überlin

Spotted this while shopping in Mitte. Ahhh snow, my toes may be numb but my heart is warm.

OK so we just can’t stay away from this place! Not only is their coffee amazing, but the cakes are out of this world…check out this bad boy! *drool*

We may not always agree on shopping destinations (COS again Zoë?), but the one place that gets both of our consumerist juices flowing is paper porn paradise R.S.V.P. This small, wood-lined shop in Mitte is like the stationary cupboard of our nerdiest fantasies, stacked high with beautifully designed notebooks, pens and accessories from around the world. R.S.V.P recalls a time before paperless offices and the digitisation of everything, when the written word really mattered, and while there is an online shop, it’s little substitute for actually being there – feeling the oversized desk calendars heavy in your hands, or enjoying the satisfying click of a Japanese fountain pen. Ooh, I just felt a little shiver.

As in, we love our loft. Don’t worry, we don’t call our new apartment the Love Loft, in an MTV Cribs “this is where the magic happens” kind of way. In fact, sharing one room with two cats 24/7 pretty much guarantees that NOTHING happens here. Aaaanyway… here’s where we’re going to be living, for at least the next two and a bit months: a converted printing fabrik in the heart of gritty Kreuzberg 36. It may be deeply impractical – we could do with some walls, more curtains and a bathroom bigger than an upright coffin – but it’s a great “space” in which to work and hang out, hipster-dickhead-style. And we love it.

A friend just asked what we do on a typical day now that we’re freelancing in Berlin, and we thought we’d share it here so you can get a picture of our “exciting” new life. Warning: contains offensive slippers.

1. James wakes up at 8am and makes coffee from a machine that sounds like a pneumatic drill
2. I wake up shortly thereafter
3. We sit at the table and mess around on our laptops checking Twitter/Facebook then we get down to some “work” in our dressing gowns
4. Sometimes we break for shower at around 11am… sometimes not
5. At lunchtime we get clothed and either eat pitiful sandwiches or we venture out to a nearby hipster café for human contact
6. Back in the flat we pretend to “work” some more before boredom sets in and social networking takes over
7. Around 6pm it’s tea time, but it seems that without Tesco Online we can no longer function as normal human beings and have to resort to pasta and pesto every night, as it’s the only thing in our cupboards
8. For our evening’s entertainment we have hopefully downloaded something to watch, or like tonight, we will force ourselves to go out in the freezing cold to some hip Berlin event to be able to write a blog post about it
9. Get to bed around midnight, making a pact to work harder tomorrow

Germans seem to offer coffee in two extreme variations: milky as hell and more schwartz than midnight. Thank fuck, then, for No Fire, No Glory in Friedrichshain, a coffee shop that brings Australia’s most important export – the flat white – to Berlin. Try it “Australian style (stronger with less milk than the “German”) along with a giant slice of cheesecake. Recommended by the lovely ladies of London’s Wilton Way Cafe, who envy its superior beans (from local roasters Bonanza) and, naturally, its location. Smug much?

Click through for more on No Fire, No Glory and Bonanza Coffee Roasters

While we’ve always found London alt.Xmas markets like the BUST Magazine Craftacular to be pricey, busy and full of tits (Pamflet grrls excepted), Holy Shit Shopping was like a microcosm of Berlin itself. Warmed by glühwein, shoppers found space to browse stalls run by friendly artisans offering (fairly cheap) products that reminded us of what we love about the city: everything from ashtrays to USB sticks clad in cold concrete, monochrome t-shirts and crockery, toilet paper adorned with anti-facist illustrations. Here are our highlights.

See more photos on our Flickr, and find out more about Holy Shit Shopping over here