For a city known by its party-hard culture and uninhibited attitude toward every kind of vice and indulgence, Berlin is fittingly prone to long-lasting hangovers. In much the same way that many locals will roll into work on a Tuesday after a start-of-the-week ‘sick day’, following a 30-hour bender in multiple venues across Friedrichshain, it can be said that certain aspects of Berlin life take longer to get going than they should, writes Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier.
Admin, for instance. The well-worn cliché that Germans love their paperwork has earned its enduring cultural lifespan because it is absolutely and totally true. By and large, German medical practitioners and council workers will not respond to emails or open PDF attachments. The best – and, sometimes, only – way to convey something to someone in Germany is by mail and by phone.
As such, when trying to navigate the surprisingly convoluted German healthcare system, do not ever throw away any of the correspondence you receive via mail. There will come a point when, if you need a prescription issued for a specific medication, you may be asked to provide a PIN code that was printed precisely once on a single letter, half a year ago. And if you happened to throw that letter away or lose it, and you can’t share that one PIN code? Well, God help you.
The biggest Berlin hangover, though, is the lingering malaise between winter and spring, when the temperatures routinely fail to hit double digits. For readers in the southern hemisphere, spring in Berlin officially starts on March 20. And yet, as I write this now in the middle of April, we have just emerged from a four-day streak of grey skies, icy winds and even a brief flurry of snowflakes.
Nevertheless, there have been enough bursts of bright blue skies and 17-degree days to give us hope for what lies ahead.
Party time
In the months since we landed at the end of November, there has not been a huge amount of time to dance our ass off and then drag it home again at 8:00 am. Even now, my partner and I are still getting to grips with various aspects of living here that prevent us from truly making the best of where we are.
Speaking personally, the core focus of my day-to-day existence is just applying for jobs and trying to network as much as humanly possible. My visa expires in November so I have a very real ticking clock over my head to keep me up at night. Which made it high time that my partner and I had a big night out; indeed, our first since moving here from Melbourne. Under the wing of a new friend I’d made, we were invited by him and his husband to pre-drinks at their apartment before venturing out to a gay techno party called Overload.
I had no idea what to expect, though a glance at the event’s Instagram page raised my suspicions that it was primarily a sex party. I was swayed otherwise with my friend’s confidence that it was a dance party that just so happened to feature dark rooms and so I agreed to come.
It turned out to be a sex party first and a techno event second. As we approached the event, all I could see through the doors was a sea of bare skin, comprised of many shapes and shades, clad in little else than jockstraps and leather harnesses.
The event itself had two large rooms with techno blasting throughout the dark, strobe-splashed interiors. The event’s usual venue occupies a three-storey building but this apparently occurs in the full swing of the summer party circuit. As such, there were just as many dancefloors as there were darkrooms in its reduced capacity operations for the spring season.
For the sake of modesty, I won’t go into too much detail, but I can divulge that my time was somewhat equally split between being on my feet and with my legs in the air. In true Berlin fashion, I left around 8am and spent much of the weekend sleeping off the highs I had experienced earlier that morning.
Health and fitness
One of the dominant observations of life in Berlin is the heavy emphasis placed on fitness culture and sportswear. Adidas tracksuit bottoms are a serious fashion staple here with oversized variants of the classic black-and-white-striped trackies seen paired with long black cashmere coats or figure-hugging tank tops.
Men in Berlin – especially those in their late teens – are visibly jacked. There is a substantial focus here on fitness, with much of Berlin’s streetwear emphasising this: baggy jeans and muscle-fit tops are standard uniform across much of the city. And yet, despite the widespread presence of extremely fit young men, Berlin actually has very few gyms. There are just a handful of chains here and their sites are broadly scattered across various extremes of the city limits. The prevalent method of fitness seems to be classes in small fitness studios offering yoga and pilates, with maybe eight larger gyms to be used across the entire city.
Gyms are therefore quite crowded, making the already tense experience of working out even more aggravating when the machines you need are nearly never free. There is also a markedly increased presence of rampaging male energy in Berlin than one finds at Australian gyms, due to the fact over half the clientele are young men.
That was one of the bigger, unexpected culture shocks about moving to Berlin: how soon boys start going to the gym. I will occasionally see boys who look as young as 14 excitedly lifting weights with their similarly slim, pubescent friends. But then, far more frequently, you will be affronted with boys still speckled with pimples and soft facial hair patrolling through the benches and barbells, all sporting 30-inch waists and biceps the size of tennis balls.
As such, the majority of men here are casually drop-dead gorgeous. Most of them average 6’ in height with sharp cheekbones and porcelain complexions of such astounding smoothness that living in Berlin often feels like walking through an issue of GQ magazine.
This can be (extremely) intimidating but after a month or so, you begin to realise that everyone here is hot and so it isn’t even really that amazing any more. You still encounter the occasional blond heart-stopper who will make you whisper breathlessly to the person next to you, Who is THAT? But, for the most part, you get used to being less attractive than 70% of the people around you and just stay in your own lane.
It is, like living in any new city, a learning process and one that ultimately becomes as entertaining as it is peculiar.
