Writing a blog post every month has made me realise how repetitive my openings are. I’ll usually start off by talking about my past, and then talk about what the posts hopes to achieve. So this time I will try and mix it up.

Berlin is a western European city which is similar to many others, decent transport, familiar architecture (mostly), and a wide choice of food options. It is also somewhat different from many other western European countries because of its past. Being the place which held the last major battle of world war two and an area that was owned by two world leaders at the time, the Soviet Union and the USA up until 1989 the area still somewhat feels like two very different halves.

The Eastside had most of the museum, attractions, and more character. Plenty of red brick buildings with shopping malls and the famous Berlin television tower. We frequented the busy Alexanderplatz which seems to be the central spot between our holding Inn and other parts of Berlin. The East was also dirtier, had more homeless and more construction going on than the West from what I could see, although we did spend much more time in the East than West so our opinion could be biased. Speaking of the West it was cleaner, had more tall glass buildings and on the whole had fewer people around it than the Eastside, but apart from that, there wasn’t much different. If you were oblivious to Berlin’s history and didn’t visit any museums/attractions you wouldn’t have known the place was divided.

In terms of attractions, we visited the DDR museum, the Berlin Wall Museum, Checkpoint Charlie and the East side gallery. Things all focused on the division of Berlin which I knew very little about before visiting. I enjoyed walking through the model home (of flat) the people of East Berlin were given by the Soviet Union and seeing pictures of how they lived in the DDR museum. Seeing the sigh for entering and leaving the American side of Berlin at checkpoint Charlie. And especially seeing all the art on a long strip of the Berlin wall at the East side gallery. I almost forgot the Berlin Wall museum which not only had great photography and media on what it was like living on either side but also an art installation which both Hannah and I took part in. The idea was for two complete strangers to talk to each other, find something in common, and shake hands in-between a piece of clay to create a weird mould of concave fingers. This clay way then hung on a string with many others.

As expected the Berlin transport system was very good and it was easy to get around the city. Trams, trains and metros were more or less on time. We had some difficulty figuring out how the tickets worked. It was odd to stamp tickets in a machine after purchase but we figured it out, and it was near impossible for us to purchase s ticket on the trams which only accepted cash, so we usually bought them from trains stations. Speaking of trams we ran into a really odd situation when trying to find a tram stop coming out of a train station. Google maps said it was close by but we couldn’t locate it for a while and when we did we were sort of shocked. The stop was in the middle of the road taking up one of the two lanes. The team would stop opposite the team stop and commuters were expected to walk on the road with cars on and jump onto the tram. Drivers seemed happy to stop and let people walk in front of them but it was incredibly odd.

In conclusion, our trip to Berlin was, ‘all right’. Although we would visit the German capital again there wasn’t anything that was specifically unique about it. There were no outstanding buildings or attractions, and as I said at the start of this post it’s very similar to most Western European countries.