The combination of boots and tutus says – you can dance and feel lovely like a little butterfly, then you can put on your boots to tramp safely through the dark wet streets to your warm home. You can fly and you can walk, and ride in a bicycle box.
I pass a shop that sells the shampoos and body creams that I found in the expensive hotel in Switzerland. I am choosy nowadays and often leave the little bottles in hotel bathrooms, when they clearly look as if they were chosen for economy. These, though, were soft and sweet-smelling, worth bringing away. I find a café to stop, and eat ‘Canadian pancakes’, drink coffee, feel grateful for cafes. The waiters, all young women, are a bit ditsy, or perhaps hungover like many of their customers; they forget my second coffee and the milk I asked for in the first one. There is wi-fi so I can find myself on Citymapper and see I am not too far from the brewery, although the dots it puts on the street map are so big there is room for error.
And I walk on, crossing a large road, turning up a hill. Past large elegant apartment buildings that must have passed through the DDR period. I wonder how that worked. At the end of the road, red-leaved trees rise up. It is not the brewery but a park. I ask a woman and she directs me to the exhibition. Back down the hill, on to Prenzlauer Allee, a vast dual carriageway of a road - very ‘east’, a very stalinist statement of power. Eventually, the brewery entrance. A security man sitting outside under a makeshift shelter points towards a door. When I come out, his colleague is sticking up one of the posters near the door and I guess they got tired of telling each new arrival where to go. The brewery is quite dilapidated, ochre bricks with reddish borders, arched around the windows.
