not imaginary

This weekend I visited Lexy in Berlin on a last-minute whim, which was a thoroughly excellent choice. We walked all over Tiergarten and Grunewald, spent a whole afternoon in a Biergarten, attempted (nearly successfully) to visit a recreated medieval village, and took advantage of Berlin's fantastic brunch culture. The highlight for me, though, was returning to Tacheles.

The last time I was there was October 2006, as part of my thirty-hour accidental sidetrip between Italy and Oktoberfest. Most everything about that trip felt like something I'd made up in a haze of too little sleep -- drinking brightly colored Berliner Weisse at the festival in front of the Brandenburg Gate that we eventually realized was in honor of German Unification Day; happening upon large numbers of nudists in Tiergarten; etc. But Tacheles really felt like something that existed only in my imagination, and not just because I went there on a night that ended in me kissing a German boy in a some grass that I thought, at the time, was a park, and the next morning turned out to be a ten-by-ten-foot scrubby patch outside a retirement home.

This is what I remembered about Tacheles: some kind of tall, abandoned-looking building with a bunch of graffiti and many flights of stairs, a bar up top, and some kind of park with playground equipment out back. It seemed deeply unlikely to be true, and yet, when Lexy, her friend Chris, and I went there on Saturday night, the only thing missing was the playground equipment. There were a bunch of massive sculptures around the Biergärten/bars in the yard -- I wonder if maybe the playground equipment I remember climbing on was actually someone's art installation? If so, belatedly: oops.