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Left berlin, moved to dublin. I was initially shocked by the fact that strangers were smiling to me on the street, then i got used to that and suddenly the anger i felt in berlin disappeared. Listen to me, run away. You will appreciate the value of human touch again.
Yep, this will place will wear you down until you... become a Berliner! You will become gray, sullen, angry, humorless, probably stink like piss, come to hate tourists and foreigners. Save yourself while you can!
Btw, I would be dead here if not for the expats. Man, love them guys from NZ or IE, always make me rediscover the art of laughter.
Thank you for giving me opportunity to vent my anger!
No sane person should move to Berlin. If you however do it, prepare for:
-Even the most simple task, let's say getting a prepaid SIM, will take you hours, maybe even days.
-No one who is hired to a job where customer service is needed speaks English. They are almost always +60 senior citizens.
-Everything except drinking beer in public is banned or heavily restricted. No AirBnB, no real Uber. Don't expect to find food at Sunday from entire metropolis.
-Drug addicts and Turkish immigrants fighting on every street corner (either among their own groups or against each others).
-Most women doesn't seem to care about their looks at all. Neither they are the most friendly or warm.
-Long distances and relatively expensive public transport.
-Credit card is not accepted pretty much anywhere.
Maybe this is not all fault of Berlin. Who knows, maybe this is just a German way to do things. I don't expect very bright future for Germany. People have essentially stopped breeding, and with that attitude it is nearly impossible to get foreign professionals to immigrate there.
Hahaha, holy crap:
"-No one who is hired to a job where customer service is needed speaks English. They are almost always +60 senior citizens."
This bit me so bad so many times! You will go to the central train station and try to figure something out and you'll only get some 60+ woman who _knows english_ but will refuse to speak it to you because you are a foreigner. They will also lie to your face and the only time they light up is if they can lose you money.
"Even the most simple task, let's say getting a prepaid SIM, will take you hours, maybe even days. ". This is not even funny. People just focus on "hey, you can drink beer on the street, that's great!", but totally miss the part that everything else is like running through a pool filled with jell-o. You wanna get a job? You gotta have a bank account (1-4 weeks). Wanna get a bank account? You gotta register first (2 months). Everything here is just so freaking hard.
Oh, also forgot to add that Berliners are the laziest people I've ever met.
They have these numbers about productivity and how Germany is da best and all that, but I think they're massaging those numbers in some ways. I mean everything here works extremely slow, the bureaucracy is slow and is open for like what - 4 hours a day? Customer service is non-existant (you will have cashiers be too busy talking with their friends to actually check you out, I mean, it's not like you're giving them money, right?). Delivery people will routinely fornicate you over - they'll just skip your house and leave your poop at the depot or theyll try and cram poop into your mailbox. Trains and buses aren't really more punctual than in other places.
Maybe theyre doing this by the magic of full employment? I mean I haven't seen this many poop jobs since ever. You got people hired for collecting coins at restrooms, you got people charged with paving streets and sidewalks with cobble stones (yeah its awesome until it's winter and it's slippery as fuck), they got people who study until their early 30's.
So theyre slow and service sucks, but is the work they do high quality? Not really - neither their public infrastructure nor housing is really good - rather "just good". Their cars destroy the environment and they refuse to do anything (the epic VW saga) and the worst thing is...
No one cares. If you talk with them, when the US or the UK are caught spying, it's a disaster! But when the same happens to Germany - they shrug it off as "hey, spies are spies, right?". Or that VW car thing - "Hey, GM/Ford/Toyota ALSO did X and Y". Sure.
I guess this is part of the whole thing when the country takes care of you from birth until death. No sense of responsibility. Just adult babies.
"They have these numbers about productivity and how Germany is da best and all that, but I think they're massaging those numbers in some ways."
I agree. One thing that helps is that they managed to scam the rest of Europe with euro currency, which is highly favorable for their exports but disaster for everyone else. Another thing is that when no one is making babies, huge amount of money is saved and people have seemingly high standard of living (kids are bloody expensive if someone didn't know). Of course in the long run this makes as much sense as peeing in your pants in winter to keep warm. Feels really good, for a short time.
"Oh look honey they are having riots in the center of Berlin..Lets go to Madrid instead for our holiday." (Bad press = NO tourists = NO MONEY FOR YOUR DUMP OF A CITY ) fornicate these Germans are smart.
A word of warning to any Brits thinking of relocating here Post-Brexit
the warnings on this site are real. Unless you're in to a squalid techno/electro party scene and only interested in superficial aquaintances, you may really dislike life in Berlin, and would be better advised to either stay home or try elsewhere.
In all honesty the people of this city have the warmth of an ice cube,.
The city itself has little to offer once you've exhausted the museums and tourist attractions (you'll manage that within the first week or two),
The parks are large, but featureless and poorly kept (you'll find them repetitive after one summer, and useless in a winter).
The clubscene - it's pretty homogenous and either you like it (for a couple of years) or you don't, but as there's only really one flavor of night life and if it's not your thing, you're screwed.
You cannot get out either, unless you enjoy spreewald and lakes, you are hours (at best) away from any other landscape, cities or cultural attractions - I guess as far as experiencing life outside the city goes, the best thing Berlin has going for it is it's airports.
If you're planning on staying at home, the tv is awful, but spotify is ok. Netflix has a pretty miserable catalog, amazon prime is mostly available in erman only, and an awful lot on youtube is blocked by GEMA. You'll certainly need a proxy.
Don't think being wealthy will save you either - it is totally wasted on berlin and even frowned upon, there are so few bars, restaurants, country clubs or anything that compare to other major cities, and good luck finding a comfy mansion in the suburbs. London this is not.
And lastly, for christs sake do not underestimate the difficulty of a foreign language. It's fairly easy to learn it, but bloody difficult to convey your personality, charm, wit or authority in it.
Think twice before relocating here, because it may make financial sense, but you only have one life, and you most probably do not want to squander it in this idiot (especially if you are the sort of person who appreciates things which make financial sense)
Oh, and if you're the sort of person who likes a laugh, you might not struggle to make people laugh, but you'll only have the favor returned very rarely (unless you're laughing at them). People don't expect humor here, they will take you seriously unless it is blatently obviously a joke, self deprecating humor will just get yu genuine looks of pitty, and humor at work will just add you to the list of "unprofessional foreigners not to be trusted with serious business". I'm not joking, it may look like a similar culture on the surface, but it is not!
Ditto on the "eat like pigs" and "they dont like humor" parts.
The first one is plain disgusting. I would extend it to the observation that they behave like pigs in every area of life. You know how a Berliner blows their knows while theyre cycling? They plug one nostril with a finger and shoot snot out of the other. You will have Berliners sneeze, cough, or belch mere inches away from you. It's also considered perfectly normal to bellow senseless poop at 5 am on a Sunday because Saturday is Party Day.
But what really gets me is the humor. There is none. People on here compare Germans to robots, but that's not a good comparison. It feels like humor has been beaten or bred out of them. They cant get any except the most obvious jokes. If you make a non-obvious joke (aka. a joke that's funny for the rest of world), you become "the freak". Oh yeah, I totally had that "unprofessional foreigners not to be trusted with serious business" thing happen to me. I quickly became the black sheep at a German company I worked for (not long, thanks God!) because of such abominable acts like "laughing", "smiling", or "joking". This will wear you down over weeks and months until your friends back home ask you what has happened to you? Are you depressed? Did you start doing drugs? No, I just moved to a pooping city.
People who describe Berlin as the best city in the world are?
Came here on the recommendation of several friends (who, in retrospect were probably just impressed with the city's offerings of all night partying) and could not have been more disappointed. Where to begin with what to hate? I'll start with Berlin's awful "street art" which in any other city would just be recognized as basic vandalism by unwashed hipsters looking to further deface whatever wall they happen to be pissing on (more on the urine later). You'd think the citizens of Berlin would have elected a mayor solely on the platform of promising to rid it's public spaces of this visual leprosy, but no, not in Berlin. In the backwards world of Berlin this is deemed "art". How about Berlin's miserable joyless population? At first you pity them and assume their horrible attitude is just the result of being born in the gaping jerk of the world, but then you interact with them and discover that they somehow think they are far superior to you in every way. You wonder to yourself: "do they own a mirror?" They must not sell mirrors in Berlin because every self-satisfied living frown here has simultaneously mastered the look of "I don't have indoor plumbing" and "I dressed myself/cut my own hair while blindfolded". Now for the piss: it's EVERYWHERE. Within an hour of walking to one of Berlin's many feel-good historical sites (more on that later) you begin to notice that city somehow actually smells worse than it looks. Just when you thought the communist architecture was enough to make you want to eat a shotgun you realize it's also soaked in piss. Anywhere you go, you're stepping in piss. Only a sado-masochist would ever dream of wearing sandals in this fish scented city. Now let's get to the much bragged about historical sites in Berlin. After visiting the "Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe", the "Memorial to the victims of war and tyranny", the "Topography of Terror" and the memorial at the Berlin Wall, you start to notice a trend: the Germans have murdered A TON of people. It's not like their bloodbath of a national history was a surprise or anything, but spending hour upon hour visiting sites solely erected to honour the innocent people killed by this miserable unwashed population, it really ruins your day. To rub salt in the wound, the intended 'sobering' effect of these memorials is completely squandered by surrounding them with piles of litter (my god do they LOVE litter here), Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's. The memory of the holocaust has never felt more futile then when you look to your right and see a sandwich board advertising a jelly donut. Want to escape the oppressive buildings, street piss, horrible people and depressing historical sites? Set aside several hours of your life because this shit-filled adult diaper of a city is absolutely MASSIVE. It literally never ends. You will walk for an hour and yet somehow still have more of your life to waste passing block after block of grey, filthy streets and faces before you get to where you're going. Want to dine at one of their four decent restaurants? Get ready for the hostess to try and seat you in the janitor's closet reserved for anyone who speaks English. If you aren't German, they instantly treat you like poop the second you walk in the door. Want to pay for that sub par meal you just choked down? Get ready to find an ATM because apparently the cold war never ended when it came to credit car payments here. You've got a 50/50 chance that someone tells you they only accept cash IN THE YEAR 2016. Great transit system however. 0/10 would not recommend.
Ah, I hope you're here only temporarily.
Totally spot on about the sense of superiority, urine, anti-foreigner sentiment, and accepting only cash money.
When I moved here, all I had was my Visa card, which is accepted almost everywhere, except for those nice stores in GERMANY that only accept the GERMAN EC card. The number of ATMs is so low that my Polish friends complain that you can find an ATM in Poland in 5 minutes, but you're stuck wondering around city center in Berlin for 30+ minutes because ATMs are apparently an extinct animal. And you're poop out of luck if want to pay with card at a restaurant. This also translate to how you can do shopping at stores - enjoy waiting 10 minutes behind some Mr. Good Berlin Citizen who takes out a separate coin purse and begins laying out 5 and 10 cent coins (in rows, no less!) for the cashier.
Another thing that I want to touch on is the sense of superiority. At no time is this more evident than now - during the football games. There are flags everywhere, even on those tiny street cleaning vehicles. Children have face-paint flags on their faces. Look at the comments after they lost yesterday's match to France: "Very disappointing. France played extremely poorly and cynically all the way through, had the referee on their side, ". I get a feeling that while other nationalities celebrate their nation's values, Germans can only celebrate their "superiority".
Take one.measured step back and watch with glee how they fornicate themselves up with their god given superiority.
these people are going down big time.Sit back and enjoy the pain they have put good people through,A dead people .A dead culture.........And one that despite all the best good will of nations of the world continues to be a bunch of Nazis. This time nobody is going to come and save you.
I've used mastercard and visa in every country in South America, Morocco, all cities I been to in India, Japan, Korea and Thailand. But when I came to Germany they didn't seem to accept it and the only time they did they even asked for my ID and made me sign twice to make sure the transaction worked. Serioulsy wtf Germany it's 2016 ffs.
I lived the nightmare of being in a relationship with a german who lived in Berlin for way too long.
I've never experienced such coldness, inability to share feelings, and constant patronizing/belittling from anybody else.
They will walk out the door and let you wondering what the hell just happened, they will refer to you as being a *stranger* the day after they broke up with you. Like the relationship never existed in the first place.
Jeez, those people would make very efficient robots but they really suck at being human beings.
Basically, the coldness you experience in your everyday life with your follow citizens of Berlin, you will experience with a partner who spent a big part of their lives here. Traumatized. I'm so glad I'm leaving soon
It was mediocre at best - in some places, like West Berlin. Now even the state itself horribly fails! If you need a paper from the state you have to first play lotto with their online system to get an appointment. When I first came here, I was told so much about how nice it is, how things work nicely and that their bureaucracy is tolerable. Almost 5 years later, I can regrettably say, Berlin sucks big time! Nothing works, and by the looks of it, change ain't gonna happen (except for the rents, they'll just keep getting higher). Which reminds me, like, seriously, immobilien agencies treat you like crap, building management is only worse (actually it's shameful), and the rents are extreme! They seriously expect you to pay 700-800 euro ++ for a idiot with no sun, in a pooping area that stinks miles away. And now that I mentioned stinkiness... wtf do the garbage trucks collect trash during launch time? Who the f*ck runs this city? Did he even finish elementary school or something? They say and they say so much, but to work in Berlin, from the looks of it, the only viable solution is to live in Brandenburg! Which of course you can't really do (unless you have a car) since with the first snow or heavy rain, SBAN starts looking paralyzed and sorry for saying that but using the bus and taking 1h on top to get home is not something you can use as an excuse for being totally destroyed the next day at work.
Please, don't forget about the piss. Piss everywhere.
For a whiff, just go on to the kulturbraueri near Schonhauser Str. It's a food market on the weekends. Just a normal wee food market.
ZING! If you try to enter it through the eastern gate that looks out onto Danziger Str. you will be overcome by the smell of stale piss. Same story every single darn weekend.
I have never experienced this anywhere. Are you spending a day at the park? Well, enjoy bathing in the site of men's penises or women's bottoms when they just take a piss anywhere they please. Oh, they were standing by a bush so it's ok to piss. Or by a car in a parking lot.
Why don't other places have this problem? Why don't places like Tokyo, NYC, or Mexico City, places that are packed with humans that you can't stretch your hands, have this issue? You'd think that with so many bladders, they'd be drowning in piss.
But they don't. Maybe because it's unacceptable in their respective cultures to piss where you live? On the street that you walk to work every morning. Or in the park that you spend time with your kids.
What the flying fornicate is wrong with these people?
Piss and shite everywhere, that oughta be Berlin's motto. I no longer live in Berlin but I had to return to Europe to Prague specifically and what a contrast.You can also say that Prague is poor but sexy but they mean it. it's not even overpriced there, I could afford to stay there for some time without having to pay a small fortune. Needless to say, people there are much much nicer.
Oh the piss... oh dear!! I've witnessed the unimaginable (in Berlin). Drunk guy from Durum shop wanted to pee. It just came natural to him instead of going to the toilette he ventured to the garages of the building next to it and started peeing there! It's no miracle that many of my connections (highly educated and skilled professionals from distant lands) after 2-4 years are all planning on leaving as soon as possible (that includes me of course)!
I spent the better part of ten years in Berlin. It was never my choice to go but as My girlfriend of the time was from there I followed here need to return. A bit reluctantly as I had a job offer elsewhere but I went and decided to make the best of it.
I was known to all my friends as an insanely optimistic and positive person. I made friends easily and was always gathering positive groups around me.
My Child was born on a cold winter morning in Berlin after our first year there and although I was already seeing the signs, I felt Berlin was like any of the other twenty places I had lived around the world and my positive attitude would win it over in the end.
6 years on after a split and misery at the hands of a relentlessly evil witch of an ex and struggling to achieve even the smallest gains I began to feel negative more often than positive.
I lasted another 3 years and I was beginning to see that people regarded me as a pessimistic and moody person.
It wasn't until I went to see my Doctor on a routine visit (an Expat) and was complaining about the latest set of troubles I was experiencing that she looked me in the eye and said, "Leave Berlin, you will never be happy here and your health is declining because of it."
It took another year of starting and stopping, worry about abandoning my child and fears of costs etc but I finally left.
It has been two years, I am again positive, I have friends, people regard me as an optimist and I talk to random strangers on the street without fear of repercussion. I have not been yelled at by a cyclist or motorist in those two years and I look forward to the day that I can offer a better place for my child.
Sure a lot of sh%t went wrong in my life during my Berlin years but that place softens what small joys you find and seems to exacerbate the ills.
I am still a Berlin Hater and always will be, but now it is comic memory rather than the daily grind.
I shall never return for longer than it takes to pick up my dear child and go somewhere else.
Out
One thing I will be eternally thankful for is that I never got anyone pregnant while in Berlin. The thought of my child growing up being raised by these people makes me break out in a cold sweat. Good luck mate and I hope things work out for you and your child.
I come from NZ and have lived here for 5 1/2 years, solely for the purpose of raising my daughter, as a solo parent. She's turning out to be creative, happy and emotionally intelligent. I'm helping her to develop the tools to deal with this culture, and the option to leave it behind if she wants to. I've taught her to speak English fluently, even how to skateboard. We'll be off to NZ as soon as she's a bit older.
Didn't expect so many new comments in summer. I have higher tolerance for Berlin's flaws in summer.
The city turns me into an alcoholic in winter. I dread the upcoming winter. I got a car now to drive to some serene lakes outside of the city to get over the crowds who come here to marvel at the "hottest" city in EU.
Enjoy the summer guys as much as you can.
This is the perfect time to warn other people, is it not? When I discovered this site around a month ago, I promised I would make at least one post a month - a way to keep the spirit up, a way to warn people save themselves a lot of pain and misery, and a way for me to let off some steam.
Indeed, summer is much more enjoyable. After that female dog of a winter, you honestly start thinking that maybe this place isn't so bad. Shame that I made myself notes during the winter because I had foreseen this exact thing happening. "DONT LET THE SUNLIGHT FOOL YOU, IT'LL BE GONE SOON ENOUGH".
Also, the summer brings on other aches that are absent in the winter. They're not as numerous as the winter woes, but they are still something special as I'm sure none of these things happen in any other civilized country.
Just last weekend I went to meet with friends at the park. We were still at that stage where we were standing in a group to the side of the sidewalk (Berliners NEVER do this, they just stop smack in the middle of the sidewalk). I observed an old man approaching from the corner of my eye, but I assured myself that we were all good - we were taking up something like 25% of the sidewalk and we hugged the side.
I was the outermost member of our group. The man proceeds to bump into my should, then *slide* his should across my back.
My friends look at me, mortified. My throat clenches up, luckily, because I'm overcome by nausea and I feel my dinner rising in my throat. I breathe deep. I count to ten.
Should I have cursed that man out? Should I have kick him in the back of his knee? What are you supposed to do at this point?
An overreaction? Do you think I'm overreacting? You wouldn't if this didn't happen to you every time you walk outside. You've got these wonderful Berliners who walk ahead, heads down, only to notice you at the last second. Or you got these groups of Berliners who take up the whole sidewalk and apparently think that you should pass them by on the road. We're talking about the young and the old, the decrepit homeless and the well-to-do latte-mamas.
At this point I just ignore these fuckers, mumble "AHN-SHOO-DEE-GHUN", and grin after shouldering them.
Btw, I hope your lake trips go well in winter. Are you getting out of Berlin at some point? I'm going to hold this winter out, but only because I'm leaving for good in early Spring.
I'm leaving the city in a few months. Even though I'm unhappy here for thousands of reasons, I find myself being anxious and freaked out about leaving.
I know the job market sucks big time, the people are...well they dont even behave like actual people BUT there are so many things to do around and activities (restaurants, gyms and so on) are still relatively cheap with great diversity. I love the fact that the city is so green, with lots of space and parks to relax.
I don't know, it seems that all the reasons that pushed me to leave have been erased off my mind.
I need your help guys, remind me what this city sucks so much.
I'm not here to tell you about the pile of crap the city is, there is an entire website here with the details. I'm here telling you to focus on the future. The thing with Berlin is that you can always come back. But almost everybody don't ever come back. Once people leave they say wow, Berlin really sucked balls and all that remains about the city are the crappy memories that slowly fade away, I'm telling you this because that happened to me. Change is always difficult, don't be discouraged. Seriously, gyms, bars, restaurants you will find literally in every other city in the world. Parks maybe not so many but there is a reason why you are here on this site cuz if you were really content with the city and life in that awful place you wouldn't be here. And if you after leaving realize that Berlin is for you then return and get your own startup selling drugs at Görlitzer Park and embrace the city, simple as that.
Think about it...the things you like...are things of simple Leisure. Not of Growth. I wont lie, there is a certain unique atmosphere Berlin has that many cities dont, but none of that adds up to a real Adult Life does it?! I think about going back to visit often, but the same things you missed can be easily found in Beijing, Shanghai, Milan, New York, Antalya, Warsaw, Prague, Paris...and countless other more deserving cities. You'll get there. Just dont be a Berliner...PUSH FORWARD!! Best of Luck.
I dont think Berlin is like these other cities mentioned. I think I would be bored in Warsaw, Antalya, Milan. Berlin's dysfunctional side makes it kind of interesting. It is just connecting with people that is so hard here and the gay scene completely sucks: quantity perhaps but no quality.
Heres what happens when youve lived in more than 3 places like I have: Gay Scenes suck EVERYWHERE!!! After 6mo...ALL cities get boring. What matters is the life YOU make for yourself, not what some arbitrary municipality had before you got there, and will have after you leave. Geesh...some of you sound like whiny Germans.
IDK loves, at some piont one must factor in Personal Accountability for ones Happiness. I made the most of Berlins environment...despite the people, still hated it, but I managed to find something to create out of it. Berlin didnt owe me "Happiness", it doesnt owe anyone frankly. On the surface, Gay Scenes arent the same, but underneath...most are. (Lived in NY, ATL, Madrid, SanDiego, Miami and Berlin) I made the most out of each for what they were worth. Thats the secret, at least mine. In sort, fornicate Berlin...what are you actually doing about it?
In just under a year I have regained what 7 years in Berlin took from me.That is my joy of life,sense of good will towards others health, friendships and career. I have not been abused by random strangers nor been insulted by depotic arseholes in the workplace or public servants. It is hard to leave because you have put so much work into staying.But in your heart you know it wont change. If you have managed to survive in Berlin you will do twice as well in any other city without the mountains of poop that you have to deal with in Berlin. Take the leap and leave.You will not regret it. Peace my friends.
almost had to return to berlin for a job.....luckily got a job elsewhere --- I WILL NEVER RETURN....left 2 years ago and still get flashbacks..
Went to a party at 1 of the germans home and guess what ... 20 minutes after that, they grabbed spray cans, gave one to me and went outside to spray the walls ... wtf