Being blonde in Berlin

I was sad to be leaving Interlaken as I think I fell in love with the place but with travelling the norm is to spend a short amount of time at a location and then move on again! Leaving Interlaken to travel onto Berlin in Germany, our 5th country! To get here required boarding a 9.5 hour train! Truth is a bag full of snacks, an iPod and a tablet makes time go fast :) although 10 minutes into this journey I ate a chocolate croissant, turns out it had nuts in - an antihistamine tablet sorted me out :)

Percy and a European bear

We found our hotel straight away this time - walk out the station exit, look right and it's staring you in the face! Our room was on the 7th floor and we used the stairs the whole time except for the 2 times we had our heavy bags and one time when my knee was hurting! That was my daily exercise, walking them stairs up to 8 times a day! On top of the daily miles of walking!

Nice sunset from hotel room

By now we were craving hot food seeing as we hadn't had any for a few days, so yes, you guessed it - we headed to McDonald's, where we had our compulsory 'ice cream sundae', which we now have decided is for market research purposes to see how price and taste differ in each place :p

Our first full day in Berlin was just one of them days where nothing seemed to go right! I turned over in my sleep, wacked my elbow on the spiky wall which grated some of my skin off! Once awake we headed out into Berlin for the day. Everywhere was surrounded by hundreds of police! We assumed something was going on but we weren't sure what. Around 3pm we headed back towards the hotel, stopping at some shops to grab some lunch to cook for ourselves in the guest hotel kitchen. By now we were starving and I think it showed as both me and jen tried to go up a 'down' escalator. My brain didnt even registar what was happening straight away. We bought pasta and vegetables to cook and were really looking forward to it! Leaving the shop we tried to get to the hotel, the whole surrounding area was cornered off with police tape due to a protest. Eventually a policeman understood we was trying to get to our hotel and gave us a police escort walk back to our hotel. Still starving, we headed straight for the kitchen - it was closed :@ hotel reception told us it was being used as a second storage room so we couldn't use it till later that evening. This angered us as we paid over double our budget to stay here and still couldn't use all paid for services! We needed cheering up so we braved the police cordens again and had another ice cream sundae (for market research purposes obviously) then bought a baguette each because we were starving! We then dissapeared to our room to sulk, before eventually managing to cook our much looked forward to pasta and veg about half 8 in the evening :) what a flop of a day!

Percy made friends with lots of green crossing men!

We woke up the next day optimistic that it would be more successful than the day previous. We grabbed some breakfast - fresh orange juice and a chocolate muffin :) Time to explore Berlin - the Berlin wall memorial was interesting, trying to visualise that a line which can now be crossed without a second thought was once covered by a wall that divided the 2 sides, with lives lost trying to escape each side! The realisation that this happened not to long ago in history was thought provoking. The information on display at 'checkpoint Charlie' was interesting to read. We walked through the hollocaust memorial then ended up having A nice sit in Tiergarten :)

Hollocaust memorial

We decided to catch a train to Potsdam on the Monday :) it was lovely here! We spend several hours wandering through Sanssourci Park which houses several palaces and other buildings along with water fountains and lots of trees. We found some yummy pizza in Potsdam too :) I really enjoyed this day trip and the hot weather was an added bonus :)

Me in Sanssouci Park

I made a crquacking friend

So although my Berlin experience started of wobbly, it ended on a positive :)

Amester x