Our weekend in Berlin was fantastic! Accommodation – cheap and cheerful, and location so good we couldn’t have wished for better. Walking tour - not at all the disappointment my other walking tours have been, informative to just the right depth with plenty of interesting little stories, and made us feel like we’d accomplished enough sight-seeing on our first day (of only 3). Food – fantastic, and cheap! SF had the yummiest delicate little pad thai the first day we were there (you know how sometimes they can be swimming in oil and soy sauce – none of that here), and our last meal was some seriously tasty Indian, and in there somewhere we also had a scrumptious buffet brunch at a Russian cafe called Gorki Park. And I think all our meals came well under what we would have paid here for the same thing.
There were of course some disappointments – we tried to find a cabaret show for the Saturday night, but all the ones we would’ve tried weren’t doing any shows the nights we were there (one especially looked like just the right kind of thing but were sadly doing a private function; we gave the glitzy extravaganza type cabaret a miss, once bitten, you know (recall the Moulin Rouge, although I do think the one in Berlin would likely have been better value), and another smaller, more intimate show I’m sure would’ve been very good, but we decided would be too similar to the various circus-type shows we’ve been to of late). Instead, on the Saturday night we did what a lot of Berliners seemed to be doing – visiting museums on the one night of apparently two a year that the museums in Berlin stay open late (15€ for a ticket that gets you into all participating museums – so we got to check out the Pergamom, the Bode Museum, and another little exhibition of works by Chagall, Dali, and Picasso). Helmut Newton’s Museum of Photography we didn’t get to that night, but we went the next day, and it had a great exhibition of photos from Newton and two of his contemporaries Larry Clark and Ralph Gibson, called Wanted but which could also have been very appropriately called Sex, Drugs and Violence.
We didn’t have time to go to Taleches – the building that was saved from demolition by squatters and now houses a few art spaces, cinema, bars, and a cafe that’s in the Food and Drink section of the Rough Guide we had – only realising on the last day when we walked past it that it was literally 5 minutes walk from where we were staying. We probably shouldn’t have bothered going to the Eastside Gallery (one of the two remaining sections of the Berlin Wall preserved and decorated by artists, heavily graffiti’d and very incongruously also housing the odd cafe/bar behind it – incongruous particularly with the man we saw who was sat down at one point next to the Wall very visibly upset, in a section where there was a bar behind an opening in the Wall - it will only ever be conjecture on our part as to what he was upset about, but upset man or not, the bamboo wall, palm fronds, and umbrellas of the bar definitely jarred with the Wall), nor gone back to Checkpoint Charlie (which we flew through on our walking tour, and thought worth coming back to, but on coming back, it was clear it wasn’t worth it, unless you wanted some Eastern Bloc stamps in your passport, 2€ for one, or 5€ for 5, or some Soviet military hats, KGB flasks of the same kind as sold in Russian souvenir shops, babushka dolls, you get the idea). We gave the Reichstag a miss, but it was something we maybe would’ve liked to go and see as well, although again, would the long line have been worth it?
But we did what we could on our short long weekend, and although I’m tempted to say that weekend trips are inferior to being able to go for longer, we did really enjoy our weekend. I guess we’ll just have to come back another time for the rest!
