Travel

An Autumn Weekend Break: Berlin

Berlin is well known for being a European hot spot for clubbing, but as I’m not really in to that I spent my weekend discovering its history, art and public transportation.

I went together with a friend of mine and we stayed at the easyHotel in Rosenthaler Platz, a place that would describe as hip, young and hipster. It was a great central location and only 40 minutes from Tegel airport. The hotel room was small but clean and modern which was perfect for two nights.

A key thing about this trip was no stress, we had decided that no matter what, we would enjoy the city and not rush to see every monument or museum that Berlin had to offer. We did manage though to see quite a lot, from the Sony Centre to Check point Charlie, but my favourites where definitely the East Side Gallery and the Brandenburg Gate.

It is definitely a creative city where contemporary art and history has collided together. I really loved how certain parts of the Berlin Wall have been divided to paintings, or street art, and are displayed around the city.  It was interesting to see how something that kept people in captivity and destroyed so many lives is now being used as memory with colours representing freedom and unity, which was some of the themes.

Another place we visited was the Topography of Terror, which is the remains of the Nazi headquarters together with a part of the Berlin Wall next to it, but it had no street art on it and it was completely grey. To be honest it was quiet depressing and sad to see it and it made me realise that it was not long ago that this happened, it was truly a strange feeling standing there.

What was great about Berlin was that it is an open museum, we only paid to see one thing, the Salvador Dalí exhibition which was amazing and if we hadn’t left on that same day we would probably have spent the whole day there. Dalí was truly a creative genius and it is always great seeing his unique creations.

When traveling it is always interesting to see how people have different habits and I learned that people barely speak in the Berlin U-Bahn (tube), or probably any form of public transportation there. Me and my friend where just hysterically laughing as we failed to take a picture of ourselves in the tube and suddenly we noticed how everyone where just starring, which made it even funnier. Good memories though and lots of laughs.

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