The One with the Party

I may be many things – someone called me a “pluralist” a couple of weeks ago – but a party person I am not. A combination of social awkwardness, claustrophobia, lack of experience and plain old ignorance of what one is supposed to do at a party mean that the prospect of writhing after-dark Berlin was about as inviting to me as a field trip to prison.

But this trip, for me, is about filling more pages into the atlas of possibilities, and so when Eric kindly put me on the guest list for last night’s SoundCloud–EyeEm Summer Party it felt wrong not to attend on several levels. Slightly more levels, in the end, than it felt right not to attend.

So I plucked up my courage and headed out into the heady atmosphere of Berlin nightlife and found my way to Picknick where, sure enough, I was on the guest list. What I found inside was, indeed, several thousand miles outside of the boundaries of my comfort zone, but I persevered and hung in for 90 minutes of beer drinking, people watching, music listening and what I might call sociological research (you might call it “hanging out on the fringes of the crowd trying hard not to look like a dork”). Here’s what it all felt and sounded like: