Tourists

Spending the better part of my stroll to uni ducking and dodging people's happy snaps, it's clear that in the last few weeks the city has transformed into a tourist playground. Double-decker buses heaving with tourists pull up regularly outside the uni; masses of wide-eyed people wander around with oversized maps; loud and often drunken accents accost the ears of train travellers. I am no Berliner, in fact, I have been here a grand total of 4 months, but even I am becoming tourist-weary.

Before arriving in Berlin, I'd heard stories of unfortunate young tourists who'd been turned away from trendy Berlin clubs for having a foreign accent, and I had been outraged. After all, these hordes do inject thousands of Euros into the local economy, how unfair that they experience such blatant discrimination, etc. But a few months in, and the attitude of some of the locals here is starting to rub off. I've found myself snarling at obnoxious, over-loud accents on public transport, pretending to not speak English or German when asked for the 3rd time in an hour for directions and clenching my fists at the lost looking fellow, forlornly gripping his map on the train steps, and refusing to budge to let a single person past.

Of course, not all tourists are tiresome - in fact it's probably only really a handful of particularly painful ones that are ruining it for the rest of us.  But that minority sure make their voices heard. For instance, there was the half a dozen twenty-somethings on the evening tram through Prenzlauer Berg, animatedly discussing in English how embarrassing it is when your mum says "shit", or heaven forbid uses the "f" or "c" words. Likely under the mistaken assumption that no one else on the crowded tram could understand English, they ensured I felt personally ashamed to be just another English-speaking foreigner here to "discover Berlin".

Then was the guy in Aldi last night who was so impressed by the low, low prices, his "Dude! These bottles of water are like, only 6 for one euro!!" carried across the entire store. Cringe. There are also the hundreds of bizarrely dressed, club mate-swigging hipsters who are to be found on every street corner in Kreuzberg, most of whom I'm convinced aren't even German, let alone from Berlin. These tourists aren't so much offensive as amusing, except when they leave the remnants of their picnics and cigarettes all through the local park and haul their 10 Euro bikes onto the S-bahn in peak hour.

"Teenie tourism" is pretty big in Berlin because everything's so cheap, a hangover from the days of soviet occupation and a sluggish local industry. You can buy a beer for 50 cents, find a hostel room in central Berlin for 10 Euros, shop at Aldi, buy a day transport pass for 6 Euros and of course, hang out in the many parks here for free. Apparently in summer the city is flooded with party-hardy teenagers and relatively poor students, meaning the city may be crowded but it's not necessarily making big dollars out of these guys. Kind of a shame for the locals who are struggling to push their briefcase onto the packed trains, avoid ridiculously long lines to grab a coffee and generally live day to day in Berlin. You get the feeling that this grungy, cool, astoundingly cheap capital city is going to move into the super touristy, super pricey category in the not-too-distant future.