All a-twitter at ITB

BERLIN – A German friend of mine was relating to me his first visit to ITB Berlin 30 years ago.

Working in his first sales job in a small property in Wiesbaden, he was told by the owner about “this trade show in Berlin” and asked if he could drive to the city “to see what it was all about”.

“I will pay for the fuel,” said the owner.

And so my friend arrived at his first ITB. “I walked around, met a lot of new people, gave out name cards and told them about my little hotel. Then someone invited me to a Mexican party and I thought, why not?

“At the party, I met the Mexican hosts who plied me with drinks. I thought, this isn’t bad. Then I got invited to another party and I had more drinks, met more people and handed out more name cards.”

Thirty years later, not much has changed really. You still meet a lot of new people, give out name cards, go to parties and get free drinks. Except as a veteran these days, my friend no longer attends any Tom-Dick-or-Harry party, he puts together select gatherings with select contacts at select places.

I was fortunate enough to be invited to this select gathering at the Newton Bar on Charlottenstrasse 57, Mitte.

Ranked as one of the World’s Best Bars (www.worldsbestbars.com), the bar is named for legendary Berlin fashion photographer Helmut Newton. His pictures are all over the place.

I must confess it’s hard to have a deep and serious discussion about industry trends and issues when you’re sitting right under wall-to-wall, black-and-white prints of beautiful girls wearing nothing but pearls and killer high heels.

“What do you think of this climate change thing?” someone asked me as I peered upwards and found myself looking right between a girl’s legs.

“Hot,” I said.

Anyway, the bar is the one of the many in Berlin that attracts the really beautiful people. Earlier, I had just been to a restaurant down the road where my German friend was pointing out celebrities left, right and centre.

I didn’t know any of them, unfortunately. The only name I recognized was Vicky Leandros (real name: Vassiliki Papathanasiou). You guessed it, she’s Greek and I remember her for the one hit, Come What May.

It wasn’t my luck though that night to meet beautiful people – instead as we sat huddled in the cold on the lounge chairs outside the bar (don’t you find as you get older, the joy of shouting over loud music eludes you), a group of my new-found, new-made “blogger” friends walked by and joined our select gathering.

See, during ITB, you don’t even have to go to parties, the parties come to you.

Anyway, these new friends do not talk about climate change or room rates; instead they talk gizmos and cool tools.

In the midst of sharing your family secrets – martinis tend to make you feel you’re the best of friends with everyone you meet – they will whip out their Flip video cameras and record you.

And in the middle of a discussion on, say, the conversion of look-to-book ratios, they will actually say, “Wait, I am twittering.”

Twittering is a “social networking or microblogging service using instant messaging, SMS or a web interface”.

What you do is tell everyone who cares to know “What are you doing?” It allows up to 140 characters.

So I twittered to a friend in London: “Newton Bar hot. Naked girls all around. Surrounded by geeks.”

Catch up with Yeoh Siew Hoon at The Transit Cafe – www.thetransitcafe.com