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let me repeat that: 👏🏽Berlin 👏🏽was👏🏽 not👏🏽 better👏🏽 before👏🏽.

I must confess to you I do not understand how someone goes around, sits down in front of their computer and write a five-paragraph blog post on how “Berlin is ruined” “lost its appeal” “is not cool anymore” and then rehash the same underlying idea over and over: “Berlin was better before, when you were not here”. When you imply that, I know you are a xenophobe. And it grinds my gears that supposedly progressive magazines are publishing that garbage.

I find it especially strange when they all dream about a time where there was nothing but smokey bars, and underground parties. I get it, underground parties are super cool, and bars too, but they both are still here and won’t go away. Yes, Ostgut Ton is super mainstream now, but because they worked hard and professionalized everything they do, as successful people do. When you say it was better before, I hear “I only want the things I enjoy to be allowed here”.

Berlin is in the best time it has ever been, and it only keeps improving. There is better food, more people from diverse backgrounds, more creative output, and definitely more money in town. While you can argue endlessly about the vice of Gentrification, you can’t simply blame the people who for years have dreamt, changed their life paths, and left in many cases literally everything they know and own to come here. Reality is far more complex than that.

Everyone is coming to Berlin and it is for a reason. Because life is amazing here. When you complain about hipsters, vegans and whatever is trendy to hate right now, I merely hear you say “You and what you love are not welcome here”.

The choices in the things you can do, consume, and produce are basically endless, even more as when you moved here. Sorry not sorry.

Because a random londoner who visited once would know right?

While the city is not a barren field full of anarchists in abandoned buildings like in the time you moved here or dreamed about when thinking of Berlin, you cannot just say that people who come now and do what they like are “ruining” the city. The days in which people come to Berlin to merely escape are over. We just don’t want to escape, we came here to make it and call this town our own. And You have to deal with that.

In the name about constructive criticism. If you want to write a piece for a magazine about Berlin, I suggest you kindly to ask what is happening now, what is new, and who is doing it, instead of comparing it to the past and name-dropping the same club door over and over.