There’s no escaping the manic beats. It is everywhere. And when I say everywhere, I.Mean.Everywhere.IN.CAPITAL.LETTERS!

Even the telephone hold lines pump out techno. When put on hold at DeutscheBahn – yes, the staid, boring railway company – you get jumped on by some biffing choons and beats, bro.

After ringing up for train times to Leipzig, I didn’t know whether to hold or neck a couple of Es and sniff some ammyl, such is the thumping bass rocking from the DB DJ machine, man!

If they are not taking their big butch dogs for a walk, nicht lead, of course, Berliners seemingly take their drink for a stroll. Usually it’s a beer, though often it’s Bionade, the lurid-coloured drink of choice invented by master brewer, and more importantly to him probably, patent holder, Dieter Leipold.

Bio stands for organic, and its brewed organically innit (”Fermentation naturlicher”, as it says on the label). You don’t see Berliners drinking anything else, apart from beer that is. The drink, naturally, fermented Herr Leipold millions.

Try the litschi (lychee), pictured above (OK, most bottles don’t stand up like this, that would defy gravity, but it’s getting late and technology is annoying me, like a Jack Russell, albeit one not shagging my leg).

At least I think it’s lychee. Rather refreshing, and not half as sweet as some of the other flavours. Lets call them orange, pink, green, red and purple.

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’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.

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

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.

“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!

I was enjoying a cold Beck’s, outside the uber-cool Mijkowka bar on Schlesischer, interrupted at regular intervals by trendy drunks shambling back home from Freischwimmer. Every 20 minutes one would amble, nay stagger past, saying: “Michael ist tot, Michael ist tot!”

Many seemed upset, most didn’t. God knows what will happen when David Hasselhof goes toes up!

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?

Jez is certainly Jez. A very friendly Jez. He has invited us to his Neukölln studio, which he shares with five other artists – a painter, an illustrator, graphic designer and two others I can’t be bothered to explain (what am I, their PR!) – all seemingly doing their little bit to gradually turn Berlin into one big artists’ commune.

Jez, an acolyte of the Paris St Germain school of art, works in a Monaco casino for two months of the year, raising enough stakes to spend 10 months working in Berlin.

He has talent. Not that I’m the best judge. I had an ex-girfriend once who was an artist. I thought she was good until authorities assured me she was utter pony!

I can’t let you judge his work, either. I’m not allowed, and don’t want to, take pictures of it, so lets say he has a penchant for painting explosions. Large psychedlic blasts. Natalia says his work would go down well in London, at First Thursdays in the East End. Possibly.

It’s colourful, dramatic, and at times as clever in technique as it is bold in colour (just have a look at his mess – a big colourful mess). I’m not too sure about art, or what to say about it, but I like what i see. He paints explosions and energy well, be it the soft blast of sprouting flowers or fucking huge rocks fucking exploding, all seemingly accompanied by a man, or two, diving into the frame. Hmmm.

“What is he saying, or trying to say” asks Lucy.

“I don’t know,” replies Jez, “I just like painting explosions.”