The Berlin Anti-Pub Crawl

We finally managed to get out for a walk on our second day in Berlin and ended up checking out all the cool places in Prenzlauerberg. We snagged a beer form the local cafe and ended up having an awesome schnitzel for lunch from a bar around the way.

Since we'd been asleep for most of the previous day I figured it was time to kick it up a notch, so come 8pm we headed over to the 'Yesterday Bar' to meet up with the Anti-Pubcrawl guide.

'Yesterday Bar' itself was pretty awesome, it's apparently run by some old hippies and they had fantastic old music going, a foosball table (pretty common in Berlin), and decor that was directly out of the 70s. Lava lamps were all around, and the plush red seats we were sitting on were awesome. Couple that with the crazy papermache bees that were hanging from the roof and an animated... something... it was all pretty fab.

We started with a few beers here as other pub crawl people trickled in and we eventually got under way at about 10:30pm as the bartenders served us some delicious apple schnapps shots.

Our next stop was the 'Last Cathedral', which is a Goth Horror rock bar. Our tour leader told us that this club was part owned by Rammstein, and it was all pretty scarily decked out inside. It was a pity there wasn't more going on, but we did meet a resident of Hamburg (a Hamburger?). He practised his English on us and I tried out my terrible German out on him. We also had another tasty mango shot here.

We made our way to an indie bar next, we think it was called 'Dammit' or some such name but by this time the beers and shot were starting to catch up with us. There was an excellent band 'Gecko' playing when we got there so we had a sneaky 1 Euro shot of Jaegermeister and rocked out for a bit. Well, I did anyway, Sancha was trying very hard to keep her Jaegermeister down.

We had a quick respite from beer at our next stop at 'Druide Bar'. Sancha and I weren't in the mood for any absinthe, so we treated ourselves to their 2 for 1 cocktails.

A short wander up the street was to the next bar, and possibly my favourite, 'Dr Pong'. This is the original 'Dr Pong' bar and I can see why other places around the world have tried to emulate it. It was pretty friendly and I got to play a few rounds of around the world ping pong, as there's only a single ping pong table in the place. This involves going to the bar, paying a 5 Euro deposit for a paddle, and then joining the big circle around the ping pong table. You take one shot when it's your turn, then rotate around the table. If you screw up you're out, so the circle gets gradually smaller and smaller, and it's quite hectic when there are only three people left as they are frantically racing around the table. We got to see some fantastic ping pong finals here.

Since I was so busy trying to play ping pong and drinking at the same time I hadn't quite finished my beer when it came time to leave. It was at this point that I found out an awesome thing about Berlin (yet another). You can take your drink with you when you leave. Well, I'm assuming only drinks you've purchased in bottles, and nothing in the house supplied glasses.

We had a quick stopover at the kebab shop next door where we were treated to a shot of a terrible vodka, and a few participants bought a cheeky late night sandwich. After the horrible vodka I was quite glad I still had my beer for a chaser.

We then made our way via tram to the last bar, Cassiopeia, which was and old train depot before it was bombed out during WWII. Getting into this place was a bit of a mission as you end up walking through so much disused real estate it looked like our tour guide had taken us to somewhere for our organs to be harvested. This last club was pretty crazy with dance music playing upstairs and reggae playing downstairs. We met a couple of scary looking guys from Ghana here, who were really quite friendly.

Everyone was fading fast at this point and I think we were the last ones to leave at around 5 am. We kind of wrote off the whole next day since we were exhausted and had been up for about 24 hours by the time we managed to figure out how the trams worked and got ourselves home. We had such a fantastic time, but got so very few photos of all the awesome bars we visited because Sancha's camera went flat after the first bar.

The pictures below are pinched from flickr, so if you click on them they will go to the page for that photo and you can see the original photographers info.