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.
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.
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