Save Your Reputation and Avoid

While most places featured in travel guides are worth a look if you're not particularly bothered  about mingling with common tourists, there are few recommendations that you should avoid at all costs and save your carefully crafted reputation. I'm not even going to give you the addresses. 

Berlin Beer Festival

Every year on the first weekend of August, the longest beer garden in the world (over 2km) is set up along Karl Marx Allee in Friedrichshain. While this may sound like your cup of organically grown green tea, it won't be. Filled, shoulder to shoulder, with whom can only be referred to as real Germans, there are more hairy armpits and drunk middle aged men here than in 1970s pornography. While the beer selection is indeed extensive with over 2000 speciality beers on offer, your carefully selected outfit will be out of place in a sea of terrible tattoos, teeth too big for their faces and the worst people from your home country. Avoid Berlin Beer Festival, grab a beer from a spätkauf and sit in Görlitzer Park instead.

Tacheles

Ten years ago Tacheles used to be the coolest squat to visit, with bars, cinemas and artists work shops running all day. Now a shell of it's former self, this once Jewish department store come Nazi torture headquarters come lumber storage space come artists' squat house, Tacheles attracts hundreds of tourists every day. The grungy building is now owned by a Dutch bank and is continuously undergoing a legal battle with the remaining artists who are staying true to their integrity (admittedly with admirable determination) and could be completely closed down any day now. Every inch of this five story building is covered in layer upon layer of graffiti, unfortunately the distinct smell of urine prevents you from staying long enough to appreciate it all. A few of the artists sell their work in an attempt to promote The Piss Palace and get their name out there. However, most of the art resembles something created during a particularly bad acid trip and not in a redeeming artistic beauty kind of way. Today it's overrated and filled with trigger happy tourists. Avoid Tacheles and check out Teufelsberg or have a voku meal at a Collective House instead.

*Author's note: While the building was open at the time I wrote this, Tacheles is now closed. The squatters have been kicked out for good and tourists can no longer enter – not even to buy the terrible art. Even though Kunsthaus was overrated it's still sad and the end of an era that this has happened. You can still visit the building from the street (before they eventually knock it down and turn it into a hotel) if you're that desperate to experience what is left. But I still recommend you don't waste your time. For more read this bitter sweet article about the closing of Tacheles.