The city hides its secrets pretty well. To the unschooled eye, Ber­lin might be explored in a very quick fash­ion with noth­ing much that lies beneath the sur­face. But there are so many per­spect­ives to chal­lenge and even more fences to climb, we’re just get­ting lazier, think­ing this and that is all there is. It’s not. There’s more, although usu­ally for­got­ten and eas­ily dismissed.

Climb­ing into a long aban­doned con­struc­tion site, for instance, is one of those exper­i­ences that lets you explore Ber­lin from the bot­tom. We took those pic­tures long ago, on a cold and muddy day, but it was sure worth it. We were cer­tainly not the first ones to be there — the hiero­glyphs and pic­tures left on the walls tell the stor­ies of so many people who’ve already found their way through the unof­fi­cial entrance. They’re leav­ing their own marks, mak­ing his­tory in a way. But what attracts us to those empty halls of noth­ing? Pos­sibly the fact that we are the only ones here. New spaces spread like rumors, build­ings are being put on hold to get torn down at some point. But before all of that hap­pens, the creep­ing writers and explorers take over and make it their own.

It’s dif­fi­cult to write about some­thing like this to the pub­lic because then it pretty much opposes the charm­ing secrecy the places carry with them. The point shall be that you’ll have to find them your­self if you’re that motiv­ated, but that we love to share what we see any­way. Get excited. Look fur­ther. Climb up on walls. Risk a view from the bot­tom or from the sky, in any case: don’t take the city for gran­ted. It’s an adventure.