Toby was asked to speak at the Web 2.0 conference in Berlin this past week. We decided to both go since it has a reputation as a really fun city, but due to work schedules we could only stay a few days. After Brooke’s last trip to Europe for work, she was really worried about suffering from jetlag and we’d heard that Berlin was a late night city…

We decided to ignore the time change and stay on Pacific time.

Berlin is about 9 hours ahead of San Francisco, so we planned to sleep from about 7am until 3pm. We’d both had this idea on previous international trips, but this is the first time either of us had ever tried it. It turned out to be an interesting psychological and cultural experiments. Here are our insights:

Insight#1: It was easy for us to stay up when we were having fun, even though we had hardly slept

On our first night, we had already picked a nightclub, but in Berlin no self-respecting clubber shows up before 1am. We busied ourselves by eating at a touristy restaurant and drinking Jagermeister with a German couple who works at Kraft in Bremen. We then partied from 1-6am and had no trouble falling asleep afterwards (carefully closing the curtains to block out all natural light).

Insight #2: It was hard to eat since we were out of sync with everyone else (and not in New York)

On Sunday, we woke up around 3pm. After walking through the Lustgarten and taking advantage of the last remaining daylight, we figured out it had been 20 hours since our last meal. We had hoped to get something resembling breakfast, but this wasn’t an option at 4:30 on a Sunday. We got coffee at a place called Balzac which is designed to look exactly like Starbucks. On her last visit Brooke had found the Turkish food in Berlin to be excellent, so we were looking around for a Turkish restaurant but had no luck. Of course, due to the time, almost every restaurant was empty, but we ended up finding an Indian restaurant that was moderately good and had a few people in it. Curry for breakfast? Ok, but not exactly what we had hoped for.

Insight #3: Our energy levels were still affected by darkness and quiet streets, despite our attempts to stay on Pacific Time.

After our Sunday “breakfast” we had a few hours to kill before meeting up with our friend Jordan and his wife Michelle for dinner. So we headed to Berlin’s new train station which was a good choice - the lights on the station are very cool, and it’s full of people and open businesses very late. We walked through a University Campus and then back to Mitte, and realized we had both started to feel very low energy. We hadn’t been up for long, had eaten and had coffee, but the darkness and the lack of people about on a Sunday night was starting to get to us. It was too early to meet Jordan so we walked a little more and eventually found an extremely touristy bar called am/pm where there were plenty of people. We felt better being after sitting in a crowded bar with Mojitos for a while.

Insight #4: Even in Europe’s biggest party city, it’s hard to find anything to do on a Sunday night

After dinner with Jordan and Michelle we attempted to go to a club that Jordan had been to the night before, but, being Sunday, it was closed. We had found a magazine earlier with club-night listings and there were a few for Sunday so we took a cab to one that was supposedly having an 80s/glam night. It turned out to be a goth place with lots of people sitting around not talking. We left after one drink, and this time decided to ask the cab driver where we should go. He called someone to ask advice and took us to a club which looked great but had we’re closing for the night — here was our interaction with the bouncer:

Bouncer: Sorry, we are closing in 10 minutes
Us: Can you tell us a place we could go instead?
Bouncer: You go to Hackesher Makt and go to a place called am/pm
Us: Umm, we already went there, it wasn’t very cool, any other suggestions?
Bouncer: You can take a taxi to Potsdamer Platz
Us: Ok, what do we do there?
Bouncer: When you get there, you can go to this place… called McDonalds

At this point we decided that the bouncer didn’t really want to tell us where the good places were so we went back to am/pm. Jordan and Michelle decided that being nocturnal was not for them and went home. Meanwhile, we heard a great song that we’ve been singing ever since - Männer Sind So Scheisse Sexy.

Insight #5: We got a special view of the culture by wandering the streets in the middle of the night

At 3am on a Sunday morning, the only people out in Berlin are drunk British men, prostitutes, tourists at cheesy clubs, and us. We quickly learned the outfit for prostitutes in Berlin always involves big white snow boots (prostitution is, by the way, legal).

We had an awesome time with this experiment, though we were both happy to see sunlight upon our return to San Francisco. The next time we plan a nocturnal trip to Berlin, we’ll probably try to skip Sunday, as this seems to be the only night of the week that is not exciting. Further, we were told by a few people that there were parties on Sunday nights, but we would only find out about them by being on the right email lists.

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