There's a time between dusk and dark, where the clouds over the city of Berlin gather like a pluckered garment, and the fading light dyes the entire city an eerie blue. This is the best time to travel across Berlin on a train - over the Spree River, catching glimpses of various catherdral tops, jutting out like sharpened pencils from out of the darkening depth beneath your carriage.
And I am struck once again by how wonderful this city is. It's not that Berlin is particularly beautiful - it isn't. There's no magic that hangs over it like it does over Paris: everything picturesque and infused with some marvellous bubbly stuff that makes one swing one's hair, and over-gesticulate (shrug, demonstrate insouciance by a mere flick of the hand, jut out your lower lip as you drawl out "Ben, [long pause, maybe time for another shrug] .... oui). Nor does it have the rugged and gothic grandeur of Edinburgh - the craggy hills always in the distance, even as you wind yourself down another wee cobbled close.
Berlin is flat, spread out. A vast cacaphony of Schinkel architecture, Corinthian towers and 18th century splendour. Bauhaus, communist high-rise flats, memorials and monuments to battles lost and won, bombed out shells of churches and monasteries, expensive shopping centres, all neighbourly with the latest and rebuilding, covering over scars left by the war.
Having just spent two days in the baroque harmony of Leipzig, with its churches that pay homage to Bach and Luther, I felt dizzy and irritated. Berlin is mad, messy, loud.
It's only when I stop trying for cohesion, that Berlin woos me, once more.
Berlin is not uniformly elegant, nor quaintly historical, though there is more history here than can be recounted. It is uncomfortable and confronting, and in its dissonance a strange beauty. It's the most alive city I've ever been to.
Everything here has a story. Most of it not pleasant, but all entirely human. Berlin is split into 12 Bezirke, or boroughs, and each has a distinct flavour of its own. Here's just a few, to taste. Tiergarten in the east is gentil, with wide, tree-lined streets. Kreuzberg is famous for its large Turkish population, and the best place for a 3 euro Doner Kebab. Mitte is the tourist centre, with checkpoint Charlie, the Holocaust monument, and three glorious museums on an island on the river ... the wide street that leads to Brandenburg gate is called - delicious evocation! - "under the Linden trees". My favourite quarter is Prenzlauer Berg, the rent being still cheap enough for artists and musicians to hang around.
