Berlin, Germany

December 2022

First thoughts

Berlin was something a little bit different. It had been a place I'd wanted to visit for years, but I'd never really done anything about it. A friend of mine from university contacted me in the summer of 2022 asking if I wanted to go for Christmas, and without thinking about it too much, I said yes. He then reminded me a couple of months later, well into the autumn, when I'd committed to another trip only a month later, and I awkwardly looked in the piggy bank and decided that I could just about do both.

I didn't know what to expect from Berlin – a capital city that had experienced an enormous amount of history in a relatively short amount of time; World War One, reparations, World War Two, Cold War, East and West Berlin, and regrowth in the last thirty years into an economically successful city. I sort of expected it to be 'London but German', but I was very wrong.

This was the first foreign trip I'd organised myself, and the first time I'd flown with just me and one friend. Luckily my friend was very organised, and over a series of phone calls, we picked our flights, accommodation, budget, in-country travel plan and what activities we'd been doing well ahead of time. By the end we settled on a four-day trip; a day to get there, a day in the Western city centre with all the main historical attractions, a day to do the one thing we that we really wanted to do each, and a day to do anything else on our list before departure.

Day one

My friend and I met at our midway airport, Birmingham International, and embarked on the plane to Berlin with just hand luggage (backpacking style), however, the lady on the check-in desk insisted my large hand luggage could go in the hold, and took it off me, almost against my will. Spending the whole time worried that my hand luggage would remain in Brussels where we changed planes, the flight there was relatively seamless.

Our only problem on day one was our plan to get to the hotel from the airport once we got to the city was somewhat flawed. By flaw I mean there wasn't one. Upon arriving at Berlin Brandenburg Airport, we consulted my print-out map of the Berlin S-Bahn and U-Bahn, made friends with some other English travellers, and jumped on a U-Bahn train that ran out of the bottom of the airport. One of our new friends used an app to work out our journey, which told us that we wanted to get off this train at a station called Friedrichstrausse. How hard could that be?

Turns out that this train didn't stop at Friedrichstrausse, and before we knew it, we were at the end of the line, a station called Hauptbahnhof. Before going to Berlin, my dad had given me one piece of advice, which was "avoid Hauptbahnhof". Turns out Hauptbahnhof is the largest train station in Europe by area, and a maze of elevators, escalators, little shops, electronic signs and displays. Luckily, we found a member of staff who told us the train we wanted to get back out was 'two floors up, second right, first left, second platform along' or something similar.

My friend rang our hotel, telling them to expect us to be there by 1 am (missing the midnight deadline for check-in), as we used my map to get us to Friedrichstrausse, and then change to get to the station nearest our hotel, Leopoldplatz. We arrived at the hotel, Steps Hotel, just after 1 am, and after a pint, we sunk into bed, looking forward to what the following day had in store.

Image

- Map of Berlin

Day two

Day two was the day that we'd picked to visit all the central historical landmarks within the city centre. After a quick pastry and coffee (this was a breakfast option of choice all three mornings) from the kiosk in Leopoldplatz, we headed on to Brandenburger Tor, the station next to Brandenburg Gate. Expecting to be close to the famous gate, we staggered as we walked out of the U-Bahn station right behind it, taking in our first landmark. After a few photo opportunities, we visited the plaque of Ronald Reagan that stands in front of the gate. While I have an interest in German history, my friend had a keener knowledge of it and had organised a lot of this day. We then moved on to one of the more harrowing parts of the day, a visit to the Memorial of Murdered Jews of Europe, a set of carved stone columns about five minutes south of the Gate, in memorial to the Jews that died during the Holocaust.

The highlight of our morning was the visit to The Reichstag Building, the old German parliament building, which involved a self-guided tour using headsets up into the Dome at the top of the building. This was a unique experience, as you walked up a walkway the inside of the Dome, the nice voiceover would explain what you could see, including the other government buildings. Included in this was a description of the other government buildings surrounding the central dome building and their significance. After this, we headed out past Brandenburg Gate, towards the Friedrichstradt area for Checkpoint Charlie, and also, for lunch.

Upon arriving at the Checkpoint Charlie area, we visited something very unique, the Die Mauer Panorama, a huge projection of 1980s Berlin covering the same place where we stood in 2022. We enjoyed this nice surprised, and in the panorama shop, I picked out an enormous postcard to send back to my parents. Checkpoint Charlie itself was interesting; the main checkpoint between East and West Berlin during the Cold War was now accompanied by a Christmas tree covered in Ukraine flags. We queued up behind the other tourists to take our photos, before looking for somewhere to shelter from the incoming rain. We then proceeded into the Checkpoint Charlie Museum shop, where I found you could pick up small fragments of the Wall for around 15 Euros.

The day turned very grey, and after a late lunch, we found the nearby shopping area Gendermenmarkt, which I found very disappointing in terms of shops and the number of people going out and about. We followed this up with a quick but rushed trip into The Topography of Terrors, the main Third Reich museum of the city, before we headed back up to the Leopoldplatz area to get some dinner and beers. While we'd enjoyed the day, particularly the Reichstag Building, we did feel a little deflated by the crowds and the weather. Not exactly Berlin's fault.

Images
- Top Left: Ronald Reagan Plaque in front of the Bradenburg Gate
- Top right: The Die Mauer Panorama
- Bottom left: Checkpoint Charlie
- Bottom right: Berlin Wall chunks in the Checkpoint Charlie museum shop

Day three

Day three was the day that I was most excited about, a day when my friend and I had both chosen something we really wanted to do while in Berlin. For me, it was a trip to The Natural History Museum of Berlin, which we did in the morning. I'd intentionally not looked up anything within the museum so I'd enjoy the surprise more. Little did I know that not only did it host a full Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton, the world's tallest skeleton (belonging to a Brachiosaurus), several Allosaurus skeletons, and the famous missing link fossil, the Archeopteryx. My dinosaur-nerd cap was well and truly worn out by the end of the morning.

From the Museum, we moved on to Gedenkstatte Berlin Wall Memorial. Located a short walk from the Natural History Museum, Gedenkstatte included a long section of the wall, a preserved observation tower, and a Window of Remembrance Memorial, with information boards talking about various victims of the separation of the city. This included individuals who were members of families split up by the building by the wall and had lost their lives simply trying to visit their loved ones. The one thing I found that surprised me from this first day and half of the trip, more than anything was how transparent the history of the city was presented; the good, the bad and the ugly. It was all there to be seen, and in a way that everyone could understand.

In the afternoon, we took a train from Gedenkstatte to Alexanderplatz, the city centre of East Berlin, back when the city had been split in two. Now we were in a place that felt like a city centre; huge Christmas markets, museums, a vast train station, indoor shopping areas, and towering over all of it, The Television Tower, the tallest tower in the European Union. It was also our immediate destination, for my friend's birthday lunch. Inside the television tower, we took a lift up the observation deck and restaurant. Although lift entry is expensive (just over $20) the food is delicious and very reasonable, once you've taken out the lift entry price. The views of Berlin, of course, are unique.

We wrapped up day three by visiting Alexanderplatz Christmas Market as darkness fell. We cruised around the impeccably well-laid out market, with identical wooden hut stalls as laid out in sequence, selling beer, coffee, food and all kinds of Christmas trinkets. Intrigued by its name, I bought a drink called 'Grog', which turned out to be rum and warm water, often drank on long sea voyages, which I won't be trying again. We took a ride up to the Ferris Wheel, which gave us an excellent view of the rest of the market. We then headed down and visited a restaurant in the centre of the Alexanderplatz area called Mio Berlin, where I bought a litre of beer at the recommendation of another friend of mine who had visited the restaurant only the week before.

Day 3 ended on a high, with a quick trip to our local bars again once back at the hotel, and having dinner at a low-key Greek café a small walk away from our hotel. I felt a little sorry to be leaving the following day, enjoying the excitement that Berlin was offering up until this point.

Images

- Top Left: Tyrannosaurus Rex Skeleton in the Natural History Museum of Berlin
- Top Right: Wall remains at the Gedenkstatte Berlin Wall Memorial
- Bottom Left: The Berlin Television Tower
- Bottom Right: 1 litre of beer at Mio Berlin

Day four

On our final day, we packed our suitcases and checked out of the hotel, before getting the train to Tiergarten Park, Berlin's central park, equivalent to Hyde or Regent's Park in London. We quickly visited Victory Column, an enormous memorial to the Prussian-Danish War, before slowly making our way along a road very similar to The Mall back to Brandenburg Gate, for the two of us to get a photo together, taken by a friendly local, happy to oblige for two eccentric British tourists. After saying goodbye to the Brandenburg Gate area, we grabbed a quick lunch before getting on the train across central Berlin one last time.

Our last stop was a visit out of the city centre, getting off at Magdalenenstrause Train Station to visit The Stasi Museum at the recommendation of my friend. The Stasi were East Berlin's secret police force during the Cold War, the German equivalent to the KGB. With the museum lying outside the city centre, I turned up expecting a small building, with all the information in German, but I was wrong. Instead, the Stasi Museum was large, and very well laid out, with all the information in English. On top of that, I found the whole museum very interesting, my friend was wide-eyed as he recognised so much from a show he liked called Deutschland '83.

Within the Stasi Museum, I found out all about the history of this organisation, with the museum packed full of interesting nuggets of information that wouldn't be out of place in a Horrible Histories episode. For example, they would dress up as tourists to spy on large events taking place in Western Berlin, and gave their agents training on 'how to appear as a convincing tourist'. They'd also be trained to look out for any signs of western culture when searching a suspect's flat – this included the album The Killers by Iron Maiden. Given their hatred of that particular band, I did wonder how long my dad would last living in East Berlin.

We moved on from Stasi Museum due to the time pressures, heading back to Alexanderplatz train station to this time successfully get on the train back to Berlin Brandenburg train station. We caught the right plane, and despite an awkward hold-up changing back at Brussels airport, the pair of us landed back in blighty at the time we'd planned to make our connecting flights. Working my way around cancelled trains back up north, I eventually crawled into bed at 1 am and set my alarm for work the following morning.

Images

- Top left: Victory Column in Tiergarten Park
- Top right: Brandenburg Gate
- Bottom left: Conference room within the Stasi Museum
- Bottom right: Entrance to the Stasi Museum

Final Thoughts

Berlin had not been the 'London but German' I had expected it to be; it was smaller, quieter, and less built up. It does, however, have an enormous amount to offer for a city break, or a week, or more. Despite everything that we'd packed into three days in the city, there was so much more we could have done, and we'd barely left the city centre. The most overwhelming takeaway from the trip was the feeling that Berlin and the people in it went out of their way to display their entire history in a very admirable way.

I'd highly recommend it as a city break for someone looking for something a little different to Amsterdam or Paris, particularly if you're a fan of coffees and pastries.

Useful Links

https://sbahn.berlin/en/ - Berlin's S-Bahn system website

www.visitberlin.de/en - Berlin's official travel website

www.berlin.de/en/ - Berlin's official website

www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/germany - Travel advice for going to Germany

www.bvg.de/en - Berlin transport app

https://www.steps-hotel.de/homepage.html - Steps Hotel website