My Berlin — Diana Kimball Berlin

Stairwell at Hackesche Höfe in Berlin Mitte

For two and a half years, people asked me how long I planned to stay in Berlin. Every time, I answered: “Indefinitely.” I left Berlin almost six months ago, but it’s stuck with me. Here are some of the things I loved.

Shops

Luiban, an immaculate stationery shop. Vintage finds interspersed with Japanese imports.
Modulor, the best art supply store I’ve ever been to. Three floors of raw material, with an atmosphere halfway between a laboratory and a warehouse.
Type Hype, an alphabetical emporium. Find notebooks, mugs, pillows, and more, all emblazoned with individual letters in surprising styles.
Do You Read Me?!, a place for magazines from all over. Come here when you’re in the mood to glimpse other ways of being, or angling to construct a collage.
Trippen, a spot for strange and beautiful shoes designed from first principles.
KaDeWe, a gleaming department store; a trip. Don’t miss the top floor, where expensive luggage mingles with oversized stuffed animals.

Apps

Deliveroo and Lieferheld for food delivery.
BVG FahrInfo for transit. (Buy tickets on your phone!)
MyTaxi for cars.

Smoothies

The Juicery, a weekend haunt. Right across from Mauerpark. I especially liked their “Immunity” smoothie, packed with avocado.
The Juice Company, a place worth becoming a regular. Delicious smoothies, plus tacos and other treats.
Goodies, the classic. “Deep Purple,” featuring blueberries and cinnamon, was my go-to.

Cafés

Bonanza, a pristine café on one of the best streets in Berlin, Oderberger Str. The ceramics sport their name in gold.
Godshot, a multi-level space in Prenzlauer Berg. Downstairs, it could be a living room you snuck into.
Hermann Eicke—old familiar. Candlelit year-round.
Distrikt, airy and grounded. Try their banana bread.
ORA, once an apothecary. Everything you’d hope.
Companion Coffee, inside a boutique called Voo. Visit after a trip to Modulor.
Five Elephants. Truly the best cheesecake.
Father Carpenter. Tucked into a courtyard; splashes of blue abound.

Restaurants

Industry Standard. Honest and elegant. A real find for brunch.
Nobelhart & Schmutzig. Local in the extreme. Unforgettable. The hush, the low lights; the wide, smooth bar we sat at side by side. My phone was stolen on the way home and the memories are still warm.
House of Small Wonder, sister to a restaurant by the same name in Williamsburg. Lush greenery at the entrance, and a spiral staircase to boot. Just-so Japanese dishes and delicate matcha lattes.
Habba Habba. Mediterranean food, fast. I’m sure I ordered their fattoush salad over a hundred times.
Fine Bagels at Shakespeare and Sons. Bagels and lox in an English-language bookshop. A Sunday ritual.
The Bowl. Rice bowls galore.

Movement

Ashtanga Yoga, a home for Mysore instruction. Go at your own pace.
Dance Works. I took a beginners’ modern dance class here and loved it. It was late summer; we opened all the windows to keep the room from getting too humid. So much sweat produced by leaping and twirling.
Bicycle paths everywhere.

Experiences

Monster Kabinett. Weird and wonderful animatronics, underground.
Liquidrom and Vabali. The best spas in all the land.
Hamburgerbahnhof. Modern art in an old train station.
Bike from Berlin to Potsdam. Invigorating and not too exhausting.
Christmas markets. I went to my first Christmas market the night before I left Berlin. I wish I’d gone sooner! What could be better than spiced nuts eaten with gloves on?
The Transparent Factory in Dresden. Marvel at a state-of-the-art Volkswagen facility.

One more indelible memory: Peristal Signum, a labyrinth so bizarre that I sometimes question whether it existed at all. It’s gone now, but the video lives on.

Resources

Stil in Berlin never steered me wrong. Their map is worth buying and poring over.
36 Hours in Berlin, part of the New York Times’s “36 Hours” series, tipped me off to Nobelhart & Schmutzig, and generally presented a fantasy of life in Berlin that I found it nice to reach for sometimes.

Originally published on Medium.