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I woke up this morning with the taste of yesterday still in my mouth. The reminiscent of stale Berliner Pils and too many cigarettes left my tongue dry. I swallow hard and slowly sit up in my uncomfortable couch-turned-bed. The left-over alcohol is drumming against my temples in a steady beat. On my wrist, the smudged stamp I collected at some bar is tattooed in black ink. I touch the blurry oval, whose original shape I cannot remember, like a foreign object and the memories come rushing in. I am standing in front of the heavy metal door of a bar, my friends recommended to me. Or at least, I think it is metal. The door is plastered with hundreds of stickers, some washed out and unreadable, some neat advertisements for one of the many hipster tattoo studios in Kreuzberg. I tilt my head, to read the name in italics underneath a sketch of an upside-down whale. Before I can reach out for the door handle, a small crack opens, and a face framed by black glasses peaks out. Loud techno seeps through the gap between door and wall into the cold Berliner February night. ‘No entry here,’ the face mutters and shuts the door with a final slam. Irritated I turn around. As I am about to use up my last bit of data to check google to reassure myself that this is in fact the entry, I feel a tap on my shoulder. ‘It’s around the back,’ the tender voice of the woman standing behind me is almost unfitting for her leather jacketed, Doc Martens wearing, pierced look. My friends warned me that it is sometimes easier to find the rabbit hole to Alice’s wonderland than the entry to a Berliner club, not even speaking off getting in, so I follow my guide closely. Without a word she leads me around the block. It smells like piss, but I already got used to the smell in just two days. The woman’s boots echo as we turn to cross a passage leading to the other side of the building. ‘Are you from around here?’, I speed up my step to keep up with her. ‘Nah’, she says and sticks a cigarette between her lips. ‘I moved up here about five years ago,’ the smoke jumps up and down in the corner of her mouth when she speaks. I would have never found the entry on my own, I think as she reached for a heavily graffitied door, I barely recognized as such. It feels like walking into a wall of smoke when you enter one of Berlin’s smoker bars. Cold smoke floats in the air of the sparsely lit bar like early morning fog in the forest. I inhale and can taste the thousands of dead cigarettes smoked in the place. I try not to cough and turn around. ‘Where are you from then?’, I try to shout over the music. Shaken by the veil of smoke, I only now notice the deafening noise of electronic beats dripping from large speakers. ‘What?’ she leans closer and despite the smoke I can feel her warm breath on my neck. Then she sucks on her cigarette, the ember button illuminating her face. I open my mouth again to repeat my question. ‘Do you want to get a drink?’, she interrupts me with a smile. I nod obediently. We move through bodies, faces, hands with cigarettes, shaved heads, nose piercings and tattoos until the bartender greets us with a quick smile before turning around to pour another beer. The poster behind the bar announcing a queer party catches my eye; ‘SUPERWOMEN – Every Tuesday’ it reads in pink. I turn to see my company watch me with a knowing smirk. It suits her, I think. ‘I’m Kate’, she says with her lips way too close to my ear again. I yawn and tie my sleep-messy hair into an even messier bun. The alarm on the nightstand says 11:25am in proud red letters. The coat I carelessly tossed over the chair when I got home last night, smells like old cigarettes and her perfume.