Blissful uncoolness & comfortable solitude. A weekend in Berlin.

Some weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting a friend in Berlin and on a Sunday afternoon found myself in Prenzlauer Berg, sitting at a lovely place with a somewhat ironic name, given how left-wing the city is, the Kapitalist Café. I was sitting there with a glass of wine, an oldskul notebook and a head full of thoughts and observations, which I proceeded to jot down and have recently returned to.

I don’t aim to say anything revelatory or particularly clever about Berlin, for a lot has been said and written about the city by people a lot more knowledgeable than me. The picture, haphazardly painted upon and after my visit, is naturally going to be subjective, filtered through my eyes which were dazzled with beautiful typography and architecture, and my soul cherishing a momentary escape from the everyday patterns and uniformed shapes of lifestyles and thoughts surrounding me.

Berlin is a city of expression – true, free, unrestrained self-expression. Anything goes. It’s like London’s once-upon-a-time subversive Camden blown-up, multiplied several times, and scattered around town. The abundance of artists, art, galleries, arty things, arty places, arty people, arty objects; graffiti’s and markings, both on the architecture and human bodies, is overwhelming, even for someone who spent almost a decade in the Big Smoke. “Coolness” is inescapable, it penetrates all street corners and nooks, is breathable like the smell of weed, sold here right outside of tube stations. “No one cares” was a sentence that friend of mine who I was visiting kept repeating whenever he saw me rising my brows in curiosity. No one cares that the entire Görlitzer P