Marcel Winatschek

Vintage Clothes and a Ping Pong Table

The Travelettes—a women’s travel blog, one of the better ones running at the time—organized a flea market that July at Dr. Pong on Eberswalder Straße in Berlin. Dr. Pong is a specific kind of Berlin institution: a bar built around a ping pong table, dark, slightly improvised-feeling, the kind of place where things happen sideways. It turns out to be a surprisingly good setting for rummaging through strangers’ wardrobes.

Vintage clothes, a DJ, a bar, the whole familiar Berlin Sunday afternoon logic. We had a table there too. I don’t remember exactly what we sold or what we took home. What I remember is the light coming in sideways through the windows, July doing its slow warm thing outside, and the particular pleasure of finding something good in a pile of things someone else had given up on.