Berlin Nights

Speaking of rainstorms.

The other night my friend John, who I sometimes play music with, suggested we bring a guitar and meet up in the Mauerpark to play some songs.

(The Mauerpark is a park created from a stretch of the former Berlin Wall. It's not a pretty or very green space, but it's always got something vibrant going on. On the weekends, for example, there's this enormous outdoor karaoke party that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people attend...)

Before we hit the park, though, we stopped for a drink at the Weinerei. (Or one of their locations, at least; it's a Berlin institution, and I can never keep the whole thing straight.)

Weinerei is literally "winery," I guess, though it's not the word usually used in German for a winery. The place works as follows: You go up to the counter and pay a euro "membership" in exchange for an empty glass. A wide array of wines – reds and whites and rosés – is set out on the counter; you take whatever you want, and at the end of the night you pay what you think it was worth. They also offer a buffet dinner under a similar system: The food all comes out of the kitchen at once, you eat what you want, then pay what you think you ate.

When John and I went, around 11 p.m. on a weekend night, the place was beyond packed, with a young and international-looking crowd spilling out onto the sidewalk and well along the street. As we got our first glass of wine and found ourselves a patch of sidewalk to sit on, John declared, "This is the most Berlin place I've ever been."

Which, well, I was skeptical about that, because what about the ping pong bar, and  the concerts that happen in basements and back rooms, and all those bars that look like someone just found an abandoned building and threw some broken furniture in it and set up a countertop and started mixing drinks?

"Well, it's my new favorite bar, at least," John said, and I admit, I started thinking I should add the place into the rotation of places good for impressing out-of-town guests...

Then we walked over the Mauerpark. The air had been heavy all day with the humid feeling of imminent rain. There was more and more heat lightning, but amazingly it didn't rain, and still didn't rain.

We found a patch of grass; a larger group nearby sang drunken, louder renditions of Wonderwall and Wish You Were Here, while we more quietly revisited our favorite Leonard Cohen songs, and the sky put on an incredible show, lightning bolts that stabbed all the way across the sky and sheet lightning that lit up everything.

The rain finally started in great, fat drops as I was biking home, and I spent a while longer with my balcony door open, watching rain wash in sheets along the street below and lightning so bright I don't even know how to describe it, followed almost instantaneously by thunder so loud and close, it sounded as if the building next door were being demolished.

What a perfect night in Berlin.