I won't ramble about my short but ever so sweet escape to the coolest capital in Europe too much. But there is one thing I wanted to do a post about - Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus. The coolest bookshop ever. The UK could take some serious notes here. I'm a big bookstore lover, and this for me, was awesome. I did the tourist thing and took some snaps.
For one thing...it's huge. Massive. If you like pokey, small, maze-like bookshops (and I do too!), then this won't be your cup of tea. But seriously...check this out!
All those floors are filled with books! I know the picture doesn't show you very well, but there's even more to either side...it's wide as well as tall! Here's another view - straight down the middle towards the back is the main entrance.
If you walk in through the main entrance and continue straight down the middle walkway, you get to this...
A funky sort of chill-out area. See the big green wall at the back of the picture? This is what it looks like close up:
That, my friends, is a vertical garden. In a bookshop! The plants are real and beneath the balcony from which I was taking the picture is a cafe. I think all bookshops should have a cafe. It looked so tranquil down there.
In case you're wondering, no I don't speak German. Obviously, being a German bookshop, the majority of all these wonderful floors were filled with German books. But just to the side of the vertical garden was this:
Voila! English! How amazing is that? An English bookshop, right in the middle of a massive German one! In the UK you'd be lucky to find even a few shelves of books in other languages, let alone a whole dedicated section. This is what it looked like inside:
There was two floors to this mini-English bookshop and even a children's section. There was lots of sofas where you could sit and read the time away, the shelves were divided by genre and there was even a specific till you could pay at downstairs if you didn't want to face the huge crowds to find the other tills dotted around the larger bookshop.
Obviously being this size, it didn't sell just books. I'm not sure what Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus translates to exactly, but I think it's something to do with culture. There was a couple of floors with DVD's, a large selection of CD's and other audio and I think they sell tickets to various music/art/book events too. But it wasn't the situation in which the books are shunned to one side to make way for all this other media. The number and selection of books far outweighed the other types of media for sale. I cannot rate this place enough, totally worth a visit if you're a book lover and in Berlin.
If you can read German, here is their website: http://www.kulturkaufhaus.de/
Oh take me back there! I hope to visit some bookshops in London whilst I'm living so close, so perhaps I'll find something close to this beauty. For the time being, I'll have to dream about it from back in soggy England. Seriously, the rain at the moment? Not fun. But perfect reading weather if you don't have to be anywhere!
Over and out
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