According to the Record Stores (dot) Love website, Berlin is home to no fewer than 92 record shops. A quick zoom around our accommodation on Google Maps also makes one thing clear: distances in this city can be unexpectedly long. What looks like “just around the corner” often turns out to be three kilometers away. Thankfully, there’s Bolt — and a wonderfully comprehensive public transport network. The U‑Bahn gets you anywhere fast, but on a trip of only a few days, where do you actually want to squeeze in a visit?
This is one example from a four‑night stay at the Titanic Chaussee Berlin hotel.
After landing on Friday afternoon, we dropped by the Berlin Wall Memorial and wandered through the nearby parks. Berlin isn’t just a vinyl collector’s playground — it’s also a sanctuary for street art. Case in point: the North Side Gallery, where we found ourselves surrounded by artists at work while the warm autumn sun cast a low golden glow over the leaves. The urban atmosphere was amplified by the thump of boomboxes and the hiss of spray cans. By coincidence, we arrived during the celebrations for the 35th anniversary of German reunification, meaning many restaurants were closed. We picked a Vietnamese place, and I went for a green curry with chicken, washed down with a local Erdinger beer.
Saturday greeted us with rain. Even so, after a generous hotel breakfast, we walked to the nearest record store — a shop simply called The Record Store Berlin on Invalidenstraße. I don’t know much about Berlin’s record‑store scene, but I’m pretty confident this one landed squarely in the category I was hoping for. Bins neatly organised by genre, and a well‑stocked prog/kraut used section that invited a proper dig. I walked out with an East German pressing of Tangerine Dream’s Quichotte live LP (a ten‑euro gem you don’t exactly stumble upon every day in Finland), plus a missing piece from my Klaus Schulze shelf: Dig It (18 euros).
A third record I’d hesitated over was a US original pressing of Yes’s triple live album Yessongs for 39 euros. The sleeve had seen some wear, but the vinyl itself was remarkably clean and the booklet intact. I asked for a small discount — and the friendly seller, probably the owner, knocked a few euros off. After paying, he sent me off with: “Enjoy your new records!”
I fully intend to. Thank you!
On Sunday it was time to visit the Museum für Naturkunde, conveniently close to where we were staying. According to Wikipedia, the building was damaged in the February 1945 bombings but reopened already that September — making it the first museum in Berlin to do so after the war. The eastern wing, however, had been completely destroyed along with its collection of large mammals and whale specimens.
Today, the vast glass‑roofed central hall is guarded by seven assembled dinosaur skeletons. The most famous, again per Wikipedia, is the 150‑million‑year‑old Brachiosaurus unearthed by a German palaeontology team in 1909 near the Tendaguru hill in present‑day Tanzania. Standing over 13 metres tall, it’s the largest mounted authentic dinosaur skeleton in the world. One could easily write a separate blog post just about the museum, but I’ll highlight two exhibits that captivated me most: the “Kosmos und Sonnensystem” hall, and the space dedicated to Earth’s biodiversity. In addition to the 11‑euro admission fee, I left a bit lighter after picking up a Stephen Hawking book from the museum shop.
For our final full day, we bought a 24‑hour ticket through the BVG app — a stress‑free passport to criss‑cross the city by U‑Bahn.
We headed east to the East Side Gallery, walking it from end to end and back again — easily over two kilometres along the former border. Wikipedia notes that 118 artists from 21 countries created the artworks here, not only as murals but as statements against the violence and oppression the wall once symbolised. With more than a hundred works, it’s the largest open‑air gallery in the world. We stopped at nearly every piece, taking our time, and it was worth every minute.
From there we crossed the railway bridge to a record shop called Bis Aufs Messer Records. Its charm lay in its carefully curated, deeply obscure selection. From outside, the place looked modest — the window cracked but intact, streaked with graffiti tags instead of a clear shop sign. It’s the kind of store where you should probably buy a wild‑looking record you’ve never heard of, because there were plenty of those.
I refrained — and instead picked up two reissues from local legends: Cluster II and Zuckerzeit. The latter sits at #63 on Pitchfork’s “Top 100 Albums of the 1970s” list (for comparison: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is at #70, and #1 is Bowie’s Low from his Berlin period…). Speaking of Low, my third find was The Great Destroyer by the American indie‑rock band Low — a double LP whose opening track “Monkey” I’ve actually covered (it’s on YouTube).
One more noteworthy detail: they had Finnish releases too — albums by Circle and Pharaoh Overlord, and even the Susi-Unto record Puheluja pimeältä puolelta.
And the store soundtrack? A constant electronic hum that could easily be mistaken for a dying appliance. Delicious.
We wrapped up the afternoon at Alexanderplatz, admiring the towering Fernsehturm and what might be the most beautiful fountain I’ve seen so far: the Neptunbrunnen. From there, we hopped on the metro back to the hotel lobby for a beer.
In that sense, Seppo Räty wasn’t quite right — I can absolutely imagine wanting to travel to Germany again someday. Besides Berlin, there are plenty of major cities still unseen (Hamburg, for starters), but time will tell whether the next trip will be a return to Berlin for deeper exploration or an entirely new destination. Either way, there’s more than enough to discover for several visits.
