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

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

Ossiana

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.

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!”

Prenzlauer Berg on trendy Kastianenalle – a boulevard of kitsch designer shops, boutiques, cafes, bars and pizzerias – doesn’t wake till at least 10, when most kaffes slowly open their doors, agonisingly slowly when you are busting for a coffee. It gives the impression that everyone is still asleep until at least 11, when the freelance rush hour starts. There is another rush hour of sorts going on – a steady stream of bikes heading into Mitte, mums and kids on the school run.

But it’s a school run with a difference, en velo. Children are packed int an assortment of ferrying devices: a saddle and foot shelves welded on the crossbar; bikes with kinder saddles over the back wheel; bikes with covered trailers towed behind; or the supposedly de rigeur new Dutch import – a wooden box at the front, bigger than an old market porter’s bike, welded to the front, a sort of mobile playground for kids, big enough to carry three or four under-5s.

Rise at 8am and the traffic is all mamas und papas, taking kids to the kindergarten. I say kindergarten because Pramslauer Berg seems to have a preponderance of kids under 5. Few, if any, are older.

“It’s all down to the trendy web and designer types who moved here in their 20s, about 10 years ago,” says Matilda, the waitress at one coffee shop that does open at 8am. “They grew up, got girlfriends, got married, and had kids. Now Penslauer Berg has so many kids under 5 it’s unreal.

“Prenzlauer lost its edge.”

She is being kind. Prenzlauer Berg is one big playground, for kids; teeming with teething tots or toddling toddlers. A Sunday here is like strolling along the nursery slopes in the Alps. Never mind the uneven or cobbled pavements, the trams, the bikes, the cars – it’s kids you need to avoid.

Eva is the most trusting person I have met so far. Well, I didn’t actually meet her. but that’s what makes her so trusting. Eva is away on holiday, you see, miles away on the Baltic, but it doesn’t stop her renting out her spare room. She has left her details with the exberliner flat renting agency and the keys with the neighbour.

It’s €125 per week, still cheaper than a private room in a nearby hostel, and she has one bedroom/office, with a small living room, and a kitchen, with a sizeable south-facing roof terrace/balcony. The neighbour, who has hurt her thumb and is off work, shows me in.

Eva is happy for me to move in if I like it even though she will not there be there for nigh on two weeks. “It’s OK, I trust you,” she says.

The words still jar. She has not even met me, yet … She … Trusts…. Me. It sticks in the craw. Why should she? Dumkopft, is she mad? Nein.

No one in Berlin seems mad, just trusting, accommodating, nice, friendly. Mad then? Probably not.

Her neighbour – let’s call her Frau Schmidt – must be mad, too. She just leaves me the keys after showing me a cursory glance of the living space, Despite my best attempts to tell her I am seeing more apartments, she leaves, putting the keys in my hand. A middle-aged east Berliner, she has had little or no schooling in English, though she probably speaks perfect Russian.

I have to ring the agency to explain to her. “Katja, the Germans are being nice again, help!”

Everyone cycles in Berlin. It’ s flat, save for a few rubble mountains sculpted from all the war rubble, with plenty of cycle lanes and a laidback attitude to cycling on pavements. Bike theft is not a problem judging by how people lock up their bikes. People just put it on its stand and lock a wheel. It’s just another easily apparent instance of a better quality of life that Germans, even in their supposedly vice-ridden urbane capital, enjoy over Londoners and Brits in general.

Bikes can be rented for about 10 euros a day, or down to six euros a day for a prolongued hire. Try Lila Bike at Schonhauser Allee 41 (+49176  611  24 909) or the Berlin chain known as Fahrrädstation, which will hire one for €100 euros  a month, mitt hefty deposit. Next door on Schonhauser, there’s Bike Piraten, which buy, sell and repair cycles. You can grab one for €50, if you have an ass like concrete and you want to wobble around Berlin on a decrepit death trap.

If you are here for a month, though, it’s best to buy one, then flog it back to the shop. Most will oblige. I plan to use mine a lot, so I grab an expensive one from a reputedly good dealer, like Fahrradladen on Lychener Strasse.

It specialises in old bikes and doing them up, like old Dutch bikes (currently in vogue in Berlin). They don’t come cheap. the cheapest is about €160, though Angelo will buy it back for say €90, depending on das wear and tear. I do the maths, and, depending if I don’t get it stolen, I plump for a green Apache mountain bike, with a basket fitted in the back. It cost €235, but he will buy it back for 160. Bargain, if i don’t lose it or wedge it under a tram!

There is one glitch – the basket at the back makes it virtually imposible to cock your leg over and mount, without lookign like a tired geriatric with stiff legs. There’s also the paranoia.

Having a bike alost twice as expensive as your two-wheeler in London makes you a tad edgy. Angelo says that although bike theft is not unheard of, and that Berliners have two bikes -  ein scheisse one for the pub, and a good one for Sundays – it’s best not to leave it outside the U-Bahns, unless you have a good lock. Watch out for courtyards, too, he says: “Their dark, and where good bikes go missing.”

Thanks, I’ll have the triple safe steel lock with the rottweiler guard dog attached, please.

This former working class district on the former east Berlin has been fully gentrified in the southern reaches nearer Mitte, the old historic city centre. Chi-chi cafes, restaurants and boutiques abound here. In northern Prenzlauer Berg, by Griefswalder Strasse S-bahn, it’s more mixed, more down at heel. Old locals remain, as do their children. What’s more, they want to stay. They don’t want to get pushed out like their southern neighbours. Evicted by rising rents and an area they feel they have little in common with.

Newcomers are welcome, kind of, as long as they don’t push up the rents. Neuergardestrasse has a working class air about it, too. There’s a new frohstuck cafe attracting newcomers for brunch – the meal of choice for newcomers, apparently, and a new bar 50 yards away, the owner of which seems to have trained her dog to walk 50 yards in either direction ofher kneiper for a poop. Nice! Otto or Fritz the dog ables down to the knieper and drops one on the nice patch of garden opposite.

People at the Pinter are proud, and have made a garden out of the earth surrounding their nearest tree. Whether or not they want Alsiatian Friz poop all over is anybody’s else business. They don’t seem to mind. The barmaid laughs. “Scheisser!”

Wilhelm has just returned from skydiving in the countryside – “How was it? F***ing amazing,” he exclaims in brilliant English. Wilhelm is a scenery and lighting engineer, with a holiday the next day he is keen to talk about the area and sup Berliner (”it is not the best beer,” he says, “it is, how you say, disruptive.”) I thik he means it makes you want to do what Fritz is doing, albeit not on the front garden.

“I am new here,” adds Wilhelm, “about eight years but people like Maria have lived here all their life, they can better tell you what life was like here before the wall fell down. how it has changed.”

I ask Maria? “I don’t know, I was five.”

Mikael is more forthcoming. He speaks great English and is interpreting for the others who don’t. However, he rarely sticks to their questions and wants to do as many impersonations of Scottish people as possible – he worked as a call centre operative a few years back near Glasgow. His Scottish accent is, how shall we say, annoyingly bad. Plus he is trying to look like Bono. Not a good look.

Mikeal lost his job and returned to Berlin when the call centre moved to Bratislava. Perhaps they just didn’t like his accent. He says the wall coming down was not good for everyone. People lost their jobs, people got poorer. Then people got pushed out of their area by newcomers and rising rents – west German professionals mainly, and soem foreigners, and their kids.

Kids. There are millions of them in Prenslauer Berg!

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!”

Cheap rent? No longer. A month’s rent for a room on Worthestrasse will cost you about 600 euros, London prices, well, nearly – this is sort of Notting Hill, Chelsea and Greenwich Village all rolled into ein.

Kollwitz Platz and its environs are choc-full of chi-chi restaurants – Chinoise hot-pot or Thai spring roll anyone? Walk around this area, and plenty of Deutsche tourists do, and you notice more playgrounds than pubs, well, green squares and sandpits for das kinder. Prenzlauer Berg should be renamed Pramslauer Berg, it is full of mums  mitt kids – a pram is almost weapon of choice here, the area mocked in Berlin and Germany as one big kiddie town, as the shops around the streets attest; kiddie clothes, wooden toys, and the ubiquitous LGB BioMarkt – “organic food”!

Pramslauer Berg, i’m told variously, has the highest birth rate in Germany or Europe. Every other 30-something woman is pushing a pram, or cycling with a baby in tow, or in a basket. If they have no kids, then they are pregnant. If they are not pregnant, and it’s rare here, they stroll around, arm in arm with das boyfriend with a smile suggesting they are gonna get pregnant very soon. The men? They all looked tired.