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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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!

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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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Kollwitzplatz is ground Zero for gentrification, say locals. It is, well was, the hub of Prenzlauer Berg. Tall, strident, multi-hued Prussian townhouses, albeit spraycanned and tagged at the bottom; structures largely kept intact despite the carpet bombing and east German rebuilding. Colonised by DDR refuseniks, artists, rebels, drop-outs, and the first place to gentrify when the wall came down with west Berliner artists, freethinkers and drop-outs fleeing here for cheap rents. As happens elsewhere, the artists leave and the yuppies move in.

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.

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