards now.”

The anecdote was as free as the repair job. He didn’t charge me. “Don’t worry,” he says. “Life’s too short. See you Thursday.”

This man is a God. He can probably walk on water, as well as cycle on it.

* Photo courtesy of artsy Lucy Hull

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Ossiana is dressed in rag tag motorbike punk gear, his hair long, uncombed, bedraggled. Think Easy Rider, on acid. He’s unshaved, too, but with make-up. He is wearing a hat redolent of the Droogs’ enemies in A Clockwork Orange, and drinking Augustinerbier from a silver dented goblet, “To keep it cool”.

Ossiana is, apparently, a teacher from Oakley, San Francisco. Quite why he is here is anyone’s guess. It’s anyone’s guess why anyone is here in Berlin except to party, lose it, get creative, and hang out. It’s certainly not to make money.

At this particular party there’s plenty of Americans. In fact, there’s scarcely a German accent. Brits, Aussies, French, Japanese, Swiss – an international brothel of muddled funsters.

Jenny has just come back from London. she seems to be in shock.  “God, London robs you,” she drawls. Yes, yes it does. Although at 5 euros per pop, this party is robbing you too, no doubt.

Soooeu, from Japan, has moved from London. She hopes to get an artist visa, although she is not an artist. She has two months to prove otherwise to Germany’s legendary bureaucrats. She should start a band and play at this party.

I say party, it’s more shindig, a happening, a party for friends, about 30 friends who make music, who create, who appreciate, who listen; who hang out. It’s part-art school party, part-party, part fashion event; there are some seriously trendy people here, albeit trendy in spirit rather than garb.

Ossiana is certainly trendy in spirit. His band, Weekend at Bernie’s, is on second in this rundown Neukölln industrial unit turned artist’s space.

Neukölln is the up and coming area, where arty types and artists are flocking in droves, exploiting cheap rents and taking over under-used or abandoned factories for studio space.

Raum 18, at Ziegelstrasse 11 is no different. It’s a tad far from KreuzKolln, the made-up mishmash name for the currently du jour district bordering bohemian Kreuzberg, where rents are on the rise. People fear Kreuzberg may go the way of Pramslauer Berg. Up!

Raum achtzehn is in a seen-better-days light industrial unit, perched on the Treptow canal by Sonnenallee S-Bahn, the type with rusting metal window frames left rather absurdly framing smashed windows. Next door a Turkish boy is having his coming of age party. Upstairs, on the fourth floor, up through the concrete stairwell is a coming of age party, too, for three “bands”.

Bands is a loose term. First up are two guys who turn the lights down low. Their music can best be described as industrially charged eardrum-baiting. There is no tune save for a recurrent low-bass dirge, interspersed with a minor amount of electronic keyboard and the odd word mouthed into a mic which is then morphed into a sound best described as Darth Vadar punching Orka the Very Depressed Killer Whale.

They last 20 minutes. Nineteen minutes too long.

Then comes Ossian. Listen for yourselves. Make your own mind up. It’s not everyone’ cup of tea, but I rather respect Ossian for trying. His band members, two females, playing what looks like medieval stringed pieces of wood, add colour, too. The music may sound primevil, but the lyrics – belted out, granted – have some poetic resonance.

Next, and last, is v.tits. An odd name given that v.tits is one person. A woman playing guitar, bemoaning, it seems, a lost love.

Natalia thinks v.tits will be v.big one day. “She has style, talent,” she says, racing off to catch the last S-Bahn home at 12.30am. V.maybe. V.maybe not.

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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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