In between wandering around Germany for research purposes I dodged off to Berlin to spend the holiest holiday of the catholic calendar hanging out in Berlin and dancing the Lindy Hop. I booked a hostel room in the middle of the super-gentrified (but thus chock full of cake-filled cafes) area in the vicinity of Schoenhauser Allee, hoping that it would be relatively near a number of parties. Berlin has a very big Lindy Hop scene and on a holiday weekend it wasn't
hard to find multiple dances with live bands going on every night, so I
just chose the nearest ones!
The whole trip went by in a bit of a blur. It came after an intense week of messing up experiments and helping to write a book chapter and it took a while for my head to calm down, especially seeing as I knew that afterwards I would have to climb back on the science wagon and head off to Dresden for a conference. The dream-like feeling was not helped by the somewhat shifted time one ends up living in when dancing till 2 or 3 am every night...
After my first afternoon checking out the neighbourhood restaurants (had delicious Vietnamese food) and exploring the local parks in the drizzle, I set off half an hour on the tram for my first taste of Berlin Lindy hop night life, getting home predictably late and getting up predictably later. I had earmarked a couple of bookshops the day before and descended on one of them to provide fuel for all the hanging around I planned to do over the rest of the weekend. After going to another laundrette (my second ever, and within a week of the first...) and sitting around some more with my purchases, I resolved towards sunset to use the sudden burst of spring sunshine to take some cool pictures of the places I had only spied in the rain a day earlier.
All the pictures in this post stem from that one 2 hour stroll around town, which was extremely pleasant and spring-y and ended with a magical sunset over the Mauerpark, silently shared with the masses of young Berliners sitting on top of the hill and soaking in the first good days of the year. Honestly, I never really liked Berlin so much the last few times I visited it, but I think now that is because I only ever saw it in winter, where the grey and rain and early darkness hide its airy green spaces and make its broad avenues seem closed in and unfriendly. In the spring the whole place seems so much friendlier, full of light and children and parks, and the broad boulevards become places to sit along and soak up the sun rather than ice-slicked deathtraps.
That evening I attended an even better Lindy Hop dance than the evening before, with better sound and a bit more space to move around. The next day I was even more exhausted than before and after breakfasting on cake I headed off to a tea dance with the idea of packing things in early and getting a bit more sleep that night. The tea dance had a decidedly 50s and 60s bent and I enjoyed it but was utterly puzzled by the fact that although jive and boogie look ust like things I can already do in Lindy Hop, it was still really difficult to dance with partners who only knew those dances... A mystery to be solved in the future, no doubt.
The rest of my weekend was filled with more lazing about, more reading, more eating, and a tiny bit of work to get myself ready for the coming conference.
Hope you enjoy my photos of my sunny stroll in Berlin, once again in their new home on flickr.
Happy Spring/Summer and bis bald,
der Tom
