The Christmas Party

There were only six of us, all freelancers writing for the same publication, so the chances of me drinking too much and embarrassing myself were reduced (slightly).

We met at a bar that used to be a hair salon in the GDR days, a big glass box on a big, loud avenue called Karl Marx Allee, which used to be Stalin Allee when the Wall was still up. I got there first and the man at the door told me they weren't opening for another half hour, and no, I couldn't wait inside away from the -5 degree night because he "had cleaning to do".

Luckily the others showed up in minutes, and while we tried not to die of cold and discuss where to go, a woman approached us cautiously.

"Gu-ten A-bend," she ventured in a German accent.

"Guten Abend," we chorused, all from NZ, Australia, England and Scotland respectively.

She paused. "Bon-jour," she tried.

"Bonjour," we all said.

She paused, then rattled off in German that she was meeting a woman called Catherine. Since I was the only female there, and my name isn't Catherine, she was asking the wrong people.

She finished off in English. "Okay, thank you, and have a pleasant stay in Berlin!" She vanished. We all laughed. At 18 months, my time in Berlin was the shortest of the group and the longest was almost 40 years, hardly a "stay".

Anyway, it was a busy road and our bar options were limited. We settled on the only other option, a bar called Albert's and all that name entails, before heading back to the ex-hair salon, which was way cooler, as soon as it opened.

I had a great time. From drinking red wine for the first time since an unfortunate encounter a few months ago with the cheapest, shittiest red wine you can imagine (and the stoned barman didn't help matters by adding lemon slices and ice), to meeting some pretty damn impressive journalists who have worked for major UK newspapers, Time magazine and many others. Some of them had been here since before 1989 and had Stasi files kept on them and were asked to spy. Madness. And they had some amazing stories, such as being strip-searched at Checkpoint Charlie when a man and his young family were off on a day-trip to Muggelsee in the East (actually, he did have some illegal money in his socks and they found it).

Talk turned to tax, which sounds like a real heart-attack inducer here (I don't earn enough money in Germany to have to pay tax, thank god, which requires filling in forms yourself and most likely ending up with days' worth of nervous tics). There was also bitchy mention of a certain magazine, which some had written for for a paltry sum and is edited by people who don't speak English as a first language, making the articles often a bit baffling to read. Other than that we talked about the Queen, Australiasian politics, and what to do if you get bitten by a funnel-web spider and only have 45 minutes to live. I really enjoyed talking to them and it made it suddenly more real that I'm leaving soon and won't see them again.

I forgot what a charmed life I'm leading at the moment when 9pm came and they all rushed off because they had work in the morning. So I wandered back towards Alexanderplatz to catch the U-Bahn and grabbed the compulsory doner kebab.