I did one of my long errand-running bike rides this week, and though I didn’t find most of what I was looking for, as usual I gained some serendipities I wasn’t expecting–mostly, a tour of the lovely 19th-century West Berlin neighborhood of Schöneberg (and a bit of Friedenau).
Schöneberg immediately struck me as quite different from where I live in Friedrichshain, and even from adjoining Kreuzberg. The buildings are taller and older, the trees bigger. It has a more sedate feel, with lots of little parks and pretty cafes–and a long, peaceful stretch along a canal that feels almost like Amsterdam. It’s not swanky, though. It felt very comfortable, and I could see why it’s fast becoming one of the new “it” neighborhoods in Berlin (along with Charlottenburg).
The tiny Nikolaische Buchhandlung (billed as Berlin’s oldest bookshop, founded 1713) didn’t have the book I was looking for, so I idled away a half hour walking the leafy back streets around the Friedenau station waiting for Da Bangg Korean Teehaus to open for lunch. There I enjoyed a good bibimbap and an excellent cup of chungzak tea on their lovely little patio before heading farther down Rheinstrasse to Globetrotter, an amazing travel store that, notwithstanding, didn’t have the rolling duffel I was looking for. So, I set off for home empty-handed–via a detour to view yet another one of my beloved kleingartenanlagen. It’s actually 3 of them together: Sonnenbad, Samoa, and Spreewald; together the kolonie of hundreds of tiny gardens form a complex so leafy and green that it looks out-of-focus on Google Earth. When you’re in it you forget entirely that you’re in a big city. As I cruised along the long, broad path that traces the kolonie’s west side, past couples curled up together on the sunning benches and men playing boules in the gravel courts, breathing in the aroma of sun-baked pines and grass, I felt that now-familiar sense of vertigo that only Berlin can produce by stuffing so many diverse scenes and lifestyles into the space of a day’s bike ride.
The Rookery 