Do you ever get that feeling when everything just feels… wrong? You can’t put your finger on it, but you know this can’t be the way things are supposed to be, so you may as well just give up right now? Why even try and make things right?

I haven’t always known this, but recently I’ve come to recognise this as my anxiety speaking. It transforms my happy go lucky outlook on life to one of resigned bleakness. I’m so happy to be able to call it by its name. To be able to look at it, almost objectively, and push it out the door. Phew!

Simmy and I took a trip recently. A really well timed trip. We went to Berlin. Neither of us have spent much time in Germany before, but it seemed like a really interesting place to visit, so off we went [bundled up in hats and gloves and scarfs and jumpers and more jumpers].

[On a side note, I highly recommend to anyone looking to take more trips to sign up to the Skyscanner Cheap Deals of the Week – so great!]

Berlin’s culture and history

When you visit somewhere you’ve never been before, more often than not you have a preconceived idea of what you’re going to encounter whilst you’re there. You pick up bits of information from movies, films, friends who have visited that city or country, stereotypes you hear about the people, perhaps what you’ve learnt at school in history, or geography.

And more often than not, you’re wildly mistaken. And nowhere more so than Berlin.

Perhaps it’s because, more than probably any other city in the world, I’d learnt about it in history. The rise of the Nazis, WWII, the Cold War, Kennedy’s famous speech. So much of it focused around Berlin. It’s absolutely crazy that the superpowers sat down and decided that it would be a good idea to carve up a city! To carve up a country, and then a city inside one of those country sections? I mean, had none of them read Solomon’s baby?

A city of surprises

We were staying in the north of the city, just on the boarder of what would have been West Berlin before the fall of the wall, and on the first day, we took a tour, mainly through what was East Berlin. I have no idea what I was expecting, but it was not this. Yes, there are areas that have been rejuvenated, that have been gentrified, that are now centres for design, innovation, entrepreneurship and hipster coffee shops. But there are so many areas that just felt post-apocalyptic. That could have come out of the set of the 12 Twelve Monkeys, or been part of the Arcadia set up at Glastonbury.

There were huge sweeping concourses for military parades with a mixture of 1960s modernist blocks of flats [the communist dream, to have a miner living next to a doctor], and blocks of the same era, built in a more traditional style.

Maybe I shouldn’t have re-read 1984 before coming out here, but the book seems all the more real having driven through those streets.

A sudden sadness

Finishing up that leg of the tour, I was filled with this rush of sadness. The reality of what I’d just seen really hit me. This wasn’t a fiction written in a book. This wasn’t just something to be studied in history.

This actually happened.

For decades the people of East Berlin lived this life. After the persecution of the Jews, the terrible WWII, there was the communist rule. And the West Berliners were living inside Communist East Germany. It just doesn’t bear thinking about. They turned one of the parks in West Berlin into a giant vegetable patch because the City was starving.

This year marks 100 years since the end of WWI. I’ve always thought that every November we mark the anniversary of the end of the war to remember the fallen soldiers. And that is a huge part of it. But we have to remember what they were fighting. How and why they died. We must remember the history.

The Katz got the cream

There was so much to enjoy in Berlin, and we weren’t there for very long [I’d love to go back!]. We chose our outings very carefully. And we made some excellent choices!

The first night we went out to a restaurant in Mitte called Katz Orange on the recommendation of a work colleague, and we weren’t disappointed. Like so many places in Berlin, it was hidden away, only to be found if you know what you’re looking for [and thanks to our tip off, we did].

The taxi dropped us off on an unassuming side street, that could just have easily been in a New York residential area, and we walked under an archway into a beautifully lit courtyard, with this incredible, gothic, red sandstone building looming up at the other end.

We’re warmly welcomed at the door, and taken to our table upstairs, overlooking the courtyard.

My starter has firmly got to be one of my all time favourite dishes: sea trout ceviche with orange and coriander. It was divine. The sea trout was firm, creamy and fatty. The citrus dressing tasted like clementine, with the slight perfume from the young coriander leaf. It was very similar to a dish that I had a Nobu years ago and waxed lyrical about for far too many moons; a salmon sashimi dish with a clementine and star anise dipping sauce.

A city carved into pieces

There so much to see and do in Berlin. I would love to go back there some day. The wall, whether its absence, its memorial, its celebration, reclamation, is felt throughout the city. In some places the path it used to run is marked by a simple line of stone, cutting through the city. In some places it had been kept. Parts of the wall have been removed and taken to other parts of the city, you see them hanging off the sides of buildings.

There is a park that memorialises the wall. They have kept parts, and replaced parts with steal bars, to show it’s course, but that can be seen through. The memorial park, before the war, was partly a cemetery, and part of the cemetery wall has been rebuilt to signify its original use.

High highs, and low lows

Our journey through the city was such a rollercoaster. I can’t even tell you. In East Berlin they built a huge TV tower with a viewing platform. People could go up and look into West Berlin for the first time. They weren’t allowed into that part of the city, apparently it was blank on all the Soviet maps, they basically denied its existence, but they built a hulking great tower for everyone to look at the city.

Weird, huh?

We went to a fine dining restaurant that you have to walk through the loading bay of a different hotel to get to, and where they stamp the dessert menu on the table cloth. We went to a Salvador Dali exhibition, covering some of his least well known work, and learnt about his skills as a self marketer. We saw a Damien Hirst shark in Soho House, and ate oysters in the Harrods of Berlin.

And yet… there’s something surreal and down to earth about Berlin. They say that tension is needed to make great art. And Berlin has that in bucket loads. For every luxury there is a history, in the not too distant past. This was built in a creator, and this survived the war because of a peppy young police man, and this was built because the previous one was destroyed, and these streets are wide because in previous revolutions citizens barricaded the streets, and wider streets are harder to barricade.

What’s the verdict, Berlin?

I feel like we only scratched the surface of the city. I want to get under its skin. I want to breath it in. I want to learn German, to live in the city, to feel what it feels. Every street you turn down has a different tale to tell. A different version of events. A different history. Berlin is a city of the world, and one begging to be explored.

Berlin helped to get me out of my own head. It helped me to see that there is a great wide world out there. It showed me the power of perseverance. Of unity. Of sticking by one another. The power of self belief.

I came back from the trip with a renewed sense of belonging. It has helped bring me self concept clarity. And for that, I am truly thankful.

I think Berlin got under my skin, don’t you?

Stay curious! x