You know you’re a Berliner when…

1. The working week starts on Tuesday if not Wednesday, while the weekend starts on Thursday at midnight.

2. You’ve danced at a U-Bahn station.

3. Leave your beer bottles on the streets for the poor folk to pick up and take back.

4. Start collecting beer bottles on the street.

5. You’ve gotten thoroughly, thoroughly lost.

Berlin nights begin at around 11pm, when you’ll innocently close your door to head out and see what’s happening, before bumping into some girls in a Hof, decide to join them to go meet this other guy, then that guy’s heard about this party from a dude he met juggling in the park. Which leads you somewhere, which leads somewhere… and before you know it its 4:30am on the following Tuesday and you’re in a club with no name, wearing someone else’s pants, dancing with people you just met, but love dearly, yet couldn’t name, and all-consumed with smug satisfaction at the joyous serendipity of life, or at least Berlin.

6. You can never tell what a person’s sexuality is - and even more than that - you stop wondering

7. You’ve been invited to at least one group sex party.

8. When you realise Berghain is just a huge queue with a small nightclub attached.

9. You have regular Berlinergasms.

I was on the tram recently and overheard an English guy turning to his two friends and saying loudly “I fucking love living in Berlin. I just love it. It’s just so fucking great”. What he possibly lacked in eloquence, he more than made up for in enthusiasm. He was having a Berlinergasm.

So you’ll live here, and in the words of that Englishman “you’ll fucking love it.” You’ll be happier than you could ever be in whatever boring, little, stifling town you came from.

Sometimes that happiness will feel hard to contain and will just sort of overflow into a wave of temporary euphoria of thanks; thanks that you escaped that town, thanks that here you’re free to reinvent yourself as you always wanted to be, just simple thanks that you get to live here.

Berlinergasms.

11. You’ve witnessed at least one daily act of crazy.

The inner voice is where our thoughts first manifest themselves.

Think of the brain like a big production line, down which our earliest ideas travel. At the end is a filtering mechanism I imagine to be a big giant crusher ball on a chain, known as sanity. This swings back and forth crushing to a pulp all of our stupid thoughts before they can go anywhere dangerous. The best ideas get to dodge the crusher and come flying out of our mouths.

But, should you walk the fine graffiti-strewn streets of Berlin you’ll see that there are a very high population of people here possessing no internal crusher.

Anything can come out at any time. You’ll spot them easily; they’re the ones dressed as shabby neon pirates and wandering around muttering to themselves incoherently. Sometimes the muttering becomes loud SHOUTS of nonsense. Berlin has more than its fair share of crazies.

10. You’ve got wasted on BERLINER BRANDSTIFTER and now understand the truth.