Boiling in Berlin

To celebrate our fifth anniversary (wow – where have the past 5 years gone?!) we headed to Berlin. The plan was to go to Italy, but it is expensive, and at the moment we are watching our pennies a little bit (just a little though…..)

So on Wednesday night we headed off to the German capital. I have been to Berlin before (about 7 years ago) and loved it, so was looking forward to sharing it with Stocky. He, however, had heard so many people say great things about the city, I think he was thinking he would go and dislike it. I am happy to say, however, that he too fell in love with the city, and it has been added to the list of European cities we would like to live in. The big downside of Berlin, though, is our inability to read or understand the German language! So perhaps we can get our friend Tina to move there and we can just go and visit her often!

I’m not sure what it is about Berlin that we like. Whether it be the history (so much of it, and so recent), the numerous outdoor parks, the plentiful reasonably-priced cafes, how bike-friendly it is, the large number of boutique stores or a combination of all these things and much more. We spent most of our three days there wandering various areas of Berlin, taking it in, and feeling a part of the local scene.

We did do a bit of sight-seeing, but there are a heap of the “must do’s” that we didn’t do!
On Thursday morning we did a free walking tour (they make money via tips only) which is a great way to see the main sights, get your head around some of the history and get a feel for the layout of the city. I would highly recommend doing this tour if you go to Berlin. Then that night we went out to dinner to celebrate our anniversary and celebrate it we did. Cocktails galore! So we were a little bit late on getting up on Friday morning….

We did check out the exhibition under the Holocaust memorial (its proper name is Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe but that seems a little bit too much for me) on Friday though. It was a really good exhibition and put faces and stories to the atrocities that happened throughout Europe during WWII, but not something that you come away skipping from.

On Saturday was the big football game – Germany vs Argentina. We kind of got how big the game could be when we went out for dinner on Friday night. Every cafe and restaurant had big screens in their windows, or TV sets out on the street, and tables were set up out on the pavement and they were packed, and people were even just standing around and watching games from across the street. And this wasn’t even Germany playing! (Now it may also have helped that the temperatures didn’t drop below 30C while we were there, so perhaps people would have sat outside and watched anything just to try and keep cool!) So on Saturday we headed to Tiergarten to join the masses wearing red, yellow and black. Our photos don’t do the number of people or the festivities justice – but check out some photos from around Germany here. Quite a party, and to make it better they won!

We were going to check out the Reichstag while the game was on, thinking there would be less people in the queue. But, of course all the tourists didn’t care about the game and the queue was just as long as ever!! So will have to leave that tour for our next trip.

There were a number of times over the time we were there where I thought, I should take a photo, but we were just enjoying the atmosphere and feeling (kind of) like a local. But here are some photos from our excursions.

Stocky shows off his “guns” as he tries to cool down a little while we walk around the city