Dr Pong

No - that wasn't the nickname I received from my classmates after forgetting my deodorant on the first day of school!

It is the name of a very cool bar in Prenzlauerberg (a cool suburb of Berlin) that Chris van Tuinen had told me about after his last visit to Berlin. My classmates and I went there to celebrate our last class together.

The decor is a cross between abandoned warehouse and friends garage and you could walk past there for two months and never know it was there (In fact Paula from class did just that - she had lived DIRECTLY opposite the bar and didn't know it was there.

The first thing you see when you tentatively open the door, wondering if this is the right place, is the competition table tennis table. When we arrived there were around 30 people circling the table, beer in one hand, bat in the other, taking it in turns to hit the ball. When you miss a shot you sit on the sides, or go into the other room where there are some couches and a small bar. When the final 2 people are left at the table they play a proper game of table tennis (first to five) and then when this game is decided the loser taps their bat on the table and everyone jumps up to do it all again.

Pleasantly, despite the amount of beer in my system (or perhaps because of it), I managed to finish in the top 4 or 5 most times. I made the final 2 a few times and I even won one game. Here is a photo of me celebrating with my friend Nick from class...


The only downside to an unventilated room full of mainly men sweating it out around a table tennis table made me marvel at the double meaning to the bar's name.

This was the first time I had seen a bar like this and we all had a fantastic time.

The night after Dr Pong, I was walking home after having a quite dinner and when I was almost at my front door noticed a bar accross the road that I had never seen open before. I was going to walk past and head to bed until I spied through the window...............A TABLE TENNIS TABLE!!!

So, in I headed, swapped my drivers licence for a bat and played up a storm while chatting with locals.

It was the perfect way to spend my last night (for now) in Berlin.