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WANDR: Our Honduras video is finally DONE!

No puedo decir lo suficiente sobre las personas increíbles que se unieron para ayudarnos a hacer este video. Esperamos que este video les permita ver el otro lado de Honduras, no muy a menudo retratado por los medios.

Marcar a un amigo que necesita ver este video y darle me gusta a nuestra página para obtener más información: https://www.facebook.com/wandrofficial

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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.

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