Date "afternoon" in Berlin

In Seattle for a date we would go get drinks at a restaurant on the shore of Lake Union and watch the sun set over the city skyline.

In Berlin for a date you have a guy take you to an abandoned East Berlin margarine factory to learn how to spray paint graffiti.

I've come to now think that the second option is more interesting, since you will learn lots about a whole world that you had zero clue about beforehand.

The workshop, a former GDR warehouse in the old East Berlin borough of Lichtenberg.

Before the workshop part, a Berlin spray-artist guy walked us around some of the famous graffiti locations in the Kreuzberg neighborhood. There are all kinds of messages and signals and even history hidden in these wall splatters. There are various "crews" who work in Berlin, groups of 10-50 people, and each one has their own tags, styles and call signs. Once you get to know some of these, you can start to identify the work and know what seemingly random symbols and acronyms mean.

Why does Berlin have so much graffiti? Unlike other cities, Berlin lays the responsibility of building cleanliness with the building owner instead of having city ordinances that flat out prohibit spray painting public places. The cops will stop you and take your information, but only to report it to the building owner, who then decides on fines based on various criteria. Some building owners will spend the money to paint over graffiti. Others don't care. Others can't afford to keep doing it, so it stays. There are situations when you could get put in jail and fined thousands of Euros of course, so doing it is inherently dangerous. This of course is the draw to it for many young street artists trying to make a name for themselves. 

Alleyway art at the Musik & Frieden Club on Falkenstein Strasse next to the Oberbaumbrücke.

Overall, the resulting policy tends to be rather lax compared to other cities and Berlin becomes a bit of an focal point for this type of expression.

There are lots of unwritten rules governing the expression of this, as certain tags or works no one would think to paint over.  He showed us a couple signatures ("GFA" in the picture below) was from a guy in the late 90's who was influential in the street scene. No one has ever painted over it, and the letters are quite faded. 

On the stretch of the U1 bahn line between Kottbusser Tor and Görlitzer Bahnhof, one of the densest concentrations of street art in the world.

One of the problems of being a graffiti artist in Berlin is that so much of the easily-accessible parts of buildings in the city have been covered. This basically means the first 6-7 feet of a building. To get around this, some climb up on dangerous rooftops and lean over with long-handled roller brushes to paint "down" from the roof. Others modify fire extinguishers by removing the chemicals, refilling with a paint and water mix, then re-pressurising into a device that can shoot paint 30 feet in the air. 

One crew, called "Berlin Kidz", has taken to stealing up to rooftops and rappelling down to paint on the open "canvas" 3 and 4 stories up. Berlin has a number of these large canvases, which are the old fire walls built into the buildings to prevent a city-wide conflagration. During the war much of the city was destroyed and many buildings stopped at the fire wall, which presents huge five storey spaces for graffiti art.

A Berlin Kidz creation. It says "I can't celebrate as long as I am living in Babylon." Which probably means something deep.

Certain neighborhoods like Kreuzberg are positively covered with graffiti, since this is the counter-culture, anti-establishment area in Berlin. It's got a history of activism and unemployment (possibly related) and during the GDR years was enclosed on three sides by the Wall so that its largely Turkish population had little access to the outside. It was a rough area that is now being gentrified, but the revolutionaries are still making their marks on everything.

Sometimes the building owners contract with artists to paint the entire structure. Falckenstein Strasse @ Schlesiches Tor U1. 

And then we took trams and busses and trains out to Lichtenberg to the old margarine factory, taken over by our guide and his crew. We cut out stencils then got to work making our creations!

Jay works on his Banksy stencil

It is a dude throwing a molotov cocktail, a sufficiently counter-culture icon

Graffiti Art: One more thing I never envisioned either A. Doing in the First Place or B. Knowing Anything Whatsover About