Being cool and on the ‘in’ side of Ber­lin does not only imply spend­ing a lot of money on the appro­pri­ate attire; more than that it’s about where you let your­self be seen. The annual Beer­meile, a good stretch of the Karl Marx Allee packed with all sorts of beer stands, is def­in­itely not one of the cool places.

But then again it’s so easy to dis­miss the obvi­ous. Sure, the music’s a mix of awk­ward shabby cover bands and Ger­man Sch­la­ger­pop, but in the end the tour­ists, the hip­sters, the stu­dents, the Ber­liners, those who are too old to label them­selves and those who fit neither here nor there all come to the same basic instinct: drink­ing. Yep, they all get wasted here (except for myself). So why even judge?

The Bier­meile is cer­tainly long, and there’s one dis­tinct­ive dif­fer­ence between the fest­ival in Ber­lin and the Okto­ber­fest in Munich: the Okto­ber­fest con­cen­trates on the Bav­arian tra­di­tion (Augustiner, Paulaner) while the Bier­meile sports a gazil­lion sorts of dif­fer­ent beers and cul­tures. When we hit it on Sunday, we dis­covered unique and never seen brands from far away coun­tries, snacks and music that you wouldn’t get any­where else, and, well, puk­ing people on the side.

I could go fur­ther with my inter­pret­a­tion on how Ber­lin tends to reach out for the mul­ti­cul­tural, while the more con­ser­vat­ive south (ie Munich) likes to stay with those of its own, but we’ll leave it at that for now.