Going out in Berlin

Our final night in Berlin we decided to go out to the Tacheles. Jess had gone there when she spent a summer studying in Berlin. The building used to be a squatters’ building but it had become a space for a beer garden and artists, studios. The whole structure was covered in graffiti and stunk like a toilet. All along the street there were entrances to various bars/clubs that are part of the building. We went into one of them which had stairs leaving up to the artists’ studios and another bar at the top of the place. Some of the artists had really cool pieces for sale. One guy had done “sculpture/diorama scenes” of marshmallows and photographed them. (He had used Jet-Puffed, smart man.) He also had T-shirts he had painted. Other artists had paintings for sale. This was all on the second floor of the building. Upstairs was a spray-painted hallway which was covered in graffiti, but none of those artists were in their studios. On the top floor, we went into a bar to look down at the beer garden space (which had a cover charge). It looked like fun downstairs, but it wasn’t that packed and not worth paying to enter. When Jess lived in Berlin, there was no cover charge and the place was packed all the time. You don’t have to buy alcohol at the bars because Berlin doesn’t have an open-container law. I had purchased a gluten-free rice beer the previous day and we walked around sharing the half-liter bottle. We didn’t even drink half of it because it was pretty bad. Jess didn’t like it because it was bad beer and I didn’t like it because it still tasted very beer-like. It confirmed that I don’t like beer. Being allergic to beer is actually pretty easy for me because I think it’s pretty gross.