I don’t think I’ve ever had so many coincidences happen in one day…

On the second and final Sunday of my stay in Berlin, I decided to go to a barbecue organized in a park by two Spaniards. On my way there, I bumped into a girl I knew from a Couchsurfing event a few days prior. She was headed to a bar with friends and didn’t know about the meeting in the park. However, when I told her it was a barbecue, she said she recalled seeing a group of people holding a barbecue sign in the park. She said she would probably join later on, and we parted ways.

As I was strolling through the park and letting my attention wander from one musician to the next, I saw a column of smoke in the distance. I resolved to go there, thinking that was where the meeting was taking place. That’s when I noticed the famous barbecue sign just to my right, and a dozen people sitting down nearby, looking for people looking for people.

When I joined in, they expectantly asked for my country of origin. There was a surge of relief when I answered. As it turned out, almost every single person who had joined them up to this point was Spanish, to such an extent that they were quickly losing all hope of an “international” meeting.

I happened to sit next to the one other French person in the group. As we got to know each other, I learned that she lived in Paris too, what’s more in the same arrondissement as me.

As the afternoon went on, we decided to move to the nearby amphitheatre to attend the well-known, cheerful Mauerpark karaoke. The organizer usually picks volunteers at random amongst the crowd and lets him or her sing, backed by the audience.

When the karaoke ended at around eight (there were only five or six of us left by then), we agreed to meet up a few hours later to go to an open-mic session in a bar.

The bar is unique in that it is almost completely upside down, so you would have chairs hanging off the ceiling and all that. As we stepped in, one of us jokingly observed that the bar felt a bit like a brothel – actually a very accurate remark, considering the history of the place. The bar was also named “Madame Claude”… which turned out to be the last name of the French girl.

As we entered the basement for the open-mic session, I noticed among the 20-ish audience members a girl that looked familiar. I later approached her to confirm and it turned out I was right: we had gone to the same frisbee meeting the previous week.

Everybody was paying close attention to the performers (to the extent that one of them even commented “Everybody’s listening. This is wonderful.”), and every performer was honouring that by delivering highly interesting performances.

One of the most interesting performances was that of Angelo Romano, a Sicilian musician that, funnily enough, I had briefly talked to in a meeting the previus week. I must say I wasn’t prepared for his music. He was hyperactively switching between frenetic guitar playing, a funny-sounding kazoo and impassioned MJ-esque yelps. For all the thoughtfulness his music undoubtedly contained, I still had a lot of difficulty stifling my laughter, and I wasn’t the only one. Whether that was what he was going for, I wouldn’t know. Be that as it may, he’s the musician who made the biggest impression on me that evening, and that’s laudable.

On my way back home, I came across two friends I had made at another event. They were sitting down on the stairs of my metro station, waiting for their host… And as if that wasn’t enough, the following day, in another Couchsurfing event, I talked to someone who had sung at the Mauerpark karaoke I had attended.

Life can be strange at times…