Wandr Blog

Most mainstream tourist guides have by now discovered Neukölln, Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg. On the other hand the district of Wedding is left out in the cold. While most native Weddingers are probably glad for this; many prefer the buzz and authenticity they (rightly) believe the tourist crowds stamped out of Mitte, a visit to Berlin is not complete without having spent at least a few hours there. To make sure your time in Wedding is not wasted, we have shared with you two places that we hold close to our hearts and that we know won’t disappoint you for a chilled Sunday evening.

There’s a high chance that you’re not reading this from Wedding. You may even ask yourself where or what Wedding even is. So here’s a brief introduction: Wedding is one of Berlin’s last remaining pre-war districts that have not been gentrified to the degree Neukölln or Kreuzberg have been. Less vegan ice cream, more kebab drenched in fat. Wedding lies north of Mitte and its name is derived from the surname of nobleman Rudolf de Weddinge, who had a manor house in the area in the 13th century. Before World War II, the district used to be known as Red Wedding because of the high density of communist sympathisers there. After the war, the district fell in the French occupation zone of West Berlin. It was and still is one of Berlin’s poorest areas. The low prices, as in Neukölln once, are today luring in creatives and students with higher ambitions than budgets.

Wedding is a bit of an ugly duckling compared to Berlin’s other prewar districts. S-bahn station ‘Wedding,’ which looks unassuming at best offers a little preview. Brute, grey and ultra-rational, the station building is devoid of any kind of unnecessary decoration. The buildings in the borough are mostly post-war and those that are not only seem to stand there to remind visitors how beautiful the area once was. As the New York Times put it in an article about Wedding last summer: “not too easy on the eye, making it (Wedding) perhaps best experienced in the dark.” Don’t let the architecture put you off, because the busy Reinickendorfer Straße, which runs past the station, holds a wonderful secret for you. Our first of two calls on our little Tour de Wedding is called Dan Thai Food and prides itself on selling “Thai fast food.” Prices of the dishes on offer range between € 4.50 and 6.50 and taste as if flown in from Thailand right there and then. The vegetables are crisp, the meat is tender and the flavours are a feast of the imagination. Mind you, auntie Dan, proprietress and chef, will happily stick the change you were expecting for your order into the tipbox herself, but she does it with such a hearty smile you won’t mind. It’s for a good cause, apparently. Like the food, drinks are fairly priced. An example: 33cl of Singha beer leaves you 2 euros out of pocket.

When you’re done eating you’re not supposed to linger around for too long: the terrace only holds 12 people and auntie Dan needs new costumers. We suggest you head back south to S-bahn station Humboldthain for a visit to the club that bears the same name. Use our Wandr-compass to navigate. Humboldthain Club is especially worth a visit in summer, it’s a venue where people can go for a drink, dance and rave on an embankment of the S-bahn. S-bahn trains run by perilously close on the other side of a dividing wall but the music plays loud enough to keep the ambiance clubby and relaxed. The occasional “einsteigen bitte” echoeing through the place only adds to the soft industrial vibe that runs through Humboldthain club. Drinks and entry prices are friendly and, unusual for Berlin, staff are as well.

On Tuesday afternoons you can play table tennis in the club from 5pm, during the weekends the place offers a musical mixture of electronic, house or a private party. Conveniently, the adjacent S-bahn keeps on running all night during the weekends, so you can stumble from the club right into your train home.

The buzz of the city began to fade the further we travelled. In its place came the hazy lull of a hot summer’s day in the country. Past the pastel-coloured 6-storey flats, at the end of the sandy concrete roads we could already see glimpses of virgin green farmland. We had reached the edges of Berlin. Any association with the city however was already gone once we had left Lichtenberg behind us and entered the concrete wasteland of Marzahn and Hellersdorf.

Wolfgang did not expect any visitors when we arrived at the DDR-Museumswohnung at quarter to 4 on a Sunday afternoon. We almost felt guilty for disturbing him when he found him lethargically leaning over the balustrade of the prefab flat we wanted him to show us. We were lucky: once we entered the flat our worries turned out to be unfounded as the rotund curator heartily greeted us with a broad grin and a firm handshake. 

As he stepped away to show us around we were shuttled into an era full of big brown televisions, pine faux-wood cupboards, patterned wallpaper and spongy floor boards. We stood in the Museumswohnung: a replica of a typical GDR-era pre-fabricated house widely known as a “Plattenbau” in Germany. Wolfgang is quick to remark that the television, standing prominently on a shelf in the living room, is not so typical. It was hard to obtain one, waiting times for a TV could be years, and buying one was expensive: for the price of two televisions you could own a Trabant car according to Wolfgang.

The house is examplary for all other 42,000 apartments in the Hellersdorf district. Like cars or fridges, houses in the GDR were ranked by type. Architects simply selected a pre-designed flat type and applied it wherever the need arose.  This flat in particular belongs to the ubiquitous WBS70 series, which stands for WohnungBauSerie 70 (construction type 70) and was available in a 5, 6 or 11-storey variant. Wolfgang explains that the elements the three-bedroom Museumswohning is made of were made in a factory in the Cottbus region and cost 109 GDR-Marks (roughly 400 euros in today’s money) to rent. Covered by that price were all possible costs of a house: maintenance, heating, electricity and water.

The curators of the museum went to great lengths to give its visitors the feeling of being in a GDR-flat. The little kitchen was perhaps the finest example of this. Spartan being understatement here: the concrete walls around the sink and stove were left bare and undecorated to prevent the otherwise omnipresent wallpaper from catching fire or getting wet. Tiles were never fitted, probably for cost reasons. Pine and imitation wood again dominated the scene here. To our great surprise the owners added everyday products such as washing up liquid or filter coffee from the GDR-days to the collection, making the atmosphere complete. 

A book would be too short to sum up all the tiny museum’s curiosities. The best idea really is to head there. The museum is always open on Sundays between 2pm and 4pm. Wolfgang, a born and raised east German himself, will enthusiastically spice up your visit with anecdotes and stories behind all the artifacts. The museum doesn’t cost a penny to enter and photography is free too.

Where is it? It’s in Hellersdorf. The exact address is:

179 Hellersdorfer Straße 12627 Berlin

Let our Wandr app take you to its doorstep. Download it here

Freebie, a photo of Wolfgang letting us out:

‘Nummah funfazwanzig nummah funfazwanzig’ shrieks a short, stocky woman in a heavy Thai accent. A slender, bespectacled guy on brown Birkenstocks looks up, jumps from his bench and walks up to the woman before hastily taking a bag of takeaway food out of her hands. As the guy walks out of the door he’s watched by around a dozen envious Neuköllners, all eagerly waiting for their orders to be ready as well. Some are playing impatiently with their phones while others sit on benches clutching beers from the nearby späti, discussing the day’s big issues with friends.

Just an everyday scene in the Thai Imbiss on Sonnenallee 134, one of Neukölln’s most charming and affordable takeaways. Its most expensive dish - squid with thai herbs, lemongrass, coriander and chillies - tastes like 25 euros but costs in fact a mere € 6.50. An accompanying drink sets you back € 1.50 which really feels like stealing.

The speed with which the food is prepared makes you wonder how they manage to make it taste as refined as it does. The answer probably is skill fused with long years of experience. The imbiss was already a well-established name when Neukölln wasn’t; the place opened its doors when most Berliners and tourists only visited Neukölln on their way to Schönefeld Airport.

Times have changed: Mae Charoen now rides the wave of cool, affluent tech-workers and creatives flocking the district that was once the apotheosis of jobless working-class Berliners and Turkish immigrants. Prices have fortunately stayed the way they were although vegan dishes have now been added to the menu.

Mae Charoen does not sell alcohol, but they have a decent selection of lemonades and Jasmin tea for 1 euro. If you fancy a beer or stronger with your Gaeng Kiau Wahn walk down 4 doors where you’ll find a spätkauf stocking an impressive range of beer, wine and liquors.

Mae Charoen is open every day from 11.30 am until 11 pm, that includes Sundays!

Mae Charoen Sonnenallee 134 12059 Berlin

Ahhh those days when you stumble out of a club at lunchtime not knowing what to do with your day but lie in bed. We’ve been there. But before you know it it will be Monday morning and you’ll realise another week has gone by working, partying and snoring in bed. Surely there’s more to life? There is and Berliners call Alt-Stralau. We’re not at all exaggerating. The area makes for a surprisingly nice a Sunday afternoon hungover cure and makes for an acceptable change from Tempelhof.

So what is special about this district no one ever goes? Ask any Berliner and the answer you get will be something like: ‘I’ve never been there’, ‘where is it?’ and some will tell you to ‘avoid it.’ At Wandr, we think this doesn’t do the area any due justice. True, the charming flea markets are lacking, the district is entirely devoid of cafés and restaurants that are remotely worth leaving the house for and, well, the poshy crowd is not keen on talking to strangers like you.

The keyword is: architecture. Because Alt-Stralau, which is built on a peninsula in the Spree, has in 25 years’ time morphed into a hotbed for remarkable architectural developments. The first building that caught our eye after passing the tunnel that carries the Ringbahn is the Spreegold building (see photos above and below).

Initially we thought we were dealing with a brand new construction but how deceived we turned out to be! Spreegold, in all its golden nouveau-riche splendour is a veritable Plattenbau in fancy dress. What is now being described on the building’s website as having a ‘hotel-like ambience’ boasting an ‘on demand and in-house fitness’ started out life in 1982 as the drab VEB Kosmetik Kombinat (people’s cosmetics factory). See photo below. Quite a makeover indeed!

As we continued to walk past some very sterile low-rise apartments we were surprised again: in a little green we found a stone, severe-looking Karl Marx staring into the unknown. Some background here: Karl Marx lived on Alt-Stralau as a student in 1837, then a green village far away from Berlin. The communist East German government commissioned sculptor Hans Kies in 1962, when the area was swallowed up by the capital, to make a monument in his memory. Fans of socialist realist art: take note!

Following the main road we encountered a healthy mixture of pre-war houses, Plattenbau and sterile new builds. The 21st century landscape planners of Alt-Stralau fortunately did not forget to respect the district’s marine history to spice things up a little. Photogenic is the big blue crane that stands seemingly forlorn on the quayside, a tangible remnant of the peninsula’s past as a dock. You can’t climb on it (at least we wouldn’t try) but you can sit very romantically underneath it. Bringing your other half or Tinder date here to watch the boats on the Spree splutter past with a bottle of wine will undoubtedly earn you countless karma points.

We could carry on writing but of course the idea is that you will go there one day. So we stop here. Right here. See you there!

How to get there:

From Ostbahnhof: S-bahn line 7 towards Ahrensfelde, change for the S41 at Ostkreuz and leave that at S-bahnhof Treptower Park. From there the BVG website advises to take bus 104 for a 4-minute ride to the heart of Alt-Stralau.

By bicycle: Locate the tall Allianz-tower, cross over to the north bank of the Spree (when you’re not already there) and cycle underneath the viaduct of the Ringbahn. On your right is a derelict warehouse that’s been converted into a party venue and on your left you see a patch of grassland with another run-down piece of former industry on it. You’re there.

On foot: same way as by bike. Our app can take you there even better. Download the Wandr app here for iOS:

http://apple.co/29uYXB9

At Wandr we’re not shy of trying out new things: be it a club, restaurant or an abandoned place. After the hypes of late exploring an abandoned place has become somewhat of a must for those new to Berlin, including tourists and day-trippers. So when we arrived at the former children’s hospital of Hohenschönhausen a few weekends ago we weren’t at all surprised to find little rental bikes neatly parked up outside the rusty fences of the place that saw its last patient leave in 1996. 

Inside, it didn’t take long before we ran into a giggling group of Spanish tourists (“olaaa”) crouching behind a bush, thinking we were security guards. If only. The hospital itself was smashed to the last window and there wasn’t much left to explore that wasn’t set fire to or badly damaged. But what we liked was the graffiti. Between sometimes outright meaningless tags (one graffiti-artist found it thought-provoking to spray “nein” everywhere) we discovered beautiful life-size wall paintings worthy of being in a gallery.

Besides looking good, we were impressed with how clever the graffiti figures played with the shape of the rooms, windows and the holes in the walls, adding much needed value to the otherwise trashed hospital.

Since a picture does indeed say more than a thousand words, we’ll spare you the lingo and added a couple of pictures for you to look at. There is more, but that’s for you to find out! The children’s hospital of Hohenschönhausen can be found with our Wandr app which you can download here, for the moment only for iOS 8 or higher.

Don’t forget to respect the surroundings when you decide to go over. Also don’t forget that it IS forbidden to be there after all, but don’t worry about getting caught too much: the surrounding fence has breached in several places and the old children’s hospital is full of people anyway. Happy exploring!

This week, the Wandr team members will be roaming around Tech Open Air to get inspired and meet interesting characters. When we had our first look at the TOA calendar the list of speakers seemed rather daunting: TOA’s ‘some of our speakers’ page features no less than 138 speakers alone! To not be completely at the end of our tethers after TOA we made ourselves a little shortlist of speakers we definitely do not want to miss out on.

Bruno Haid

First on our list is Bruno Haid, CEO and founder of Roam. Haid founded Roam 2015 and this company revolves around the idea of dropping your homebase and working wherever you feel comfortable. Roam currently offers co-working and co-living spaces in Madrid, Miami and Bali. At Wandr, we find it important that you never settle for the beaten tracks, and we are very interested to hear what Haid has to say about his ideas on living and working around the world.

Haid will be speaking this Thursday 14th of July from 10.30am until 10.55am.

More information on the TOA-page.

Rem Koolhaas

In the world of architecture, as anywhere in life, there are greats and there are giants. What pleasantly surprised us is that one of contemporary architecture’s giants: Rem Koolhaas, will be coming to speak at TOA. Already famous in Berlin for his eye-catching Dutch embassy building in Mitte, OMA, the agency he founded in 1975 has been selected for the design of the new Axel Springer campus on Zimmerstraße. Koolhaas and his partners have designed buildings all over the world, most well-known among them: Beijing’s China Central TV headquarters, Lille’s TGV-station or Singapore’s hyper-futuristic “Interlace” complex. Since we possess a healthy interest in architecture at Wandr, we’ll be queueing for his signature!  

Koolhaas will be speaking this Wednesday 13th of July from 11am until 11.25am.

More information on the TOA-page.

Paola Antonelli

This Lombardy-born lady once attempted to make a Boeing 747 part of New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. Paola Antonelli, senior curator at MoMA, will be speaking with Facebook’s Head of Product Design Luke Woods about the influence of art in tech. At Wandr, we are always very interested in the link between on the one hand creating something user-friendly but also something that looks pretty. The line between practicality and aesthetics is a thin one, so we can’t wait to hear what these veterans have to say about it.

Antonelli will speak twice, once on Wednesday 13th of July between 4.35 and 5pm and on Thursday between 12 and 12.15pm.

More information on the TOA-page