Berlin - best of all?

Having declared my love for Lisbon just a few weeks ago, I have been unfaithful already. I was in Berlin earlier this week, and it now challenges fantastic Lisbon for my affections.

It was only a 36 hour trip, but while I was there I had the unmistakable feeling that Germans are indeed a master race. Everywhere I looked the people seemed to be healthier, more beautiful, more intelligent, more relaxed, and more efficient. A homeless man tried to sell a magazine in the metro, and not only was he impeccably polite, but his canine sidekick was so well trained as to trot up and down the carriages offering the magazine to passengers from within a plastic folder in its mouth.

After the organised chaos of London, Berlin felt incredibly civilised. The streets are wide, and the cycle lanes enormous; the roads are never busy and traffic cruises along at an amiable pace. While London blindly aims to become the new Manhatten, Berlin's blend of beautiful old and tasteful new architecture is generally low-rise, and there is an abundance of green space, especially right in the centre of town next to the parliament. For a metropolis of two million it feels as sedate and welcoming as a small town, whilst also being one of the most vibrant cities in the world.

I was there to run a couple of meetings, and not wanting to waste a charities money stayed in suitably squalid accommodation, managing to find one of the city's few ugly buildings to call home for a night. The sewage pipes in our enormous hostel shook violently every time a neighbour put them to use, and the blinds fell apart when opened. It was next door to the North Korean embassy, and aside from the towering fence around one of them, the two buildings looked identical. As I went with a colleague to get food we saw the North Korean diplomats' young children playing in the embassy compound, stretching their arms through the impenetrable fence in what looked like a tragic bid to escape.

The meetings we held went alright, though we soon realised that the Germans are a touch audience. Long the industrial powerhouse of Europe, with enormous trade surplus, they are not used to relying on outsiders. (While the war and especially the Wall are still recent memories, the Marshall Plan seems well and truly forgotten.) So our offer to strengthening their civil society through pan-European collaboration was met with a cool 'so what'. But there were some glimmers of hope and we'll keep plugging away.

Some visitors to Berlin may think that the Wall remains an unhealthy obsession for Berliners. Every map of the city has it marked in a fat red line, and an initiative to mark the footprint of the wall is almost complete. I was reminded of the video's on sale in beautiful Dubrovnik, showing the city's pounding by 'Yugoslav' artillery.

But it could also be seen as a brave attempt to acknowledge the past. The scars of the city's division are still apparent: much of the no man's land separating the two sides remains wasteland, while the starkly contrasting housing on both sides is clearly evident.

This contrast has given rise to an interesting social phenomenon, where the poorer eastern part of the city has attracted a predictable mix of bohemians and artists, making it the coolest part of the city, though now increasingly populated by 'yuppies pretending to be poor'. Apparently they're making the place boring: Starbucks et al are moving in and the interesting galleries and parties are harder to find.

This case was put to me as an example of the importance of social capital by a German intellectual I met in Lisbon two weeks prior. He explained governments narrow-mindedly turf out squatters because they think more money can be made from property in other ways, ignoring the social capital that squatters may bring to an area. The former New York Mayor Ed Koch tapped into this when he said that he only needed the artists in Brooklyn until they could no longer afford to live there.

But despite the encroaching gentrification and the sprouting of a dull and generic western city-scape in areas such as Potzdamer Platz, Berlin remains intensely vibrant, independent and, dare I say it, 'edgy'. However I'm reliably informed that, while it's indisputably a great place, it's nowhere near as dynamic as Hamburg, Munich, or Freiburg. I have a host of potential mistresses awaiting.

Andalucia: home is where the history is

My parents have done well: though not rich, they have carved out for themselves a most idyllic life in the stunning mountains of Andalusia, near a small town called Gaucin.

They met in Spain in the 70s and moved back when I left home in 2002. It's now the family home, though I've never lived there for longer than eight weeks and it doesn't feel like home to me.

I've visited every year of my life except 2008, when my growing concern at climate change prevented me from flying 'unnecessarily'. But I finally relented and have just spent a week there, swimming, sleeping, reading and relaxing. Principles have a high price.

My parents' place is an ongoing labour of love, having grown slowly from a modest hut in the early 80s to the comfortable villa that it is today. I spent my days lounging around by the pool, deciding whether to go for the deck chair or the hammock, and playing with my fantastic two-year old nephew.

Imagine lying here, in a crisp 27C, with nothing but the distant sounds of birds, crickets, and goats' bells gently tinkling. It is the perfect place to relax.

Though quiet and rural, Gaucin is far from boring. There are all manner of cultural quirks to keep the nosey visitor amused.

It's a very traditional village. The elderly man who grazes his sheep on my parents' small fields uses tools and methods as his grandfather did, and has never travelled more than a hundred kilometres from the village. He is typical of his generation.

Of course the younger generation expects more. Born into MTV and YouTube rather than Franco's austere republic, they are like young people in any advanced liberal democracy: demanding, noisy, restless. They smoke dope behind the blacked-out windows of small cars with shiny rims and deafening sub-woofers just as my peers did in my sleepy home town in England.

This much is typical of the area, but what sets Gaucin apart from the neighbouring white villages is its large number of foreign residents. My parents were among the first, but now there are dozens of couples (generally without children and approaching, or past, retirement) from across Europe, north America and even Japan. These foreigners mostly don't wear gold chains, read The Sun or demand egg and chips for dinner like the stereotypical Brits abroad, and most speak excellent Spanish, but I sense that their presence still brings a tension within the village. They are resented for not being local, for pushing up house prices. Yet without the expats most of the village would be unemployed, and the local economy would be desperately stagnant. They've also started an impressive art collective.

The expat scene is something to behold: gin and tonic on the veranda, endless games of bridge, and the Archers on Radio 4. It feels semi colonial, partly because many of the expats were part of that scene in days gone by. One expat, a rather posh fellow named George, has recently build stables neighbouring my parents' land, complete with infuriatingly noisy peacocks and geese. He complained that our unkempt field - which has been left to grow into a semi-wild natural habitat - was 'harbouring beasts' (i.e. mongeese and stoats) which were attacking his beloved birds. (Parallels to President Bush accusing 'unfriendly' countries of harbouring "terr-ists"). When my father said that he didn't know whether these 'beasts' were in fact residing in our field, George asked incredulously "well don't you walk your land?!". My father conveyed his deep sadness at the beasts' attacks, secretly hoping that they'd cull the rest of George's screeching flock as soon as possible.

And that's not all. Besides the peasant farmers leading near medieval lives, the typically 'independent' youth, and the bizarre expat scene, there is also a truly labyrinthine and machiavellian local political scene, complete with corruption scandals (both the traditional backhander and the topical expenses varieties), and vote-rigging allegations. And all of this in a cinematically picturesque village.

The evening before I left was the summer equinox, and we were invited to mark the occasion at the remote farmhouse where my parents met and first lived together. Our host, having lived there the 30 years since they left, was an incredibly eccentric and extrovert 83 year old. An architect, he worked under the legendary Le Corbusier, and still designs stunning buildings to this day. His office is the height of modernity, utilising every technology, yet has no car, walking the 7km to get there every day, and lives without doors or electricity. As we ate in growing darkness he initially refused to light candles for fear of undermining the stars' splendour, only relenting when wine was spilled over the fully-laden table by a friend bravely trying to dice a watermelon blind.

The other guests were a fascinating and charming bunch of ageing hippies, most of whom had been in Spain for over 30 years. Unlike most of Gaucin's expats, they are an older generation. Their sense of belonging in Spain is total, as most have been there longer than anywhere else. It is their home for the rest of their lives, and seeing them so clearly in love with their adopted country was touching.

Though I love the place, it doesn't feel like home to me. I disgracefully only speak very poor Spanish. But it's where my parents' heart is, and until I find my own idyll, it's good enough for me.

Lisbon: learning in luxury

Hot on the heels of being cringingly branded a 'young leader' by being selected for the Intercultural Navigation programme, I was last week elevated to international heights by being graced with an invitation to the BMW Foundation's European Young Leaders Forum. However unlike the British Council, which houses the leaders of the future in musty dorms, the BMW Foundation put us up in a five star hotel, in Lisbon. (I must confess that for both schemes I was selected not on merit, but on a recommended-by-a-friend type basis - in the brave new world of our network society it's not what you know, but which networks you know.)

As expected, the Forum's participants were high-calibre: the group of 40 hailed from over 20 countries, all were extremely smart and successful, and the breadth of their fields was stunning. Thy spanned the full range of professional sectors, from the most blood curdlingly corporate (a Ukrainian entrepreneur explained that his priority was not only to have a nice car, but the most expensive Mercedes on the market), to the most esoteric academia (a Latvian professor baffled the entire room with his absurdly verbose explanations of even the simplest points), to the most no-nonsense public sector (a Dutch European Central Banker delivered dreadful dry jokes and economic assessments in identical monotone) to the dreamiest lefty (a German idealist argued passionately that developing local energy markets could replace capitalism with a radical grassroots democracy). And of course all spoke impeccable English as a second or third language.

Though mostly in their mid-thirties or younger, these people's achievements were astounding. One had persuaded Greenpeace to fund him and some friends to write a report on green technologies which was so successful that it prompted the World Bank and UN to invite them to present it at their HQs, and the Swedish Government to change their climate policies. Another started a solar panel company in France which now employs 55 people and is growing at around 20% a year. A third started his own investment bank in Lithuania, which is now one of the biggest in the country, and is about to start his Ph.D. All three are the same age as me! Such stories were not exceptional within the group; they were the norm.

Almost competing with the brilliance of the participants were the stunning palace, exquisite and endless food, first-class entertainment and gorgeous weather that hosted our deliberations. Not to mention the beautiful host city itself - wondering through its effortlessly elegant lanes, soaking up the uniquely relaxed, deeply cultured and refreshingly down-to-earth atmosphere, I fell in love with the place.

It would have been easy to feel overwhelmed by such elevated surroundings, but instead I allowed myself to be swept up in the big ideas being thrown around and focussed on trying to keep up with the discussions. However what really made my name within the group was my capacity for sleep deprivation. 

Following an early morning flight I was shattered by the end of the first day, but when our local ringleader demanded we then visit some bars, it didn't take long for the peer-pressure and my own hedonism to get the better of me. I was also fully aware that these informal excursions are often the most valuable part of international networking events. 

After a late night and an early start the next day (BMW wanted to get the most out of us and saw the agenda as a challenge to see how much they could squeeze into each day), I was struggling to stay awake, but found myself out again the next night, with two American tourists and Geoff Mulgan - luminary of British politics, policy, thank-tanks, and now also the international social innovation scene - at Lisbon's most famous club, Lux.

Part-owned by John Malkovic, Lux is an institution. Widely regarded as the best club in Portugal, it effortlessly combines international chic with a come-as-you-are cool. Its large and quirky layout is complemented by huge outdoor spaces and a waterside location offers stunning views across the enormous Rio Tejo. The music is good enough to appease aficionados without being too loud or niche to deny those wishing to chat or dance stupidly. And dance stupidly we did. It was a great night.

I somehow ended up back there the following night, with 15 Forumites in tow. Though it didn't match the surreal appeal of the previous night, it was still good fun. However it did cement my reputation as the hardest party animal of the Forum, being the only person to go out on all three nights. After around 10 hours sleep in three nights I looked and felt like a baggy-eyed zombie, but I managed to stay awake during the discussions, and knew that I'd be able to trade of this hedonistic image for years to come, if I played my cards right.

Of course the discussions themselves were more than mere window-dressing for my nocturnal folly. The Forum topic was 'Social Cohesion Beyond the Nation State', and the three main issues were migration, social investments, and climate change. The Forum was jam-packed with inspirational speeches, innovative discussion formats, and fascinating new ideas, such as the concept of 'social remittances', which are the 'western' ideas (such as entrepreneurialism, or human rights) that migrants send back to their home communities, and have been shown to be a progressive force in developing countries.

Many of the participants were either economists or climate change experts, so there was much talk about financial mechanisms to promote environmental sustainability. It felt as if the people present were well-placed to offer genuine solutions to the issues at hand, and whilst the conversations were very technical and largely over my head, they were invigorating to observe. These discussions were balanced by a field trip to a favela school that struggled badly before being dramatically turned around by an impressive headteacher with stunningly progressive methods.

My four days in Lisbon rewarded me with a head bursting with inspiration, a stack of exciting new contacts, and the prelude to a nasty cold on account of the punishment my body had endured. Luxurious it was, but it left me in desperate need of a holiday.