For the homesick or those Thais in Germany who just yearn to hear their language again, a Berlin park is the place to go.

Preussen Park, west of the city centre in the Wilmersdorf neighborhood, is Berlin's Little Thailand, with Thai food cooking in the open air and giving off the unmistakable scents of coriander and peanut sauce with Thai-style chicken.

Families of Thais and other Southeast Asians spread their picnic rugs on the broad lawns amid German sunbathers in summertime or on a warm fall day.

Some of the women have even adapted the practices of Asian rural markets to this foreign climate, putting up little mobile food stands on the grass and selling Asian snacks such as balut -- a boiled egg with a nearly-developed embryo inside popular in Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines -- for a few coins.

Filipinos and Vietnamese take part of the fun, with hundreds of Asians on the lawns on weekends, when Berlin's many parks, with their clusters of trees and clean air, are the place to enjoy the blue skies.

Other culinary delights on offer include spring rolls and papaya salad and snacks wrapped in leaves, such as chili peppers, nuts, shrimps and chunks of ginger.

The visitor might just get invited to join in a poker game. Even Thai-style massages are available.

This being Germany, everyone has been counted. The city's registry for foreign nationals says nearly 6,000 Thai nationals live inside the city boundaries.

In Preussen Park, their presence is acknowledged by an extra notice containing the park by-laws ... translated into Thai.

Nobody can precisely remember why Preussen Park, which is situated in a middle-class neighborhood, became dear to the hearts of Germany's Thais during the 1990s.

"It just kind of happened," said one man.

"We just say, 'I'll see you at the park,'" said another, Ed, 51, a masseuse who works in a Berlin gym.

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