Jim’s Berlin: Drink the Ring

(Our hero, and lover of the weird and wonderful aspects of Berlin, takes up a challenge that was neither big, nor clever…)

Are you sick of senseless drinking? Need something more challenging? Forget the Monopoly pub-crawl in London. Berlin has “Drink the Ring Bahn”, and since 2002 Germanys best mobile drinking session is up and running again. For 40 odd years due to political differences between east and west, a great big wall and no money to repair the tracks it had to be stopped, leaving a generation of Berliners without the experience open to you now.

The Ring Bahn is 37 km ring of railway that runs though some of Berlin’s most glamorous neighbourhoods (Prenzlauer Berg, Charolottenburg) and some of Berlins not so glamorous neighbourhoods (Wedding, Neukölln).  There are 27 stops and the idea is to find the nearest pub to each stop and drink a beer (kebab shops don’t count). Now just a little simple mathematics tells us that drinking a big beer at each stop would be a very bad idea, as it works out at 13.5 litres (29 US pints and 24 British pints).

Drinking a small beer at each stop also works out at 8 litres of beer (17 US pints and 14 British pints) and having drunk a few beers in our time we know this hurts too. I would also like to add at this point that binge drinking is not big and it is certainly not clever…. But in the name of glory and prestige amongst fellow man “The Usual Suspects” so JD, Seanie, Toga, Jörn, yours truly Jimbo went for it.

Starting at Schönhauser Allee we went anti clockwise and it turned into most nonsense way that you can pass your time. The first casualty was Jörn at stop 16 who was picked up girlfriend to stop him from being so stupid. Casualty number 2 was me who had a funny turn at Treptower Park and have only heard what happened… the others are not sure what happened afterwards but one of them vaguely remembers being at Ostkreuz. Along the way we had tears, arguments, lost bags, dramatic taxi rides, tears, a very expensive mobile telephone invoice and one broken relationship. Just another Saturday really….. You just need to buy a day ticket for the public transport and you can hop on and off all day.  Have fun….