A Saturday Afternoon in Görlitzer Park

It’s been a while since we arrived to Berlin, six months now. A month before coming here, I remember my German teacher asking to the students who was actually going to live in Germany. When I answered him that I was moving to Berlin in the middle of October, he incredulous looked at me and asked “Why would you move there now, when the winter is coming?”. I guess he found it quite weird. But actually it was not that bad at all. Well… maybe February was kind of hard, but we survived! And anyway, spring has finally arrived. And with it, the good weather is coming, and so the sneakers, the milkshakes and fro-yos, the picnics in parks,… Oh, spring is finally here!

The city just looks so unlike than when we got here. You can perceive it in the streets, crowded with people everywhere. You can see it in their clothes, t-shirts and cardigans and no more coats. And, of course, you can see it walking through the parks. And that’s what we’re going to talk about in this post, about a Saturday afternoon in Görlitzer Park.

Görli -as Berliners call it- is a 14-hectares public park located in the East-Kreuzberg. There used to be an old station that worked from 1867 to 1951. Nowadays, we can still find some remnants of it: two goods sheds and the office, the railway bridge and the underpass’ remains in the crater are still visible in the park. Today this buildings are bars, where you can placidly drink a beer during the sunset. There’s specially one called Das Edelweiss, where you can also enjoy a jam session every Tuesday night. In the park you can also find a tiny Kinderbauernhof (a child farm), where kids can have fun with goats, pigs, rabbits, and even donkeys! So this way, children can have contact not only with nature, but with its animals, even if they are living in a cosmopolitan city.

What else is there for adults? To tell the truth, it’s the perfect place for having a picnic or a barbecues and chill out a little bit laying on a towel spread on the grass. Then maybe during the afternoon, if you’re lucky, there’s an Open Air party. That is an improvised group of people dancing the loud music played by a dj. Yes, that’s in the middle of the park! The time we were there, it was quite astonishing because there were many different kinds of people together: from young guys that had not slept yet to mums and dads with their children, from tourists to berliners, and from 18s to 40s. It was just awesome.

Text and pictures by Silvia Conde.