Unscene Berlin

Flow Cafe, Schoeneweide Last week, while cycling through the eastern borough of Schoeneweide for the first time in years, I saw streetart, scrap art, industrial-residential hybrids, new pedestrian bridges, squares and all kinds of sophisticated little urban touches that I have never seen in the utilitarian streets near my place, before.  As they race relentlessly away from the Mitte, gentrification's stylistic enhancements seem to have shot straight past poor, fugly (yet still not managing to avoid those rent hikes) Lichtenberg, and carried on to the admittedly more scenic environs around Schoeneweide, where they have settled in like a hand in a glove. The area is a nice mix of natural open spaces, derelict buildings and cute little residential streets that seem to have survived by sheer virtue of the fact that nobody remembered they even existed, until recently.  Stuff to do in this area include the Flow Kaffeehaus , the Funkhaus , and nearby  Sisyp...

Breaking up with the EasyJet set can be hard, but it's worth it. Do you live in Berlin?   If the answer's yes then you're probably an underemployed, liberal artist of some kind.  You probably eat local, organically-grown, fair trade products.  You almost definitely always return your bottles for the pfand (deposit).  Your flat's energy probably comes from a renewable source.  You presumably cycle from A to B, using public transport whenever you can.  Let's face it, it's probably all that you can afford.   In other words, you don't use up that much carbon every year. So surely, you can afford to take a flight some place warm every now and then.  Right? Wrong. The assumption that flying a few times a year isn't such a bad carbon 'expense' is one that many people - myself included - are guilty of having. Until recently, I used to fly about once or twice a year from one European city to another for the same reasons everyone d...