Author: Guest Blogger

July 29, 2015

How to work at a startup: 2. Your resume

by

Guest Blogger

Category: Opinions
By Federico Prandi.

If you’ve read the previous chapter of this guide, you should have identified the startup job of your dreams and be ready to apply.

If you haven’t found your dream job, that probably means you’re being too picky and are doomed to homelessness while you wait around for that perfect job to pop up (“Hairstylist at a horse beauty contest”).

But let’s assume you are ready to go.

Applying for a job at an internet startup is a delicate process that you can’t afford to fuck up. Your whole career depends on this preliminary phase, so in this second chapter I’ll focus on how to put together a spotless Curriculum Vitae.

STEP 1 – LAYOUT

Once upon a time the world of CVs was ruled by an evil king called European Model. The European Model states that all the information inside a CV shall be divided into two columns and presented in the most readable (i.e. boring) way possible, as if to proudly proclaim to the world that we all have OCD.

Then the game changed. Recruiters were getting tired of ~~their job~~ life after hours of going through piles of excruciatingly boring and anonymous documents, while at the same time Internet startups started understanding the value of differentiation and personality.

I remember the day that Davide, a former boss of mine, decided that pink was the right colour with which to rebrand his career and had a professional graphic designer redesign his resume. Not only did the document suddenly look shiny and fresh, but a couple of weeks later Davide was offered a new, better job.

Clearly, I needed to follow his footsteps.

I went home and dusted off my self-taught Paint skills to give my CV that subtle touch of personality which makes it look like the Myspace page of a 13-year-old Luke Perry fan.

I only wish the PDF format allowed me to include a “My Heart Will Go On” midi file and an animated glitter effect on each page, but I guess you can’t have everything.

STEP 2 – THE PHOTO

Stop everything you’re doing now. You need to take care of your CV photo ASAP. There are three possible strategies to follow:

1) The Conference Photo

My personal favourite resume picture is the one in which the subject is giving a talk at a conference, looking irresistibly smart.

Of course, you can always fake this. You just need a shot taken from below (or by a very short person) while you’re holding a microphone. Karaoke will do, but be sure to take care to Photoshop out the lyrics of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” from that giant screen in the background.

2) The German Photo

Months ago I tricked my boyfriend into watching five hours of Vier Hochzeiten und eine Traumreise (the German version of the American reality show Four Weddings). It really seemed as if the future brides on the show hadn’t grown up idealising their wedding and I ended up applauding German society for that.

The truth is that in Germany your wedding day is not even as important as the day on which you have your LinkedIn picture taken. Little girls grow up dreaming of which pantsuit they’re going to wear and their prudent mothers make sure to have enough money saved up to pay for makeup artists.

A German CV photo basically portrays you at your fanciest. If the Financial Times and Men’s Health were ever to merge and I was asked to appear on the cover, that’s the kind of picture I would go for.

3) The Boy Next Door Photo

I hate to highlight this, but a lot of internet startups are owned by nerds who still giggle when they see a boob and have been wearing the same three hoodies for the past 13 years.

If you suspect option 1 and 2 may be too threatening for the company you’re approaching, just go for the boy-next-door photo. Smile at the camera, look natural, don’t overdo it. And if you can’t help thinking the picture could be better, send it to your friend who claims to know Photoshop and ask him or her to Vogue it up. That expensive nose job you’ve always desired is only a couple of clicks away.

(Shout out to my co-worker Maria for noticing, after months of working together, that “there’s something different in your LinkedIn picture, but I couldn’t say what”).

STEP 3 – CONTENT

Wait a second now. Nobody knows better than I that the sentence “I can easily operate an excavator” comes with a price, so I don’t mean to suggest you write things that aren’t true on your CV. You should definitely consider, though, writing things that are *almost* true.

Every single task you do at work can be blown up to unprecedented levels of greatness and graciously land on your resume. Last week, for example, I put together a scrapbook for a co-worker who’s leaving the company and even though the result looked pretty amateurish, I can’t wait for my next employer to read about my skills in “coordinating and executing internal design projects involving more than 20 team members”.

You know what I mean? In order to write a good CV you need to walk the fine line between truth and outright lie, and pray that nobody checks your criminal record.

Some more random tips include:

Never specify you can work with Microsoft Word and are an accustomed Internet user unless you’re planning on sending your CV back in time to 1997.

If you’ve ever played team sports be sure to mention it, even if you were forced by your parents who eventually changed their minds after you went on a two-week long hunger strike.

Mention somewhere that you’re very good with pivot tables, then head to the nearest church to ask the Lord for forgiveness.

Ask a trusted friend to check for grammar mistakes, typos and the inadvertent inclusion of terms like “semi-reformed arsonist”, which could lower your chances of getting the job.

In the next episode I’ll teach you how to write a proper cover letter and manage your online persona before submitting the application.

Federico is an Italian in Berlin. He blogs, tweets, infiltrates the German language, and is currently employed at a cool internet company based in Berlin with a million open positions.

If you liked this, check out our observations on the Berlin startup scene, and get more practical advice about landing a startup job (with more GIFs!).
July 23, 2015

Portrait: Eva Langhorst, Mr. Whippy’s Frozen Yogurt Truck

by

Guest Blogger

Category: People

by Emma Robertson

You’ve probably seen Eva Langhorst driving around Berlin. After all, her pink and white sixties-style Mr. Whippy ice cream truck is hard to miss. “Freshly made just for you,” it declares in bright blue lettering, and it’s true. Every morning, Eva gathers fresh ingredients – milk, yogurt, fruit – from the local markets in Berlin, and spends the day driving around in her truck, a realisation of a childhood fantasy and an enduring love of ice cream. Her dedication to her craft is made all the more impressive, I find out, because right now Eva is pregnant with a baby girl. When I ask if she’s going to continue running the truck when the baby comes, she smiles. “My parents want to build a custom baby seat for the truck,” she laughs, “So, I can take her with me! We’ll be fine!”

Eva started her business in 2012, and since then, she and her Mr. Whippy truck have travelled all over Germany, selling homemade frozen yogurt. “There’s a lot of risk that you take with a job like this. It’s hard,” she continues, “And when you have a baby, it’s harder. But I don’t really see it as a job. It’s just fun.” It’s no wonder, then, that the end result is so sweet.

In his book The Feast of Love, Charles Baxter wrote, “Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.”

(Laughs) I definitely agree. I eat ice cream every day! No lie, I can’t get enough of it! I spend all winter actually looking forward to putting on the ice cream machine again! Even if I work all day, my boyfriend and I come home very late at night, we park the car, and we walk to the kiosk to buy an ice cream! (Laughs)

Have you always been this passionate about ice cream?

I was actually quite into ice cream even from childhood! (Laughs) I’ve loved frozen yogurt since I was a girl – that’s where it all started. My mom told me that when I was growing up, I wanted to become an ice cream seller! So there must be something about it! (Laughs)

Do you think that kind of nostalgia plays a certain role in making Mr. Whippy so popular here in Berlin?

Yeah, I think it definitely plays a role! For me, I’ve searched for it for frozen yogurt for years because when I was ten, I tasted it for the first time and I just loved it. With Mr. Whippy, it’s not only the product, it’s also the van that attracts people. Everyone recognises it, it’s like a giant toy! Everyone remembers these kinds of trucks from their childhood, so of course it generates those lovely nostalgic feelings in some way.

Can food, ice cream especially, ever really be as good as the memories or feelings associated with it?

In our case… Yes! My mother makes the best elderflower sauce. It’s one of the syrups that we stock in the truck. Even though, like you said, the associations are a strong influence… I think it really is that good!

Has Mr. Whippy always been a part of your life? Do you have a special connection to the brand?

I actually didn’t know the Mr Whippy trucks because we didn’t have them in Germany. I first wanted to start selling frozen yogurt and only later came the idea of the truck. In 2012, we found the Mr. Whippy truck and imported it from England. It was already a Mr Whippy truck, but I thought, “I can’t change the name!” (Laughs) There was no copyright in Germany, so I just kept it. Then I started to restore the car basically from the inside…

I read that your father helped you re-design the truck.

Right! My dad is really good with cars, luckily. He used to be a racecar driver when he was young! So he’s my helping hand. Without him, it would have been difficult, with all these technical tasks and mechanical problems. It took us four months to restore the truck, and get it decorated. On the side, I work as an illustrator, so that came in handy when we were designing the inside and the signs. I like to work really creatively… I kept all these elements from the sixties and added my own twist, so that was a great project!

It sounds like a family affair. You said your mom makes the sauces, right?

Yes! She’s really sweet. She lives in the countryside and she has this whole garden with all the berries and the elderflowers. So, she does the bases for the sauces for me, and then we have fresh fruits by season as well. I wouldn’t know what to do without my family’s help. My mom helps a lot. And she even comes sometimes to help me with the selling! My dad and I have gone on some trips together with Mr. Whippy. (Laughs) He drives the truck! My cousin helps me as well – she lives in Berlin, too.

Is that homegrown aspect of Mr. Whippy very important to you?

Very important. It makes it so that you can put a lot of love in it. Everyone helps. That’s another reason why I want to keep the company small. It’s important that I’m always present with the truck, I want to keep it close to my heart. We also try to keep the business local… Like I said, we use seasonal fruits from local vendors, and everything is fresh.

That’s what makes Mr. Whippy so different to the kind of ice cream trucks I know from my childhood in Canada, which seemed like a franchise. Everything was mass-produced.

Yeah, actually that happened also a little bit with the Mr. Whippy company itself. It goes back to what we were talking about before with the childhood memories. Sometimes I actually have problems with the name for people who know it from England and associate it with that kind of food franchise. But different people, different connections.

What has the reaction been like from Berliners when they see you driving around?

There’s the English crowd that really knows Mr. Whippy! We used to have ice cream trucks driving around here in Germany when I was a kid, but more in the countryside, so I don’t think Berliners know it that much. They didn’t have that this ice cream culture of the van driving around. For the most part, it’s not the brand that’s the attraction, it’s the look of the big pink truck!

Let’s talk about the product, which is so delicious. What can you tell me about the recipe, or is that top secret?

(Laughs) The secret is actually to keep it simple. It’s important to find a good quality for the base. There are some bases that are just mixes that you stir in with water, and that’s… Well, not so nice. I use fresh yogurt and milk and a bit of lemon, blended with a sugar mix made by another Berliner. He has a frozen yogurt shop and he works as a food developer, studying some kind of gastronomic chemistry. We buy the milk from a local farm as well. So the produce is all from Berlin, and we all work together. We just try to keep it simple and use fresh products.

As for keeping it simple, I imagine it’s been quite a task getting a food truck business up and running in Berlin, the capital of making things complicated.

(Laughs) There’s a lot of rules in Berlin! There are infinite rules about where you can park and sell. When I first started, I thought I could park anywhere in the street, but it turns out it’s very difficult. Of course, the city makes it kind of impossible to park and stay and sell just anywhere. You are bound to the festival places and food markets. It’s also an electricity problem – the machine needs electricity to run, so it’s hard to be self-sufficient. There’s also the problem that because you’re on the road, things can break down! Luckily this has only happened once, but I got towed to the Bread and Butter trade show because I just had to make it there! (Laughs) It’s the same with any job though – you can never foresee what’s going to happen.

Running a truck does have its perks, though, I’m sure.

Of course. This gives me freedom! I can park the car when I don’t want to work anymore. And it waits! I can drive around if I’m not selling well. We’ve driven to Hamburg, Munich, all over Germany on these little adventures in the truck. I don’t think we’d have the same experience if we were rooted in Berlin with a shop or a cafe.

Food trucks are becoming more and more of a trend these days, especially here in Berlin.

Yeah! Definitely. It’s getting really bad for that! When we started, I was one of the first trucks driving around. I got lucky – I was there before the big competition really started. Currently, there’s not really any other frozen yogurt trucks though, so there’s no direct competition for me. There are a lot of people who do ice cream, but the ones that I’ve met, I’ve become friends with. We give each other jobs. It’s a very friendly environment.

I was going to ask… Are you guys out there racing around in your trucks to beat the other vendors to the best spots?

(Laughs) Fortunately, this doesn’t happen, no. We support each other! Sometimes we even park next to each other! You have to live with it.

Do you ever worry that the food truck trend is going to go out of style?

I’m not so scared! I know that actually a lot of frozen yogurt and ice cream shops around Berlin already had to close, and maybe that’s a little bit of a pressure but I don’t think it will ever really go out of style. I think if you have the right product, it doesn’t really matter so much what’s trendy. You create the whole environment. And people will always eat ice cream!

It’s my number one weakness.

I read an article that Germans are the number two highest consumers of ice cream in the world. So why should I worry?! (Laughs) You can have ten burgers but there’s always room for ice cream.
July 23, 2015

Portrait: Eva Langhorst, Mr. Whippy's Frozen Yogurt Truck

by

Guest Blogger

Category: People

by Emma Robertson

You’ve probably seen Eva Langhorst driving around Berlin. After all, her pink and white sixties-style Mr. Whippy ice cream truck is hard to miss. “Freshly made just for you,” it declares in bright blue lettering, and it’s true. Every morning, Eva gathers fresh ingredients – milk, yogurt, fruit – from the local markets in Berlin, and spends the day driving around in her truck, a realisation of a childhood fantasy and an enduring love of ice cream. Her dedication to her craft is made all the more impressive, I find out, because right now Eva is pregnant with a baby girl. When I ask if she’s going to continue running the truck when the baby comes, she smiles. “My parents want to build a custom baby seat for the truck,” she laughs, “So, I can take her with me! We’ll be fine!”

Eva started her business in 2012, and since then, she and her Mr. Whippy truck have travelled all over Germany, selling homemade frozen yogurt. “There’s a lot of risk that you take with a job like this. It’s hard,” she continues, “And when you have a baby, it’s harder. But I don’t really see it as a job. It’s just fun.” It’s no wonder, then, that the end result is so sweet.

In his book The Feast of Love, Charles Baxter wrote, “Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.”

(Laughs) I definitely agree. I eat ice cream every day! No lie, I can’t get enough of it! I spend all winter actually looking forward to putting on the ice cream machine again! Even if I work all day, my boyfriend and I come home very late at night, we park the car, and we walk to the kiosk to buy an ice cream! (Laughs)

Have you always been this passionate about ice cream?

I was actually quite into ice cream even from childhood! (Laughs) I’ve loved frozen yogurt since I was a girl – that’s where it all started. My mom told me that when I was growing up, I wanted to become an ice cream seller! So there must be something about it! (Laughs)

Do you think that kind of nostalgia plays a certain role in making Mr. Whippy so popular here in Berlin?

Yeah, I think it definitely plays a role! For me, I’ve searched for it for frozen yogurt for years because when I was ten, I tasted it for the first time and I just loved it. With Mr. Whippy, it’s not only the product, it’s also the van that attracts people. Everyone recognises it, it’s like a giant toy! Everyone remembers these kinds of trucks from their childhood, so of course it generates those lovely nostalgic feelings in some way.

Can food, ice cream especially, ever really be as good as the memories or feelings associated with it?

In our case… Yes! My mother makes the best elderflower sauce. It’s one of the syrups that we stock in the truck. Even though, like you said, the associations are a strong influence… I think it really is that good!

Has Mr. Whippy always been a part of your life? Do you have a special connection to the brand?

I actually didn’t know the Mr Whippy trucks because we didn’t have them in Germany. I first wanted to start selling frozen yogurt and only later came the idea of the truck. In 2012, we found the Mr. Whippy truck and imported it from England. It was already a Mr Whippy truck, but I thought, “I can’t change the name!” (Laughs) There was no copyright in Germany, so I just kept it. Then I started to restore the car basically from the inside…

I read that your father helped you re-design the truck.

Right! My dad is really good with cars, luckily. He used to be a racecar driver when he was young! So he’s my helping hand. Without him, it would have been difficult, with all these technical tasks and mechanical problems. It took us four months to restore the truck, and get it decorated. On the side, I work as an illustrator, so that came in handy when we were designing the inside and the signs. I like to work really creatively… I kept all these elements from the sixties and added my own twist, so that was a great project!

It sounds like a family affair. You said your mom makes the sauces, right?

Yes! She’s really sweet. She lives in the countryside and she has this whole garden with all the berries and the elderflowers. So, she does the bases for the sauces for me, and then we have fresh fruits by season as well. I wouldn’t know what to do without my family’s help. My mom helps a lot. And she even comes sometimes to help me with the selling! My dad and I have gone on some trips together with Mr. Whippy. (Laughs) He drives the truck! My cousin helps me as well – she lives in Berlin, too.

Is that homegrown aspect of Mr. Whippy very important to you?

Very important. It makes it so that you can put a lot of love in it. Everyone helps. That’s another reason why I want to keep the company small. It’s important that I’m always present with the truck, I want to keep it close to my heart. We also try to keep the business local… Like I said, we use seasonal fruits from local vendors, and everything is fresh.

That’s what makes Mr. Whippy so different to the kind of ice cream trucks I know from my childhood in Canada, which seemed like a franchise. Everything was mass-produced.

Yeah, actually that happened also a little bit with the Mr. Whippy company itself. It goes back to what we were talking about before with the childhood memories. Sometimes I actually have problems with the name for people who know it from England and associate it with that kind of food franchise. But different people, different connections.

What has the reaction been like from Berliners when they see you driving around?

There’s the English crowd that really knows Mr. Whippy! We used to have ice cream trucks driving around here in Germany when I was a kid, but more in the countryside, so I don’t think Berliners know it that much. They didn’t have that this ice cream culture of the van driving around. For the most part, it’s not the brand that’s the attraction, it’s the look of the big pink truck!

Let’s talk about the product, which is so delicious. What can you tell me about the recipe, or is that top secret?

(Laughs) The secret is actually to keep it simple. It’s important to find a good quality for the base. There are some bases that are just mixes that you stir in with water, and that’s… Well, not so nice. I use fresh yogurt and milk and a bit of lemon, blended with a sugar mix made by another Berliner. He has a frozen yogurt shop and he works as a food developer, studying some kind of gastronomic chemistry. We buy the milk from a local farm as well. So the produce is all from Berlin, and we all work together. We just try to keep it simple and use fresh products.

As for keeping it simple, I imagine it’s been quite a task getting a food truck business up and running in Berlin, the capital of making things complicated.

(Laughs) There’s a lot of rules in Berlin! There are infinite rules about where you can park and sell. When I first started, I thought I could park anywhere in the street, but it turns out it’s very difficult. Of course, the city makes it kind of impossible to park and stay and sell just anywhere. You are bound to the festival places and food markets. It’s also an electricity problem – the machine needs electricity to run, so it’s hard to be self-sufficient. There’s also the problem that because you’re on the road, things can break down! Luckily this has only happened once, but I got towed to the Bread and Butter trade show because I just had to make it there! (Laughs) It’s the same with any job though – you can never foresee what’s going to happen.

Running a truck does have its perks, though, I’m sure.

Of course. This gives me freedom! I can park the car when I don’t want to work anymore. And it waits! I can drive around if I’m not selling well. We’ve driven to Hamburg, Munich, all over Germany on these little adventures in the truck. I don’t think we’d have the same experience if we were rooted in Berlin with a shop or a cafe.

Food trucks are becoming more and more of a trend these days, especially here in Berlin.

Yeah! Definitely. It’s getting really bad for that! When we started, I was one of the first trucks driving around. I got lucky – I was there before the big competition really started. Currently, there’s not really any other frozen yogurt trucks though, so there’s no direct competition for me. There are a lot of people who do ice cream, but the ones that I’ve met, I’ve become friends with. We give each other jobs. It’s a very friendly environment.

I was going to ask… Are you guys out there racing around in your trucks to beat the other vendors to the best spots?

(Laughs) Fortunately, this doesn’t happen, no. We support each other! Sometimes we even park next to each other! You have to live with it.

Do you ever worry that the food truck trend is going to go out of style?

I’m not so scared! I know that actually a lot of frozen yogurt and ice cream shops around Berlin already had to close, and maybe that’s a little bit of a pressure but I don’t think it will ever really go out of style. I think if you have the right product, it doesn’t really matter so much what’s trendy. You create the whole environment. And people will always eat ice cream!

It’s my number one weakness.

I read an article that Germans are the number two highest consumers of ice cream in the world. So why should I worry?! (Laughs) You can have ten burgers but there’s always room for ice cream.

Tags: Bread & Butter, Eva Langhorst, Food & Drink, Mr. Whippy’s Frozen Yogurt Truck, Portraits
July 20, 2015

Is Berlin over?

by

Guest Blogger

Category: Photos

by Paola Moretti.

My father is one of those men who are terrible at choosing presents for women. I’m not sure whether his insistence on giving me perfume, dresses and cute necklaces is a hint that I should be a little more feminine, or if he simply has no clue about what I actually like. This year, he gave me a glittery nail polish which I liked only because I have a taste for tacky stuff. Two years ago, he bought me a style guide written by Angelika Taschen, The Berliner, where one can find such observations as, “ For the Berliner the quest for the perfect purse is more important than the quest for the right man. The metropolitan animal needs to bring its stuff always with it, so the bag needs to be a proper one.” Let’s just say that my father has a peculiar sense of humour as well.

When I read the book’s subtitle, “The guide to the alternative chic”, I thought: this is the end. If Berlin was about to become a Mecca for style, when just a while ago I could walk around completely unnoticed in neon-yellow leggings, matching rubber kitchen gloves and a bright blue dress, it meant that something was changing. Indeed, the running joke about Prenzlauer Berg’s Latte Macchiato mums was over. At that moment, the press focused on the hatred of tourists which, expressed through stickers and graffiti, telling them that they were no longer welcome. It had become a local pastime to pick on the new representatives of categories such as the “Club Mate generation”, “New York artist”, “South European student”, or anyone else suspected of feeding the ravenous beast of gentrification by paying above-average rents, occupying hitherto-neglected neighbourhoods, or opening upmarket bars.

Berlin became the place to be. Old-school Berliners were bewildered and, I must admit, I didn’t join in the raging aggressiveness towards every single change, I was a bit worried. The city, at least to me, had been a stargate to a utopian dimension. You could feel that history had had taken another course here. Its environment and inhabitants hadn’t been infected by the fever of globalisation and consumeristic craving. The German capital was a small loophole in the West’s capitalist system. Things I had only heard about from my older friends, such as underground movements – which in Italy were long-time dead, or had been absorbed by a fashion industry which repackaged them and tossed them to the masses – here were still thiriving in their original forms. Berlin was cool because “she” was the anti-cool. Then, she became glamorous and lost some of her charm. Gradually, she became less unique, less radical. She was slowly letting herself be undermined by imported trends, swayed by a progress which didn’t always mean improvement.

Just like when in junior high you fall in love with your desk mate: a bony girl with no breasts and protruding shoulder blades, but nice and sweet. Everybody laughs at you because you like her, but you don’t care. In high school, she becomes a hottie, a real heartbreaker who forgets what kindness means. And then you feel that mix of bitterness and pride: you’re proud because you foresaw her potential back when no one else could, but you feel sad because she is no longer who she used to be. She stops using her cousin’s hand-me-down sweaters, in which she looked like a potato sack, and starts wearing tight tops. She learned how to use tweezers on her eyebrows, and now she has highlights in her hair, the original copper-like colour of which was naturally beautiful.

So it is with Berlin: she is young, a 25 year-old girl who not so long ago was disfigured by a wall. She has just found herself sexy and wants to party, to take advantage of any situation. Thus, Kneipes close and cocktail bars open; currywurst booths disappear while burger joints pop up everywhere. Sandals with socks remain, but just because they seem to be fashionable now.

But it’s just when you get used to the tables full of Macbooks in cafes; when you are no longer surprised by salespeople not understanding German in your local vintage shop; when you basically take for granted the availability of various pieces of the world patch-worked together in one city; when you finally understand that you can find whatever you like, even those things which are not cool anymore and never again will be – well, then, the media announces: “Berlin is over”. In 2014, the Tagespiegel said that “Berlin isn’t the coolest city in the world anymore”, just after Rolling Stone called Berghain “a club full of tourists” . Each time I hear these utterances, I imagine Manzoni’s characters with their bells, ruefully wandering through the village picking up the dead bodies left by the plague. What I never understand is whether the pandemic is Berlin being cool or not cool anymore.

Many local newspapers greeted the news happily; club owners worried right away about their future incomes; some sighed with relief, others felt mocked: they had just found a WG! Most readers probably simply shrugged. I insist, like the devoted classmate who tenderly looks at the sharp bones coming out of his childhood love’s back, or like my father, who next year will give me a bracelet with pendants for my birthday, that I will keep looking for those things which make Berlin my city. Because love is resistance and the first love is never outmoded.

Originally published in Italian on Il Mitte.
July 18, 2015

Berlintercourse: An orgy to remember

by

Guest Blogger

Category: Opinions

A theme that always comes up when I discuss my latest sexcapades with my flatmate is the fact that, no matter what kind of crazy situation I have just experienced, a crazier one will follow. I often find myself thinking, ”This is it. It can. Not. Possibly. Get any more extreme.”

And then it does.

Having had threesomes, tried out suspension bondage and attended a sex party, I was wondering how I could possibly add more notches to my bedpost. That is, until I received a Facebook message from one of the organisers of the sex party, asking if I wanted to attend a “crazy bisexual orgy” taking place in a hotel suite a few days later.

No need to guess what my answer was. As always, my first concern was the dress code, especially after I found out that we would all be attending dinner at this fancy restaurant before heading back to the hotel.

On the big day, I hurried down the stairs at work as soon as the clock struck 6pm. Chugging a much-needed beer on my way home, I jumped in the shower to get ready for the evening. After a quick wardrobe check, I ended up settling on a long 90s black dress I had found at Humana, paired with faux pony-fur platform sandals and a baseball bomber jacket. Casual chic, I thought, not entirely sure of my outfit choice.

Thankfully I ran into a foreign tourist in the U-Bahn, who, upon seeing me looking at my reflection, told me I looked really pretty and didn’t need to check any mirrors. He asked me for bar recommendations and I couldn’t repress a smile when he asked about my plans for the evening. “Oh nothing much, just meeting some friends.”

I was the last guest to join the table in the backyard of a Mitte restaurant. (Not the cool part of Mitte; the boring fancy part.) All eyes were on me as I greeted the couple I knew and was introduced to the other participants.

I soon realised that we were basically three couples and me. Fine. The men were considerably older, which kind of worried me, but at least the women were cute. Almost all of them were Russian. Journalists, writers and entrepreneurs – no doubt part of some sort of free-thinking, free-loving, travelling elite.

They were certainly very interesting human beings, and I enjoyed listening to their stories of going to the opera on LSD and driving across Europe on motorcycles. Most of them were divorced and had children, making me feel like a little like a child at the grown-up’s table.

As dinner was served, our conversation switched to opinions on Berlin’s various sex clubs. I listened, occasionally answering questions, unable to shake the thought that I was about to experience something my mind couldn’t have fathomed just a few months ago.

Once everyone had finished eating, one of the guests paid for our meal and announced that we would be making our way to the hotel.

We walked for a few minutes while I talked to this Russian journalist. He was older than my parents and very sweet. His arms were covered with several large tattoos, which I asked about after we’d talked about mine.

“Let me tell you the one thing I’ve learned about tattoos,” he said.

“Growing up, my mother always told me there were three rules she wanted me to follow. One of them was: do not get tattoos, for they will stick with you for all of your life. As you can already tell, I didn’t really respect this one. She passed away several years ago but I still think about her very often. Actually, I was lying on the beach last month and looked at my own tattoos, which reminded me of her rules. And I thought, ‘You know what, Mom? All of your life is really not that long.’”

I was deeply moved by these words of wisdom coming from a 60-year-old man, and decided that whatever was about to happen, the evening had already been worth experiencing.

Arriving at our suite, the host started putting together an incredible cheese platter and serving glasses of insanely delicious Italian red wine. The guy who’d invited me had already asked whether I was into drugs, so I was expecting more of a “pick me up” before getting naked but, to my surprise, everyone started making out before I could take my first sip of wine.

Since I was absolutely not attracted to any of the participating men, I was working on ways to refuse their advances. Thankfully, this really hot Russian girl started kissing me, keeping me busy while the others were at it themselves. We had sex while her boyfriend watched, leaving me to spend the rest of the evening sipping wine and smoking cigarettes half naked on the suite’s balcony, occasionally going back inside to see what was happening.

I never considered myself much of a voyeur, but I found it easy to witness what was going on. Girl-on-girl-on-boy-on-girl-on-boy-on-boy, basically. A string of naked bodies spread over the suite’s living room and bedroom. Heavy breathing, the occasional burst of laughter. Random enquiries along the lines of private parts smelling like cheese – there was a cheese platter, remember.

I decided to take care of the soundtrack, occasionally interrupting our host mid-sex to ask him to unlock his iPad, which for some reason was absolutely no big deal.

I stepped out to get more cigarettes and ended up entering a tacky nightclub to use their vending machine. I was buying three packs, which confused the people standing in line behind me. “It worked, no need to put more money in! Look, your cigarettes are right here.” I briefly considered telling them it wasn’t my fault – I was buying smokes for a whole orgy – before leaving the club and getting back to the hotel.

By then things were coming to an end, and we all chatted some more before the organiser’s girlfriend announced that she wanted to go to sleep. I quickly got dressed and suddenly was standing on the street, feeling slightly dizzy from this oh-so-weird evening.

I bought myself a beer and entered the U-Bahn, which I left again to change directions after deciding some dancing was in order. I had a sip, sighed with satisfaction and smiled about the fact that none of the other passengers had any idea what I had just been up to.