15/16 August 2022 BERLIN

For those of you asking – some good news first – our bags arrived in Berlin with us!

As we landed in Berlin a storm began, meaning we sat on the tarmac for 1 and 1/2 hours before the ground staff were able to assist us disembark. My favourite holiday gadget is now officially the air tags I bought a few weeks ago. As we were waiting patiently (or not so patiently 😉 ) on the tarmac for the lightning to stop, I checked the app on my phone and could see our bags were with us – what a relief. Those said bags did take a further hour to come up on the luggage carousel, but better than not coming up at all.

We easily located the taxi stand, and jumped in a Prius Hybrid for the 30km trip to our city hotel. The driver must have sensed my desperation to get to bed (after 44 hours I was kinda keen to lie flat) so he seemed to disregard the speed limits!

After a smooth check in, we showered and went to sleep. We left the large windows open – it seemed the hotel air-conditioning was kaput!

Who doesn’t love a hotel breakfast buffet! Probably stop reading this blog now if you don’t 😉 The Scandi Hotel Potsdamer buffet turns out to be a pretty darn good one. I started with fruit and yoghurt, then quickly moved to the cold meat selections. Germans are well known for their charcuterie, and I really enjoyed tasting the salami, ham, Berliner and Fleishwurst of course with some great crusty bread and butter!

I have bought a data only eSIM, which hopefully will be able to be used for the whole trip. Being able to use the maps is especially helpful when you want to pack a lot in to a single day in Berlin. The delays in getting here meant we had limited time to see and do all the things we wanted to.  

Our hotel was an easy 15 minute walk to where there is a good specimen of the remaining Berlin Wall and not much further along was ‘Checkpoint Charlie’, where of course we had the obligatory selfie in front of the sand bags.

Dave had pre-booked a two-hour self-drive Trabant Tour of Berlin. Trabants were an East German made car and the owner of the tour company owned 200 of them! There were six groups booked, each choosing a Trabant to drive to all the well-known sites, following the owner in his version that had been converted from petrol to electric. It was a super fun way to see the sites, although a little stressful at times as Dave worked out how to drive it! Many of you will know that Dave has for the past 20+ years refused to drive in Sydney claiming, ‘I don’t have a city-driving endorsement on my license’, yet here he was driving an unknown car, in a foreign city, and on the wrong side of the road, no less!

Another thing that many of you will know is our love for a posh hotel afternoon tea. Close to the Brandenburg Gate is Berlin’s fanciest hotel – the Adlon. Dave enjoyed the signature dish, Adlon Torte, and I had Currywurst, which is basically sliced sausage with tomato sauce, this version sprinkled with curry spice and gold dust! I washed it down with a Cosmopolitan and Dave with a pot of tea. The lovely waitress was very enthusiastic to talk to us about Australia – where she had visited post-university three years ago. 

Passing under the Brandenburg Gate, we walked through a large park to the Soviet Army Memorial to the 80,000 Russian soldiers killed in the WWII Battle of Berlin. It was 30c in the heat of the afternoon sun, I am so glad I packed a wide brimmed hat!  

Back towards Potsdamer was the German Spy Museum, which was our next stop. We had pre-booked tickets for entry at 4.30pm, which was a simple process of scanning the QR codes from my phone. Gosh, the world has learned a lot about QR codes through COVID! This is the sort of place that our kids would have loved a few years back, and it was fun (even as old people!) to check out all the interactive displays.

By the time we walked back to our hotel my step count was 15,000 and I was definitely ready for a lie down! Many of the streets are cobblestones which is beautiful to look at but not so good on the bottom of your feet! 

Dinner was at a nearby Bier Haus (beer house), where we chose a couple of typical local dishes – starting with pretzels, then ham hock for me and chicken with potatoes (served with a fried egg!) for Dave. Both were pretty tasty, and in a typical pub meal sort of way were very large – neither of us even managed to eat much more than half.

A long soak in the bath post dinner and I was ready for bed… the hotel had put a fan in the room as the air-conditioning was still broken. It was actually quite nice to listen to its whirring as we drifted off to sleep.

The following picture doesn’t really need commentary – a dead rat that thankfully I didn’t accidentally tread on!

We are now in Czechia at a beautiful hotel in the middle of old town Prague but more on that later!